Working Backwards Quotes

“The use of anecdotes and exception reporting has enabled leaders to audit at scale in a very detailed way.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“anecdotes and exception reporting”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Anecdotes and exception reporting are woven into the deck.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Graphs show two or more timelines, for example, trailing 6-week and trailing 12-month.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Graphs plot results against comparable prior periods.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Emerging patterns are a key point of focus.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“How many metrics should you review?”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“It’s mostly charts, graphs, and data tables.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“The deck represents a data-driven, end-to-end view of the business.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Each meeting begins with the virtual or printed distribution of the data package, which contains the weekly snapshot of graphs, tables, and occasional explanatory notes for all your metrics.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Second, we’ll describe the meeting itself, how it’s structured to maximize results, and some cautionary notes about how it can fail.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“talk first about how data presentation (mostly graphic) is designed to draw attention where it’s most needed.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“This final stage is all about ensuring that your processes are operating normally and performance is not degrading over time.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“In the end, if you stick with identifying the true root causes of variation and eliminating them, you’ll have a predictable, in-control process that you can optimize.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Correction of Errors (COE) process, based upon the “Five Whys” method developed at Toyota”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“The objective in this stage is separating signals from noise in data and then identifying and addressing root causes.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“the Analyze stage is all about developing a comprehensive understanding of what drives your metrics.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“The first metric is inward-facing and operations-centric, while the second metric is outward-facing and customer-centric.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“As you develop the collection tools, make sure they are measuring what you think they are measuring”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Having an independent person or team involved with measurement can help you seek out and eliminate biases in your data.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“the flywheel concept in Jim Collins’s book Good to Great,”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Six Sigma process improvement method called DMAIC, an acronym for Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“companies in general, have very little ability to directly control output metrics. What’s really important is to focus on the “controllable input metrics,” the activities you directly control,”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“A team might identify a hard problem during a review that we did not know how to solve, and didn’t know if we could solve. Jeff would say something to the effect of, “We shouldn’t be afraid of taking on hard problems if solving them would unlock substantial value.” Above all, keep in mind that the PR/FAQ is a living document. Once it is approved by the leadership team, it will almost certainly still be edited and changed (a process that should be directed by or reviewed with the leadership team). There is no guarantee that an idea expressed in an excellent PR/FAQ will move forward and become a product. As we’ve said, only a small percentage will get the green light. But this is not a drawback. It is, in fact, a huge benefit of the process—a considered, thorough, data-driven method for deciding when and how to invest development resources. Generating and evaluating great ideas is the real benefit of the Working Backwards process.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Economics and P&L What are the per-unit economics of the device? That is, what is the expected gross profit and contribution profit per unit? What is the rationale for the price point you have chosen for the product? How much will we have to invest up front to build this product in terms of people, technology, inventory, warehouse space, and so on? For this section of the PR/FAQ, ideally one or more members of your finance team will work with you to understand and capture these costs so you can include a simplified table of the per-unit economics and a mini P&L in the document. A resourceful entrepreneur or product manager can do this work themselves if they do not have a finance manager or team. For new products, the up-front investment is a major consideration. In the case of Melinda, there is a requirement for 77 people to work on the hardware and software, for an annualized cost of roughly $15 million. This means that the product idea needs to have the potential to earn well in excess of $15 million per year in gross profit to be worth building. The consumer questions and economic analysis both have an effect on the product price point, and that price point, in turn, has an effect on the size of the total addressable market. Price is a key variable in the authoring of your PR/FAQ. There may be special assumptions or considerations that have informed your calculation of the price point—perhaps making it relatively low or unexpectedly high—that need to be called out and explained. Some of the best new product proposals set a not-to-exceed price point because it forces the team to innovate within that constraint and face the tough trade-offs early on. The problem(s) associated with achieving that price point should be fully explained and explored in the FAQ.