YouSaid · the spoken record

Colin Bryar

lines on the record: 76
first: 2021-02-08
most recent: 2021-02-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“What is, you know, what is our business? What's our product? What are we building? What are the details of that? How is what processes, how do we do the work? What is the filter, the lens through which we make decisions? And then who, of course, is who are my leaders? Who have I? How have I making sure that I assemble the right team? And in doing so, how do I delegate responsibility to those people so that they can carry out those details? That is a classic and challenging transition for any entrepreneur owner who starts off being in control of every detail and that they have to slowly let go of those details. And then they have to figure out how they put in place the right mechanisms to be able to properly audit the work of the teams. And that's really what we tried to describe in the book is actually this management science, frankly, that Jeff and the team developed to really solve this problem.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do, in fact. Jeff, I remember Jeff at least more than once talking about the way a leader needs to evolve as the company grows. And I think about this frequently, which is you said at the beginning, the leader needs to really focus on what? Then they really need to focus on how, and then eventually their focus really just becomes who”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Accountable himself included, by the way. And I would say that I also learned that sticking to these core principles is harder than it sounds, but the time when you need them most is the times when it's easiest to ignore them. So for instance, Amazon Prime, he made the call that, hey, we're going to go launch this shipping project in the holiday season. And it was not very popular at the time. when he explained his thinking that Jeff had this insight that comes once in a generation for Amazon Prime. He just stuck with the leadership principles and took them to their logical conclusion when it was tough to do in the face of the holiday season of what our quarterly results were.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On what would become AWS and digital, and those businesses had revenue of effectively zero for those two years. And he told me more than once, you want your top leaders and your most impactful people working on your biggest opportunities. And that may be different from what your biggest current set of activities are. Jeff changed during that time and just to become a better CEO one thing he said is he learned how to become a better operator becoming more operationally efficient. Fortunately, that is a teachable and a learnable skill. And Jeff had some great people at Amazon like Jeff Wilkie, you know, who's a great operator. He's the CEO of the consumer business. And now in his own right, he is a great operator and insist on the highest standards is one of Amazon's leadership principles he holds people.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So, I mean, my role as Jeff Shadow was primarily two parts. One was just to make him more effective CEO on a daily basis, making sure that the right issues are surfaced, that the people coming into the meetings, we cover the right topics and have enough information to make the right decisions on afterwards that it gets followed up on. So kind of bookending the day. But then the second and more important part, the longer-term part was it was a training role in the way Jeff put it, is I want us to be able to model each other and know how we would think in different situations. One of the enlightening things that I realized during my time with Jeff is what he chose to work on during the two years I was his shadow or technical advisor. And it wasn't the biggest businesses at Amazon. About half of the time were spent.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And these pieces all fit together because then we have to loop back to like, oh, the reason that Amazon could do that is because those teams wrote narratives and PRFAQ. So they made it abundantly clear if Jeff wanted to see what is this team doing. Oh, here you go. Read this document. And in two hours, you knew exactly what it was.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Other teams, it was just that we worked so hard. I'm very fascinated by how organizations evolve in general to be effective. And when you think of any large company, it becomes a complex system. And you're essentially describing how modular, self-contained units can thrive in these complex systems. It's a lot like evolution.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and don't take away from this that Amazon is some nirvana world where you never had to worry about coordination with other teams. It was just that you worked so hard to minimize the degree to which we did.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“During this timeframe where we were making the transition, we were using narratives. And one of the questions that we actually required was for the teams to put in what things that are not under your control that you wish you had under your control and how are you going to organize and create APIs so that can happen. Again, this is work that's below the tip of the iceberg of where Amazon really put a lot of effort into how can you still grow and be as nimble and agile as we were when we started out. And it's not easy, but it only gets harder. So you may as well start now.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, the idea is for each one to be like a self contained unit and in search, that's all engineers, but in some other business like my digital video business, it was like a combination of engineering and marketing people and people working with studios. But you have all of the resources you need. You don't have these dependencies that basically slow you down.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yep, I call that bare metal decision making, like who's the closest to the metal The thing, and that's what I think is super valuable about what you just said. And you're essentially describing these small units as like every team is its own mini GM of every mini unit is the leader and then every product, you're like so close to the core in that decision making framework”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some roles that don't actually fit too well in this type of paradigm. So for instance, like a chief product officer doesn't really fit in this role because if you ostensibly are responsible for making every product decision in the company from what's going on in the warehouse to what should the apps be built to how can we decrease delivery time, there's no one person who can be obsessed with all of those details. And so that role typically doesn't fit as you separate into these small separable single threaded teams. The fallacy is as your company grows, the chief product officer isn't really doing that anyway because they can't get that much high quality information to make all of those important decisions. You do want that the team's closest to the customers making those types of decisions anyway.