From Start-Up to Grown-Up: Colin Bryar—Mandating Amazon's 6-Page Memo

A lot of companies these days, I think, have a little bit of a pushback culture, a little bit of a like, you're gonna make us do so much extra work and we don't wanna do that. Was there that kind of thing at Amazon? And, and how did Jeff and you handle the fact that they didn't wanna do that?

Yeah, so there was pushback. It was an unpopular decision, um, you know, but, but again, Jeff said, we are gonna try this. Like, we're, we're all in on this decision, so we're not gonna, litigate it or re-litigate it. It does take more time to write a narrative than, than a slide together. But the thing that people often get confused is the difference between speed and velocity. You can throw something together and for an hour meeting very quickly with slides and have that meeting, but you may make the wrong decision, which takes you off path. And so by slowing down, making sure, okay, do we really understand what we're about to decide? Measured from the time it takes from that point to creating a scalable product that's out there delivering value for customers, we found that was the quickest way to get from point A to point B. A lot of times when people talk about, oh, it's a lot more work or it's going to slow us down, they're not measuring the correct starting and ending point. They're measuring an intermediate ending point. And yeah, you can zip there quickly, but you may be going off into the wrong, often are going off into the wrong direction.