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“The Kindle Press Release Kindle was the first product offered by the digital media group, and it, along with several AWS products, was among the first at Amazon to be created using the press release approach. Kindle was a breakthrough in multiple dimensions. It used an E Ink display. The customer could shop for, buy, and download books directly from the device—no need to connect to a PC or to Wi-Fi. Kindle offered more e-books than any other device or service available at the time and the price was lower. Today, that set of features sounds absolutely standard. In 2007, it was pioneering. But Kindle had not started out that way. In the early stages of its development—before we got started on the press release approach and when we were still using PowerPoint and Excel—we had not described a device that could do all these things from the customer perspective. We had focused on the technology challenges, business constraints, sales and financial projections, and marketing opportunities. We were working forward, trying to invent a product that would be good for Amazon, the company, not the customer. When we wrote a Kindle press release and started working backwards, everything changed. We focused instead on what would be great for customers. An excellent screen for a great reading experience. An ordering process that would make buying and downloading books easy. A huge selection of titles. Low prices. We would never have had the breakthroughs necessary to achieve that customer experience were it not for the press release process, which forced the team to invent multiple solutions to customer problems. (We tell the whole Kindle story in chapter seven.)”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“As we continued to meet with Jeff, we tried various kinds of spreadsheets and PowerPoint slides to present and explore our ideas, none of which seemed to be particularly effective. At some point, I don’t remember exactly when, Jeff suggested a different approach for the next meeting. Forget the spreadsheets and slides, he said. Instead, each team member would write a narrative document. In it, they would describe their best idea for a device or service for the digital media business. The next meeting arrived, and we all showed up with our narratives. (As mentioned, ours was one of several teams involved in the early experimentation with narratives at the company. They were not yet official Amazon policy.) We distributed them and read them to ourselves and then discussed them, one after another. One proposed an e-book reader that would use new E Ink screen technology. Another described a new take on the MP3 player. Jeff wrote his own narrative about a device he called the Amazon Puck. It would sit on your countertop and could respond to voice commands like, “Puck. Please order a gallon of milk.” Puck would then place the order with Amazon. The great revelation of this process was not any one of the product ideas. As we’ve described in chapter four, the breakthrough was the document itself. We had freed ourselves of the quantitative demands of Excel, the visual seduction of PowerPoint, and the distracting effect of personal performance. The idea had to be in the writing. Writing up our ideas was hard work. It required us to be thorough and precise. We had to describe features, pricing, how the service would work, why consumers would want it. Half-baked thinking was harder to disguise on the written page than in PowerPoint slides. It could not be glossed over through personal charm in the presentation. After we started using the documents, our meetings changed. There was more meat and more detail to discuss, so the sessions were livelier and longer. We weren’t so focused on the pro forma P&L and projected market segment share. We talked at length about the service itself, the experience, and which products and services we thought would appeal most to the customer.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“As I was to learn, the process for creating the digital media business would be quite different because there was so much more to creating a great digital media customer experience than simply adding the next retail category to the Amazon website. The first part of the process went as normal. Our team of three or four people developed plans using the tried-and-true MBA-style methods of the time. We gathered data about the size of the market opportunity. We constructed financial models projecting our annual sales in each category, assuming, of course, an ever-increasing share of digital sales. We calculated gross margin assuming a certain cost of goods from our suppliers. We projected an operating margin based on the size of the team we would need to support the business. We outlined the deals we would make with media companies. We sketched out pricing parameters. We described how the service would work for customers. We put it all together in crisp-looking PowerPoint slides (this was still several months before the switch to narratives) and comprehensive Excel spreadsheets.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Jeff has an uncanny ability to read a narrative and consistently arrive at insights that no one else did, even though we were all reading the same narrative. After one meeting, I asked him how he was able to do that. He responded with a simple and useful tip that I have not forgotten: he assumes each sentence he reads is wrong until he can prove otherwise. He’s challenging the content of the sentence, not the motive of the writer. Jeff, by the way, was usually among the last to finish reading.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“The six-pager can be used to explore any argument or idea you want to present to a group of people—an investment, a potential acquisition, a new product or feature, a monthly or quarterly business update, an operating plan, or even an idea on how to improve the food at the company cafeteria.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon