Colin Bryar: Author, Advisor, and Amazon Insider

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I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People. Remarkable People is sponsored by the Remarkable Tablet company. What a concept. The Remarkable Tablet is a single purpose tablet for taking notes. It's not an iPad because with an iPad you'll be checking social media, answering email, watching videos. Totally defocused. When you want to do deep thinking, the remarkable tablet is the way to go. Today's remarkable guest is Colin Breyer. Colin has a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science from Cornell. He worked at Amazon for approximately 13 years. Beginning in 1988. He held three positions at Director of Amazon Associates, Chief of Staff of Jeff Bezos, and Chief operating officer of IMDb. He and Bill Carr, also a former executive at Amazon, have written a book called Working Backwards. Insights, stories and Secrets from Inside Amazon. If you want to create a company as successful as Amazon, you'll cherish this episode. You'll learn key concepts such as working backwards, that is doing what customers want as opposed to doing what you want. The power of the six page narrative and why Amazon banned PowerPoint, the highly structured and disciplined Amazon recruiting procedure, and why two pizza teams with single threaded leadership rocks. In short, for the inside behind the scenes story of Amazon success, you've come to the right podcast. I'm Guy Kawasaki and now here's the remarkable Colin Breyer.

I started at Amazon in March of 1998 and at that time Amazon was just selling books from the US and they shipped overseas. But there were two fulfillment centers. I call them fulfillment centers. They were giant warehouse houses with books, bookshelves where people would walk in and pick the books. So I worked at Amazon for about 12 years. I had a number of different roles and that time Amazon was effectively a different company every 12 to 18 months given the growth, both just in the scale of the business. I started out in the software team and I was a technical product and program manager and a software development manager and then I moved over and did some more general management. I managed our affiliate business which was A pretty new thing at the time. And we had a couple hundred thousand websites who had joined the program and got to see how you build things at scale, when you build some software and then deploy it out to a couple hundred thousand websites. So I learned a lot about that the hard way, I would say. We made a lot of mistakes and it's a lot easier to do now with Amazon Web Services. My next job was working with Jeff Bezos as his technical advisor. Internally, they call it the Shadow, and it's more like a chief of staff role in terms of how other companies would call it. You know, basically I would spend 10 hours a day working with Jeff and the two primary roles in that job, in jobs in that role were one, to make Jeff a better CEO and do what it takes. So make sure the right information and people and groups and issues get surfaced in front of Jeff, make sure that those types of meetings are productive. So that would entail, you know, my. The bookends of my day would be meeting with those teams before or after Jeff to make sure that those things are followed up. But the second and perhaps more important role or goal of that role, as Jeff put it, was we wanted to model each other because it's a temporary role and I was going to go somewhere else in the. In the. The company. And he wanted to make sure that, you know, we thought about the issues in the same way as much as possible as I would go into another area. So I was there for about two years. I was fantastically lucky to have been able to do that role. I learned a ton. And then my next role at Amazon, which was my last role at Amazon, I spent five years at IMDb, the Internet movie Database, is the chief operating officer there. IMDb is a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon, and it's a site all about movies, TV and everyone in the entertainment industry.

When you started your chief of staff position with Jeff, did you have hair?

A little bit more, but yeah, that's always been a challenge for me and I would say losing battle, but that's okay. Okay. Okay.

I was just looking for a causative relationship. I don't want this to be an interview about Jeff, but you have some insights, I suppose, or I assume that very few people would have. So if you indulge me for a few minutes, I'm just going to ask you some Jeff questions. Since 1987, I've been asked, what's it like to work with Steve Jobs? So I know the burden of what I'm about to ask you, but so what was a day in the life of Jeff Bezos? Like?

One thing Jeff, he loves what he does. He's not doing it for the fame or for a legacy. He genuinely loves creating, as he put it, Earth's most customer centric company. And, and that is contagious from, you know, not just for me, but for everyone around him. I could just tell that Jeff, he was in his element doing what he loved to do. And you know, still to this day. The second thing is Jeff, he's insanely customer obsessed. You know, you've heard it and seen it, but to actually see it in action on a daily basis, it was quite impressive. And in all of the different ways Jeff makes sure that the customer is front and center of everything that Amazon does. And another thing is that he's got really high standards. He holds himself, you know, to those standards but he holds other people accountable to those standards too. And you know what I learned about that is you can have high standards but if you don't point them out when they're not met, what happens is you've lowered the standards. And so Jeff is good at pointing out, here's a case where we did not meet, meet our standards. What can we do? What can we learn from this? How can we get better so we can keep and you know, meeting or exceeding our high standards. But I had a lot more fun in that job than I thought I would and, and I was, I told, I was told that that was going to happen by Andy Jassy, who's the CEO of Amazon Web Services. He was the chief of staff before me. He said you're going to learn a lot but I just want to let you know this job is going to be a lot more fun than you think. So it was challenging, it was hard, but it was also quite a lot of fun.

Was he the kind that gets up at 4:30, goes for a 10 mile run, is in the office at 6, works all day, then goes out and does customer. What was his.

So I was with Jeff from about 10am to 7pm Those you know and maybe you know a half hour earlier or later and then I would come in before and, and say bit later. But he was an early riser. I don't, obviously don't know what he was doing before he got in the office but I definitely got email at my BlackBerry at the time. Very early in the morning, you know, he's likes to exercise. If we were traveling, we'd go out running in the morning before we started our day. I'm a Big runner. And on the weekends, a lot of CEOs walk the store and have a retail business where if they're in a city, they'll go into one of their stores or a competitor store, walk the store and just, you know, make observations. Jeff does that Saturday and Sunday mornings. You can tell that he's coming through the site. When he sees issues, he'll send them to the. He's a good switchboard operator, sending it to the right teams and, you know, make sure that the issues are followed up.

Okay, this is my last Jeff's question. So when people ask me, what was the relationship like, either for me or in general with Steve, I would use two words, which is love and fear. How would you describe Jeff's relationship with employees?

