An absolute treat to have Colin Bryar as special guest for Edge Exchange this week. Colin is former Chief of Staff to Jeff Bezos, launched the first AWS service and helped shape some of the frameworks and rituals that have helped Amazon become the most customer-centric company in the world with 1.5m employees and a market cap nearing 2 trillion USD (greater than 🇦🇺 GDP).
Colin captured those lessons in the book “Working Backwards - Insights, Stories, and Secrets from inside Amazon” with fellow Amazonian Bill Carr. Together they co-founded Working Backwards, LLC which now teaches the management science that underpins Amazon’s success, to founders, executives and teams around the world.
“Working Backwards” contains a number of very useful principles and models which can be applied to businesses of any kind. The fundamental concept is to work backwards from the customer (who loves your product). A great of this is the PRFAQ framework which inverts the usual sequence of events and starts with a press release for the product that has yet to be built (its still at idea stage).
Writing the press release is a forcing mechanism for thinking deeply about the customer and their needs, and how the (yet to be built) product/solution addresses those needs. The internal/external FAQ’s force detailed thinking and stakeholder input to elucidate how the idea is actually going to work, be sold, make money, be delivered, etc.
PRFAQS are one of the narrative-focused tools that defied conventional business orthodoxy. Another is the adoption of 6 page memos in lieu of slide presentations as the default form of communication at a meeting. The first 20minutes are devoted to reading the memo, the rets of the meeting is for discussion and can proceed on the basis that everyone is appraised of the ideas being presented or decisions to be made.
This was the first time we beamed in a remote presenter for a live session with an in-person audience in our new Wonder Pod and feedback from attendees was that it was the immersive experience we hoped it would be - far different to watching a talk on a laptop screen or similar.
Thanks to Colin and Bill for writing the book ad to Colin for giving so generously of your time to share those priceless management insights with our members.