Well, you know, I think it's. It's obviously different with different people. You know, some people see Jeff once a year, and that can be, you know, a nervous, intimidating time for people. And so it's hard to say what is my relationship? I think I can speak for myself. I can't really say what. What his relationship with. Was with everything else. You know, I consider him a friend whenever I see him, which isn't that that much anymore. You know, we'll laugh about things we had in common beforehand. Talk about jogging. But. But he is. He's very genuine, and as I said, he has high standards. He will let you know when they're not being met. But, you know, the next moment it's okay. Let's, you know, he's good at context switching, too. Let's go focus on something else. You know, I would call him a friend. Personally.

It doesn't seem like fear was the operative word.

Let me put it this way. I was driven to succeed and make sure I was successful in my role, which a large part of that was helping Jeff be successful. So I was highly motivated to do that.

Completely switching gears, going down a little bit of a rat hole. I am also an author, and one of the things that struck me about your book is that it's so cogently written and organized. And I think that's hard enough for an author to do, but for two people to write a book and do it, it's almost impossible. So how did you write this book?

Well, so Bill and I, we were never really satisfied with the messages about what is Amazon all about? How does it work? People would ask us, how does Amazon do it? And it was actually Bill's idea to say, hey, we should write a book about this. He was at a conference and there was A CEO of, you know, a large company who said, I don't know how Amazon does it. They're into cloud computing devices, e commerce, logistics. We're still trying to open our stores up the right way, one by one. And you know, Bill, he thought, well, I actually know how Amazon does it. And he was talking to, he told me about this conversation. I said, that's a great idea. And I said, we should write this book instead of you should write this book. That's when Bill and I were joined at the HIPAA on this. And the first thing we did is we wrote the press release and faq. We went through the working backwards process to say, ok, we're about to embark on something, let's go see if there's anything there. And we wrote the press release. And then the fact part is just where you answer hard questions about what's upcoming, you know, and one of them was, well, what, what are your goals for doing this? And the number one goal was we wanted to remain friends throughout this process and we did not want this book to get in the way of that. So I think that helped put things into, in perspective. It was our most important thing because we were friends outside of this book. It was a collaborative effort and we didn't know how to struct the book either because it's not a linear story, Amazon's not a one trick pony. And what also helped is that Bill and I, my co author, Bill Carr, we spent 27 years at Amazon but we didn't overlap a ton. We were friends outside of that and so we had very good coverage and we were there at pivotal times. And so, you know, sometimes when we did overlap, it was actually when I was working with Jeff and when Bill, he was the second employee in the digital group, kind of on different sides of the table. So it brought different interesting perspectives into how some of these things developed. So I think that the, the book was better where we were both involved, whereas if we each wrote our separate version, not knowing how, I haven't written any. This is the first book I've written, so I didn't really. We didn't know what we were getting into. So our goal was just really to get into enough detail to help the next generation of business leaders and with enough information, give those people enough information if they decide this is the way that they wanted to build their organization or company that they could go do it, essentially get started at least without much involvement other than reading the book.

Okay, but I really want to know, so was it written with Google Docs and either person could edit. Was it written with Word? And then you sent the Word file. He worked on it. He sent it back to you. Did you co write. Did you know Bill did chapters one, three, five and seven? You did two, four, six and eight. Really? I want to know how the.

You want to go deeper? That's right.

Yes.

We used Google Docs and so we, we did start, we started writing and the first thing that happened is Bill started writing the, the hiring chapter and I started writing the narratives chapter because we didn't even know if we had a book and we thought we'll just, we'll write it and see what happens. And you know, we edited each other's work and made comments and we sent it off to a publisher who politely said there's not enough space between what's out there and what you guys are writing. And by the way, if you want to write a book, here's how you should go about doing this. The, the publisher was right. Actually we, I don't, I think we had missed a couple of steps and sometimes you have to figure out when to leave the world as you find it and follow the existing process and when to try to change the world. This was probably a case of the former since, especially since we were first time authors. So we've found. I didn't even know what a literary agent was before, until after we wrote those two chapters. Neither did Bill, but, but so we got, we've. We found an agent who explained the whole process and, but Bill and I, by and large we, we had a large list of topics and we didn't know how much. We struggled at first to say how much of it is a how to book versus the four origin stories. And telling is always a great way and especially the more complicated the topics. Telling stories is a great way to get that across. But we also felt that there was just, there was so much content where you kind of have to explain things in a reference type way. So we, we did this hybrid and that made it easy because it wasn't a linear flow where you had to keep every character plot in stream and that would have been much more difficult. So we could segment different parts of the book and then add our own. So we used Google Docs and it just got bigger and bigger the more we added chapters. We didn't know how many chapters we were going to have going into the book. Some of them we threw out by saying this isn't really uniquely Amazonian or it's not going to be accretive. To the book.

Okay, now we're going to go back getting out of that hole. But I'm just curious as an author because I'm telling you it is remarkably cogent. So my hats off to you and some editor I'm sure help too. But one of my favorite topics in this book is the diatribe against PowerPoint and how PowerPoint is essentially banned at Amazon. So you have got to explain why. And the replacement, the six page concept.

Sure. So it was banned for meetings and it was first banned for meetings with the S team, which is Jeff's the senior leaders at Amazon for all hands and things like that. There's still slides. You know, slides are a good way to do broadcasting out to a broad group. But it was banned for uses within those meetings. And it really started off that the S team met and it was about 15 people, the senior leaders, Jeff and I participated in those meetings. It was every Tuesday from. It was scheduled from 10 o' clock till 2 o' clock but it never really ended on time, so. And there were usually two to three groups that would come in and do presentations and it could be proposals, decision making, updates or anything in between. And PowerPoint is typically what those teams used. And we realized that those meetings weren't actually going. They weren't that as effective. And as Amazon was scaling, the consequences of those decisions were in the cost of making the wrong decision was growing and the issues were becoming more complicated and different people were presenting sometimes for the first time ever. And it was hard to get to well, what is the real issue or the decision that needs to be made. And we had also been. Jeff and I had also been reading up on Edward Tufte. He wrote this great essay, the cognitive style of PowerPoint and talked about how it's being used for the wrong purposes. And Jeff and I had been talking about that for probably two or three months beforehand, I think. There was one trip that we took and we each had a copy of the essay and we read it on the plane and chatted about it. There's one particularly painful S team meeting I was on a Tuesday where and it wasn't the presenter and it wasn't the topic, it's just we didn't really get to what we needed to. To talk about and it was a waste of everyone's time. The presenters time didn't get, you know, the team to get what they wanted. S team didn't get enough information, the decisions weren't being made. And at the end of the day I was in Jeff's office. And Jeff had said, okay, we're gonna try something and there's gonna be no more PowerPoint at S team. And he's, he said at first, so, you know, these, a lot of these processes don't come out fully formed. They kind of morph into where you find your right stride and solution. And so I had then went back to my office and sent out an email. No more PowerPoints at ST meetings. Please come with a narrative. And I felt pretty good about that. And, and I thought finally, we're, we're changing things for the better. And the reaction was just the opposite. Opposite. It was swift and it was universally negative. You know, hey, I'm presenting next week. What is a narrative? How do I write this? And you know, so we talked about. So first of all, there were no exceptions. We made the switch, we ripped the band aid and a couple of things about that I think that are noteworthy. One is it was a reversible decision. We were going to try it. If it didn't work or if it bombed, we would have gone back to PowerPoint. There was a fallback plan. Two is that we were, we knew that the first several narratives that could even be worse than the previous PowerPoint but you know, slick presentations, but we knew that this is something worthy to try and experiment to get better. And also we knew that the, the decisions were only going to get more complicated. We needed to look at more information and make more decisions in those four hour time frames than a year from now, two years from now, just with the way the complexity of the business was going. So we knew we had to find a higher bandwidth communication and decision forum. And so from that point on we started writing narratives and people played games at first with changing margin sizes and either try to put too much or too little information. And and so the, we eventually settled on six pages and that's about the right information density. You know, first of all, if you look at pixel density for PowerPoint in a narrative, it's about seven to nine times more people read faster than they talk. You can also have multi causal concepts that come out much better in a narrative than PowerPoint. So you know, I think it's more than 10x the amount of information that goes through with all of those things. But we did it because we wanted to make better decisions. And it also removed a lot of bias, quite honestly from the decision making. You can have a very slick presenter with a so so or even a bad idea and at the end of the day you want to make the right decision. It doesn't, you know, one really cares. A year later. That presentation was awesome. I felt so happy. If it's a high charisma, low judgment person can be a pretty dangerous PowerPoint presenter. And then, you know, the, the flip side is you could have someone who isn't particularly good at doing presentations or doesn't like them and isn't your clip art at the expert who has a great idea, but they're just not a good presenter. And you get so bored in the presentation, you know, when is this thing going to end? This presenter is lousy, but it's not the presenter that you're really evaluating. It should be the idea. So narratives, what they do is they surface the idea and they remove the whole bias of the presentation. At Amazon, most of the narratives aren't signed by an individual. It's usually a team and it's collaboratively written. So those are some of the reasons why we decided to do it and experiment with it. And you know, it turned out to be one of the better decisions that, that Amazon made it a simple process. And it also wasn't one after that point that needed to be imposed on other groups. They just started copying it because they saw it was so effective. It wasn't one of those things where from now on you must never use PowerPoint. People started realizing, yeah, this is actually better. And so that's how it happened and how it, how it's been used at Amazon.

Couldn't somebody make the case that, that just as someone could be a lousy presenter with a great idea and narrative, what if you're a lousy writer with a great idea, wouldn't the narrative not do the idea justice just as the presentation itself didn't do it justice?

Yeah, that's a great question. And I haven't seen that. The best narratives that I've seen come from the best thinkers, not necessarily the best writers. And so it's the thinkers when they. You can come up with a thoughtful argument. When I read narratives, I can forgive, you know, spelling error, grammar error or two. And I actually worked overseas for a couple years, some of the best narratives that I read were written by non native English speakers. And just because the ideas and the arguments were great and you know, it wasn't flowery prose, it wasn't going to win a Pulitzer Prize. Some people get so caught up in the narratives themselves. But that's a tool to help you make better decisions. And you know, and if the idea is surfaced in the right way and you make the right decision, it's A successful narrative, even if it doesn't win a Pulitzer.

And is there a specification about. In the six pages, these are the following sections that must be in there.

No, it's pretty free form. And because they're used for different purposes, some of them was one specific type which we talk in the book, which is the working backwards process. That narrative has a press release and an faq. So that has sections. But the other ones are just. The reason it's six pages is because at the right level of information density, it takes about 3 minutes to read a page. It's a good rule of thumb. So a six pager takes 18 minutes to read, two minutes to say hi to everyone in the meeting, 18 minutes to read, and then 40 minutes to have a deep discussion about the topic. So if you have a 30 minute meeting, you do a three pager.

So I walk into this Amazon meeting and for the first 20 minutes people are reading. So it's silent.

Right.

Why can't you circulate the document in advance and depend on social pressure or whatever that you have read this before you enter the room?

Yeah, this is where I don't know. But there's some universal law that I found that teams will update their documents until just before the meeting. And so if you, you may get an advanced copy and you know, the day before or the morning before, it usually changes because people are updating to the last minute and you want to save time. And one way to waste someone's time is to read version two when you're presenting version three at the meeting. We found that this guarantees everyone is reading the same document, is literally has the same set of information to, to work with and, and spends the, you know, the right amount of time, time reading it.

And my last question about this, because as you can tell, I am absolutely fascinated by this. Have you ever pitched to a vc, a partnership trying to raise money, something like that?

Yes, I worked with VCs. Yeah.

Okay, I'm sorry, but can you imagine that a venture capital firm says no more PowerPoint. You come in with a six page document and we're going to spend the first 20 minutes reading it.

I have talked with two VC firms who shall remain nameless who would like to and are trying to encourage teams to switch over to do that. And so, you know, I would say, what's that?

Does it start with M?

I'm there? No, no.

Okay.

It doesn't. And, but, and it really depends on what they want to get up, get out of that. If whatever the VCs, if they're evaluating the person versus the idea. You know, I'm not a VC. I did a little bit of investing. I realized I was bad at it and I didn't really particularly like it. So I'm more an operator and a builder. If it were me, if I were looking to see what is this organization about and if I were going to invest my money in it, I would require some type of a deeper document than a PowerPoint. But those people know what they're doing, they're very successful. So it gets back to when to change the world. And if I were trying to raise money, for instance, I would probably, if they asked me to go in with the PowerPoint, I'd go in with the PowerPoint rather than say no, here's a narrative and risk losing the deal.

I can guarantee you that the ability to give a slick presentation is probably is inversely related to your competence as a CEO. But we won't go down that. Okay, so next topic that fascinated me was this, the role of three things, which is mock ups, press releases and FAQs. So please explain why those three things are so powerful and useful.

Yeah. So that's combined into what Amazon calls the working backwards process. It's also the title of our book. It's one of the most uniquely Amazonian processes. The working backwards process really what it tries to do, and the only thing it tries to do is it's to start from the customer perspective and then work backwards from that. And this can be it for a small feature on a webpage or an app to entering a new line of business or to moving in a new geography and start or starting a whole new, you know, inventing cloud computing. Amazon goes through that working backwards process and it's starting from the customer and working backwards. Some companies use different ways to develop products in terms of skills forward approach about what are we good at? What's the competition? Doing what are, you know. Sure. What are strengths and weaknesses? Here's an opportunity if we can go in and get the, this percentage of the market, that is one way of doing it. Amazon really doesn't do that. It starts from here's the customer experience we want. And so the first thing, if someone has an idea, hey, I have an idea about X. Especially if they're new. The, the, the manager say that's great. Can you go write a working backwards document about that? And the working backwards document is a one page press release and that's the first thing that's written and that is you have to explain to your end Customer what it is you're building and why, what's in it for them? And you have to keep it to one page or less. And if you read that press release, if you're not, if at the end of the press release, if you don't want to buy that product or use that product is, you know, do not pass go. You have to go back and rewrite the press release until you're convinced. And then the FAQ helps. There are two portions. One is the external FAQ which is again is explaining to the customer about the product. Why should you know how much is this product going to cost? Why should I use this product versus what are some of the alternatives that they're out there in the market. The internal fact is FAQ is those are the questions that make this problem hard that you need to go solve. So can we build this device with the bill of materials for under $200? We with these sets of features, this product needs a salesforce. Will we partner with someone? Will we build our own salesforce? What are all the hard parts about building this? You don't necessarily have to solve all of them. You have to identify them and say, here's how we're going to solve it. And then if it does have a heavy UI component, the mockups would help to say, well, okay, here's what the customer, again, here's what the customer is going to experience. And those mockups are optional because some of them are. They don't have these products or features, don't have a UI component. But it's all really about getting nailing the customer experience up front before you write a line of code, before you get budget or headcount to go do something. And very few if any of the ideas or products make it through this process the first time. It's an iterative process. And what else happens in. Once you write it and present it, it's kind of like the narrative meeting. It's exactly like the narrative meeting. It's 20 minutes of silence and you get high quality feedback on that. At that point, it's essentially no longer your idea, which is a bit different because you've had another team, if it's your manager or who's ever looking at that, other groups are looking at that. They're giving you really great feedback to, you know, to make the idea and direction to go into so collectively from that point on, and that group owns the success or failure of that idea.

I would tell you that these two ideas, first, that what's fundamentally wrong with PowerPoint and why a six page document narrative is better. And the idea of the mock up, the press release and the FAQ are worth the book alone. Just those two ideas are so great. I, I can't tell you how much I love those ideas. Okay, next big topic, the concept of how you select and recruit employees, including of course, the Bar raiser. So explain how Amazon does this.

Yeah, so it started when, actually in 1999, I believe is when it started when Amazon. It was response to a specific problem where Amazon was growing so fast and you had new people hiring new people hiring new people. And that meant you lost control effectively of what people you were attracting at the company. You didn't have a, even if you had a loosely defined hiring process, you weren't actively going out and knowing what you were vetting the skills and attributes you're trying to vet for people coming into the company. So unless you have a deliberate hiring process, especially for a company that's small and growing, you're going to lose control of your company culture unless you have a deliberate hiring process. So what the Bar Raiser is all about, it was meant to have a deliberate hiring process to ensure its consistency across groups and teams. And so it has a couple of unique attributes. One is it looks at the Amazon leadership principles and each interviewer is assigned two or three of the leadership principles and they have a job to do going into the interview. They know what their job is and they know what information they're supposed to get from a candidate. I'm setting aside the functional skills because this applies to any type of position. But I'm going to go vet for think big customer obsession and ownership. And so my job as an interviewer, I've got a set of questions and it's usually behavioral interview techniques, which means that you look at the candidate's past performance as the best predictor of future performance. So you find out what did they do and how do they approach, how did they approach situations where they needed to think big or you have customer obsession. And so the next part is the interviewer has to write down their feedback and come up with the vote before talking to anyone else. So it removes bias. I can't say, hey guy, this is a great candidate, I just interviewed her and you're gonna love this person we should go hire. You now have this inherent bias going into the interview that, okay, I'm gonna hire this, I'm now in cell mode where that's not the purpose of the, the interview process. So you can't see anyone's vote you can't see anyone's feedback. And then the other thing that does is you have you write down your feedback. So I know I'm gonna have to write my feedback and defend it in front of my peers. So I don't. I've been at other companies or witnessed other people the same. The candidate talks so much I couldn't get a word in edgewise. So I didn't really. I don't have enough information to vote. That's a failure of the interviewer not taking control of the interview. And because they do have a specific job. So you have to get the information that you're assigned to do because no one interviewer has all of the information. And so if you don't bring your piece of the puzzle to the hiring decision making process, you haven't done your job. And then the next thing that happens is there's a bar raiser. So the bar raiser process. But there's a role called the bar raiser and that's a trained interviewer. Their job. First of all, they're not in the hiring chain of the group that's hiring the person. So whether the person that gets hired or not, they don't have a bias. The urgency bias is another one that creeps in. We need two people or else we're not going to hit our goals. Their job is to make sure that hiring bar stays consistently high and to train the inner all of the other interviewers so they have veto power. Doesn't matter who else is in on the interview loop. It could be VPs, senior VPs. If the hiring manager, if everyone wants to hire, if the bar raiser doesn't want to, they have veto power and the person doesn't get hired. In practice, that veto doesn't really get used because a good bar raiser is there to help train and it's there to help the hiring manager make the right hiring decision. So, so that is another unique aspect. And then the last part is the, the debrief. It's usually anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes per, per candidate. Usually, you know, if it's, if you're probably 30 minutes is more, more common where you it that's again like another Amazon meeting where you read all of the written feedback, you look at the votes and then you have a discussion on it. And for me, where that really helps is that this is a feedback loop that makes the bar raiser process get better the more time you run through it. Because I see sometimes feedback about, oh, how did you actually pull this information out of this candidate, I couldn't figure that out. And you learn new interviewing techniques by just watching and reading the feedback of how other people interviewed. Or you can ask them at the time or I teach other people. So they asked me, how did you get this? Well, I noticed when either hesitation or this wasn't, it was a fluffy answer. So I needed to peel one or two layers deeper to get to the, the root of the issue. And so interviewers, the more time that they go through it with the bar raiser and these debrief meetings, they just become better interviewers. And so it's a simple process. It scales, it's, it's teachable and you can replicate it across many groups so that it's also one of Amazon's secret weapons in terms of how you consistently hire the right people. And Amazon does have a consistent culture across geographies, across different business lines. And by and large it's due to the bar raiser process.

The bar raiser has a full time job too.

Yes.

So why not institutionalize the bar raising function into the HR department?

I think that you're a better interviewer if you are running and operating or involved in, in, in a business. So if you just become a professional interviewer that, that becomes harder. And also there are some functional skills. If you're interviewing software engineers, it helps to know about software engineering. So, so there, there, those are a couple of reasons why, you know, HR does play an important facilitating role. But at the end of the day it's really the, it's the hiring manager's responsibility to hire the right people and it's the bar raiser's responsibility to make sure that the processes are followed. Yeah, you don't get extra points for it, but it's one of the most important things that you can do at the company is attract the right talent. So it's, you don't have to, I mean people are willing to put the time in it because it, it will help everyone achieve their, their long term goals.

Okay. And if you think about it, that ties into the fact that salaries are low and your income really is related to stock price, which is dependent upon success, which is dependent upon hiring the right people. So it all works, right?

Yeah. And that's what Amazon I think has done pretty well is they have 14 leadership principles. The reason they're not just a poster on the wall is because they are woven into all of the important processes that Amazon does. And so the ownership and, and you know, the long term thinking is an example of how can you weave that into the bar raiser process.

So, yes, my favorite line from the book is missionaries, not mercenaries. I thought that was just brilliant. So I don't know if it was Bill or you, but whoever thought of that line is utterly fantastic. The next thing that just fascinated me was that this example that in order to get more women hired, there was a department that had a decision that every resume from a woman got a phone screen. Tell me about that. That is such a great idea.

Yeah, A lot of the ideas just bubble up from within. And this was, it was a director at a. And you know, for a group that really was. Was trying to build a more diverse workplace and wasn't succeeding. And so just tried something and the bar never lowered. It just, it just really, I would say it uncovered some biases that people didn't know were happening. And so it wasn't anything more or less than, let's try this, let's see if it works. And you have to stick with it a little while for an experiment. And it, it did work and then got noticed. And you can, and then you can shout about it and say, here's I did this and, and here's how it helped my team or my department recruit a more diverse workplace.

And why not apply that to race?

So there are, I mean, there are some teams where you just strip the name off the top of the resume. So you look at a resume, sometimes you can even go even further with schools or company names. Some people think, yeah, you know, this person went to school X or worked at company Y, they must be great. Well, School X and company Y, they have plenty of great people, but they have plenty of people who probably won't do so well in your organization. So it is important to really strip the bias out and rely on the process itself. And it's harder than it sounds. I make it sound like it's, oh, yeah, just got to eliminate the bias. They're inherent biases, so they're difficult to get to find and get rid of.

But I would make the case that this, every woman gets at least a phone interview. It's beyond erasing the bias. It's actually compensating because not every man got a phone interview. So every woman got an interview overcame an inherent weakness. Right. So it forced more women candidates down the pipe. Yeah, which, which is why I love the idea. I would also say, do you think that the first step being a phone interview levels the field? Because if the first step is a in person interview, I think that the way people dress, are they attractive or not do they have body odor. You know, you pick up cues in person that you cannot pick up by phone. So do you think that may also have a field leveling effect?

It could. But one of the best pieces of advice that I received early on on in the bar riser processes, someone told me when I form my initial impression in the first two minutes of the interview, I spend the rest of the interview trying to convince myself that impression was wrong. And I thought that was just a good thing to keep in mind. And you know, that's, that's me is basically saying if you see someone or you for whatever you, you form an opinion, it, it's by definition uninformed because you haven't uncovered hardly any information. And so you want to get rid of that. And you can do that either the phone or over a zoom interview or in person. So I, to me, I think that the phone does help it remove some of that. It also makes it a little harder to interview, I found because they're verbal cues you can get and you can tell whether someone's nervous, in which case you want to make them less nervous or if they don't really know what they're talking about, you want to make sure that, that they're not. Do they actually, are they qualified to do this type of job? And you have to tell the difference between nervous or they actually aren't qualified for, you know, to be a software engineer or, you know, and so to me I find that's a little easier to do in person. But the piece of advice about that first two minutes I thought was at least it works for me if I.

Understood the compensation correctly. I mentioned this earlier, there's sort of a limit of 160,000 or some number like that. And the bulk of the true wealth creation occurs because of the stock price. Now it happens to be working well because Amazon's stock price has continuously been going up. But what if there are outside factors that an employee cannot control that makes the stock tank? Then what do you have a recruiting and retention problem?

Well, so I mean the stock will go up and down. I don't know what it is today, but it's going to be lower than it is today. I'm quite certain at some point in time. And so what long term thinking reinforces, you know, the stock vests over a period of years and you look at, well, what is the stock price doing today? You'd go crazy if you did that every day, especially even early on. It was kind of a roller coaster, coaster ride, spreading it out over years and the grants come every, every year the stock went down by a lot. Your next grant, they look at the, you know, total compensation, there'd be more stock number of stock units that, that are granted in the following year. So if there were, you know, a, some structural change, there would be some, some adjustment, but it doesn't come on. The Stock really dropped 20% this quarter. There's nothing that's going to happen. You know, I'd be shocked if there were any compensation adjustments because Amazon's not looking at what's the stock going to be next quarter. It's what's it going to be five, ten years from now and how can it grow? And those are the type of people that you want. You know, in the dot com bubble and bust and dating myself you could tell the people who were there for the short term pop and then when it didn't go they, they kind of opted out of the company. But the people who stayed were really the people the builders and who wanted to build and make a difference at scale to lots of people and cultures are self selecting. So that kind of tells you about the compensation, just reinforces those type of people.

Next topic, single threaded leadership, another great topic. Tell me about this.

So that happened. Some of these processes are actually developed as direct results of trying to solve specific problems that Amazon had. And so Amazon realized that as Amazon was growing, one, the technology infrastructure was making it harder to, it would take longer to build things and deploy services out to the website or to the fulfillment centers. And then two, the organization was growing. It was harder to go figure out who is the right person to talk to to make the right decision. So we found we are spending more time coordinating and communicating than actually building and creating value for customers. And so you can now you can take two approaches you can take are let's build more collaboration and communication tools and we'll be world class and collaboration tools. Jeff basically said the opposite. No, I want to eliminate communication and coordination. I'd love to have small autonomous teams. And so the first iteration started out as what we call two pizza teams and they're called two pizza teams because if the two pizzas aren't enough to feed the whole team, the team's probably too big. You need to cleave it in half and separate the space. And so it's the two pizza teams. It's not just an org change. You have to change, you have to change how you make decisions. The org change is actually the easiest part. You just change the reporting structures. But how you make decisions, who's responsible for what. And then the second part, you need to make sure that you have a technical architecture where there aren't all of these embedded dependencies between teams. Where if I want to go do something, I've got to get another team to change a couple of APIs. Or if they're shared libraries that you're using, that's even worse. Or if they're mucking in your code base, everyone's on the same code base. That's the worst level. We were at the worst level in some instances and trying to rapidly move forward to separate. So we had to do one move to a services based architecture and invent and develop some things to make that happen at scale and then come up with an org structure and decision making structure on how you could do these things. What was interesting is that some people again just opted out. If you're, I don't know, let's say that a chief product officer, that role doesn't really exist in an independent two pizza team structure. You say okay, I'm going to go now, work on fulfillment center problems. Or Amazon didn't have a chief product officer. But this is something I've seen at other companies who typically want to move to a services based architecture with small separable teams. By definition, that person doesn't have enough information to make all of the quote unquote product decisions. You want people waking up every day in the shower, going out for a run, thinking about here's my domain space, how can I solve my customer set of specific problems. And you don't want someone like a chief product officer or chief Innovation officer to come and say here's all you need to innovate or here's what you want to build. So it's just antithetical to that. So the first iteration was these two pizza teams and you'd have fitness functions. It was kind of a geeky thing about you come up, instrument your own group and you have one composite metric that should go up and to the right. And that turns out that was kind of a waste of time. It didn't work, so we moved away. But we found out really what was the once we had this services based architecture and we could have separable teams. What was really the most important thing is what you'll hear in a lot of Amazon meetings is, especially when a project is not going well, you'll hear the question who is the senior most leader working on this problem that is thinking about this problem and nothing but this problem and if it happens to be A junior product manager who you know, just joined but and you're trying to build a large business which you'd be surprised at how often, often that kind of happens. Then you're not setting that project up for success. And so that, that's where the concept of the single threaded leader and single threaded teams come, comes in. If it's big enough to be what we were doing, you should have someone running that who, that's all that they think about. They also have the appropriate skill set, you know, and they can do the job. This junior product manager may be a great person but they're probably not going to be able to build a Kindle and come up with the whole digital device. And so a great example of a single threaded leader was Steve Kessel who's no longer at Amazon but he was running Amazon's biggest business, the media, books, music and video business, the physical books, music and dvd. And Jeff took him off that business and put him on a business that was effectively zero at that point which was digital. And you know, Steve at first and Bill at, he's the second employee. Well why can't we run both? Because digital is so small. But that violated the single threaded leader. You'd always, the digital group would, decisions would always lose because they'd be outweighed by. Yeah, but we have this business that's keeping the lights on. And so that's, I think that's a powerful example of where a single threaded leader can go and, and, and run with a specific problem and not worry. Even if you're talking to the same set of partners by the way, the publishers, the, the music labels, the, you know, the, it's just, it's a different business. And so Amazon set that up because it was so important to take and wasn't a career buster for Steve either which at some companies it would be to say yeah, yesterday I was running the, and I had huge headcount and now I've got, it's Bill and me and I'm responsible for this business that does not bring in any revenue. It won't for the foreseeable future. That Andy Jassy did the same, roughly the same thing for web services. And so that's the concept of a single threaded leader. Dave Limp, who's the senior vice president of devices at Amazon has a great quote. It's the best way to fail at inventing something is to make it someone's part time job. And so that just you know, kind of sticks in if it's, if it's important enough to where you want this thing to succeed, you should have someone thinking about it full time.

He's from Apple.

I worked with him. Oh, you did? Okay.

Yeah, yeah, he's from Apple. I, I don't know how much time I have. Obviously you can tell I love the book because I got a lot of questions.

Thank you very much.

I, I don't know if that's good or bad that you might think, oh God, that was like the longest interview. Why didn't I just have a. Some dumbass podcaster asked me really simple softball questions that he just figured out from Wikipedia. But there, there are three inside stories that you mentioned and I don't know, I would like to hear them all, but I'll give you a choice. So you can do as many as you like or as few as you like, but minimum one. Okay, Minimum one. I want to know and you to explain the inside story of either Kindle prime or aws. Pick one.

I'll start with Prime. And, and mostly because when we wrote the book and I showed it to that prime chapter to other people, they said, yeah, but this isn't, this is different. You know, in the prime story that, that we've seen, it all starts after the prime story that you wrote happened. Even people who still work at Amazon. So I'll start there because I think it's something that is may not be as well known, but these ideas, sometimes they accrue over time and there's not a single aha moment about let there be Prime. And so Amazon back in 2003 and then prime came out in February 2005. So 2003 and 2004, the growth rate of the physical media business and that's shipping physical books, books, CDs and DVDs. That was 77% of Amazon's business. And the growth rates were actually slowing down. It was still growing, but the Internet was growing faster, which meant that Amazon was becoming less and less relevant, as if it's growing slower than the rate of e commerce on the Internet. And so we had tried several different things to how can you turn that trend growth trend around and make it grow faster? And the Amazon has a concept of the flywheel. There's the, the price selection and convenience. One of the things that I, I thought was notable about prime is that we didn't say, well, let's go run a bunch of promotions or try things that were giveaways just to juice the short term growth. We knew that we had to stay within that triangle of price selection and convenience. We didn't know where it would be, you know, if you lowered prices by half a percent or 1% on average, it would obviously be more. For certain products, lowering prices is easy, but figuring out how you lower your cost structure so you can do that is the hard part. Or should we stay the course and just keep adding more, selection more products to the catalog? We were doing all of that and it still wasn't working. And so convenience, which is the shipping time that we really look there and where people had ideas, hey, we should be just shipping overnight. These giant flat screen TVs, they're very expensive, we have more than plenty of gross margin and we should just ship those overnight. It turned this is a case where the technical architecture made it too hard to go do that at Amazon because it didn't really treat products all the same. And so. And it wasn't worth it treated all products the same and it wasn't worth it to just do a hacker change just for flat screen TVs. So those ideas that existed before and this was one of those projects that would have never gotten done until Jeff just, he kept getting. And Jeff would send an email, I would be on those emails and I'd see all the response, be involved in the dialogue. And it was with a relatively small group of people, the category managers, finance and some of the folks in logistics about what can we do to get products faster. And there are always excuses about well, why can't we do this? And this is where you know what Jeff has called the institutional no creeps in, you know, and there are lots of great reasons why you couldn't do it. And then the holiday season was coming up. Finally Jeff just said we're going to launch a free shipping program. I don't even know actually what it is going to be at this point, but we're going to do it by the end of the year. And here's the let's get started. And so that was where I would call the beginning of the official prime. We knew we were going to do it. We didn't know what it was, we didn't know who was on the team yet. We didn't know if it was free two day shipping, free express shipping or you know, or you know, anything. It doesn't include 30 third party products or not. But we were marching and on that road and we're going to go do it. And there were another reason not to do it by the way, was if it worked. We had just spent the better part of 10 years coming up with a supply chain and a delivery chain and we were getting relatively competent at shipping out products in three to five days cheaply and reliably to customers. And now we're saying we need to do it in two days or less. If that works. This whole infrastructure that we built needs to be changed. And so we haven't even gotten a return on that investment yet. But this is where long term thinking and customer focus and willingness to invent and cannibalize yourself comes in that, well, if we don't do it, someone else is going to create a version of Amazon prime and it's going to be obsolete anyway. So we may as well be the ones who make this infrastructure obsolete. And also if it didn't work, there are not that many prime members. It launched in February. We didn't have 150 million prime members in March. So you know, and so I think that there are a couple of things for prime. And by the way, if Jeff, and it was in October, I believe said no, I've, I thought about it and you guys are right. Holidays are coming up, let's not do it. We'll revisit it in, in 2005 he probably would have been lauded internally and you know, hey, you made the right decision to go do that. And that would have been one of the biggest errors of omission that has been made because a large chunk of the growth of the e commerce business of Amazon is directly due to Prime. And prime gets better and their delivery times are going down further and further now people expect it in hours and minutes instead of two days.

Prime video.

Yes and yes and yeah in prime video. And you know, it adds, it added more and more. And Jeff early on said we are going to add more to this. It's not just going to be a free two day shipping. So that was one of those things that wasn't. People knew we wanted to ship faster to customers. There are always good reasons not to do it. And no one was really responsible for it because it took people from the website, the category managers. There were physical processes that needed to be changed in the fulfillment centers. So it was one of those, those tangled, messy projects that doesn't have a clear owner. And unless you say we're going to go do this, you know, someone like the CEO, it's not going to get, not going to get done.

Doesn't this contradict the single thread theory or was Jeff the single thread?

This is also when some of these processes like the working backwards and single threaded leaders, those were developing at this time. So the time it's really between, I would say 2002 and 2005 or 2006. Amazon spent a lot of time and effort into how do we instrument and build a company that can launch in scale and grow 10x. And so we were figuring some of these things out as we went along. So they weren't fully codified yet. And sometimes stubborn on the vision and flexible on the details is what Jeff says a lot. Sometimes you just realize I'm the only one who can make this decision. It won't be made unless I make it. And there's no better time to do it than today. And it was a, you know, you know, I talk about how messy it was. It was a relatively small project because it was aimed for convenience oriented and some of the our top customers at first. So it wasn't meant to appeal to the whole customer base because you had to pay $79 to, to order and a lot of people just ordered from Amazon at that time one or two times a year and you wouldn't pay 80 bucks to get two day shipping. You'd be better off just paying two day shipping for the two orders a year you place on Amazon. Those are a couple lessons that are embedded in prime. And there are articles out there about what happened after Jeff sent that email and how the team got together and they did incredible work and they worked hard on tight deadlines and, and there are lots of projects like that. But I think the better lessons for the readers are what led up to that? How do you spot when the institutional no is really slowing you down? When do you need to accept that what we built is good, but it's not good enough no matter how much it cost? We need to go try something different. So those are some of the lessons that I personally got and I was lucky to see the back and forth with Jeff and that small group of individuals on what led to Prime. So that's one I can go on forever on this stuff. I love talking about it.

But you know what, you know what? We're gonna leave Kindle and AWS off the table. So if you want to hear the great stories about Kindle and aws, buy the book. I have two more questions for you.

Okay, Fire away.

So question number one is for you or for Jeff, if someone said to you, so where do you do your most, your deepest thinking, your most innovative ideas? How do you set yourself up for that? Is it something that just happens when you're running or do you get a quiet space? I mean, what's your. Do you Have a technique for forcing yourself to come up with deep thoughts and great ideas and innovation. That's question one.

Yeah. So there are two things that I do and one is uniquely Amazonian. It's really to get yourself in the customer mindset and look at everything through the eyes of the customer and you realize that, hey, it can be better. What don't I like about this process? And one small example of that would be the returns process at Amazon. No one likes returning stuff to companies. Usually you return it, it takes a while. You have to go to the post office, you buy the postage and then if they accept your return six or eight weeks later, you'll see something on your credit card. And I don't know who did this at Amazon, but they said the return process can be better. And so Amazon, they'll refund you when you say I want to return it and here's why you get the refund and then, and Amazon still checks and make sure that the product actually was delivered and came. But what the thinking was that, you know, 99.5% of the people are trying, our customers are trying to do the right thing. Why are we penalizing them? Because a small percent of people are trying to defraud the company. Let's flip it on its head and let's not make a return process being so painful and it doesn't. It builds more trust and it in which eventually is better for the long term health of the company. So putting yourself in that customer mindset allows you to do things that you normally wouldn't do if you're just looking at spreadsheets or what is this going to do to revenue? Because customer trust is one of those things. At Amazon, Jeff has said that we hold a conviction that the long term interests of shareholders are completely aligned with the long term interest of customers. You can't shake any Jeff or anyone at Amazon from that statement. And so if you do what's right for customers, it will be aligned with shareholders. And personally, the second thing I do, and this is not necessarily Amazon me, but you know, you mentioned running. So if I'm wrestling with a particular issue, I'll throw on my running shoes and I'll head out. And for me, what that does is it's, it sounds weird to say, but it separates my body and mind and my mind goes someplace while my body's chugging along the streets and I get to think about that, the problem. And a lot of times I will come and I find out when I'm at peace with that issue that Okay, I think I have it, or I think I see a way out of this problem. But everyone has their own way to do that. Second part, but the first part anyone could do in terms of, that's the difference between customer focus and customer obsession. Just thinking, seeing everything through the minds of the customer.

Okay, and my last question, it's not really a question. It is a question and I will not. I just want to give you an idea and you can tell me I'm nuts. I think that what we should do is you should be able to order your vaccination at Amazon and then the Amazon truck and the Amazon logistics, which truly knows how to reach anybody in America right away, either the driver or there's a nurse with the driver or some qualified person and you can order and get your vaccine from Amazon. I know it sounds like a weird idea, but I truly do believe if Jeff said Amazon now you can go to Amazon, order your vaccination, a driver will come who's trained or with a nurse or whatever, and you can get your vaccine. I'm not worthy. I'm not worthy that.

I'm sure there are people who are entertaining ideas like that.

Are you trying to be nice to me?

No, no, I'm, I'm, I'm saying that if you think about what is in the long term interests of customers, and this is, is quite honestly, this situation is an area that's going to require a ton of innovation in us to do things that we didn't even think were possible or that we should be. Could do. Ideas like that. Yeah, I mean, I could put you in touch with someone who's, you know, Amazon is working with. They've got over a million employees and have to figure out how to test those million employees on a regular basis. And that's at a much smaller scale than what you're talking about. But I, I would be surprised if ideas like that aren't being discussed right now. I have no inside information on that. But at Amazon you would not be left out of the room for that idea. You'd be asked to write a press release and an FAQ for it. No problem. There's anything to do. But yeah, so it's a great idea.

Can you imagine? I'm really like losing it now. But can you imagine if Amazon said Amazon prime members get a free vaccination, Click here. Oh my God. I give you that idea and if it happens, I'm going to claim credit for it. Imagine a world where you have a staff meeting and the first 20 minutes are silent. Because everybody's reading the same six page document. That document has three a press release, an FAQ, and screenshots. No PowerPoint, no pitches. My head is exploding. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Remarkable People with the remarkable Colin Breyer. Be sure to check out his book, Working Insights, Stories and Secrets from Inside Amazon. Welcome, everyone. I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. My thanks to Jeff C. And Peg Fitzpatrick, who work backwards from you, the listener, to create the most remarkable podcast we can remember. Don't go into crowded places, wash your hands, wear a mask and get vaccinated. Mahalo and aloha. This is remarkable people.