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not only was this process of massive waste of time, but then you'd have these frustrating business reviews with a team saying, yeah, we really need to go build X, Y, and Z. And Jeff and the S team saying, yeah, I agree. Go build X, Y, and Z. But they say, well, I can't because I need brows to do this and I need the team that works on the checkout, the order pipeline, and they already have like these four other projects they're working on. So I'm just sitting here in line and I can't go build it. And so you have de-empowered your teams, the senior management, they become like referees of between teams who's going to go do what. And frankly, that's not much fun. So this was a huge breakthrough for the company was breaking down, you know, not only, of course, breaking down the code into APIs, but then breaking down the teams into single threaded focus teams.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the ironic thing is that we started off with the process that was the conventionally traditional wisdom was brought in what we called NPI, new project initiatives. It was horrible. I mean, basically it was another example of the process becoming a thing where you had to come up with like, what's your new project initiative? You had to write it all up. You had to project what are the financials behind it, most of which were totally wrong and guesses, like almost all pro forma PNLs are, and then put it in front of a big committee and try to take it upstairs.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this is a case where Amazon faced the same question that a lot of growing organizations do. We're adding more people. It's just, it seems like it's taking longer to get things done, but came up with a different answer. Some companies would say, let's build coordination tools, let's collaborate better. And Jeff said, I'd love to eliminate coordination altogether. Now, in practice, you can't eliminate it completely. So you break up into loosely coupled teams. And this was a hard, hard problem to solve because it required to change the way we built Amazon technology-wise to decouple it into what's now services-based architecture. That was hard to do back then in 2000, 2001, especially as you're growing super fast. But then there's also the organizational component too about how do decisions get made. It was a multi-year.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, again, this is where I just can't get over how creative the book is in terms of its application to all kinds of creative fields, companies big and small, because to me, both the memo strategy, the PRFAQ, and then this idea that you both shared of being able to write competing press releases and then harness kind of the wisdom of the group, it's actually about the power of narrative for really helping instantiate things that you know when you know. I think a lot about how tools change our thinking and vice versa. And you guys are essentially describing these practices for how that plays out in organizations, especially as they scale on this note. You have a section in your book, the subhead is better coordination was the wrong answer because that's one of the common myths that people have is a scale is we need to coordinate better and in fact it creates layers and layers of crap to deal with people create entirely new roles like dedicated chiefs of staff just to like you know”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, think about how inexpensive it is to write a one page press release versus how expensive it is to build mockups. To Colin's point, when you read them all as a group, like the best ones are going to be clear.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One tour you can use for startups, and I've actually done this at other companies. If you're trying to figure out what to build, you can write competing press releases with different takes. Oh, I love that. The problem. And then it becomes pretty apparent when you've got two or three or four different approaches that we really need solution A or I'm going to take the first part of this solution and combine it with a great idea that came up in this second one. And this is actually what we want to build. So it's a lightweight way to crystallize your thinking and also get alignment.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also creates alignment for the teams who will go out and build because sometimes it requires more than one team. If they're not aligned on what the problem is, they're going to solve different problems and those components aren't going to fit.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talk about what makes Amazon special, you can read these principles sticking to them is sometimes quite challenging either when things are going really, really well or when they're not going well or when there's uncertainty. These are not just posters on the wall. They're woven into the DNA of everyone who's been in Amazon for any length of period of time.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You talk about distractions. We did not know at that time what other people were doing. Web services were no secret. There were other companies who by their own right should have gotten there first. We didn't know if someone would come out with a set of developer APIs at that point in time.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it was at least 18 months, and I did have software engineers after some of the meetings come to me and say, hey, can you remind Jeff that our job is to write software code, not documents? And they were itching to go. It took a while to figure out what we should build. And that time was very well spent writing Word documents versus writing C code.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and just to pick the AWS thing is so remarkable, think about that for a minute because we just told you, I mean, what was it colin? 18 months, 24 months? How many months from Go before the team even wrote the first line of code?”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, they do work together. We started off the conversation about the our right a lot principle. Well, the one right below that is learn and be curious and the one right above it on the list is invent and simplify. And you need to do both of those in order to be right a lot. The one thing I would add a lot of people say, well, Amazon, they've either have so much money or so much time they can afford to do all these things long-term thinking doesn't necessarily mean it takes longer to get to your end goal. You know, Amazon built a hundred billion dollar business faster than any company. AWS got to $10 billion in revenue from zero faster than Amazon the retail business did. So sometimes to slow down to move fast, even with smaller organizations, you more than likely will get to where you want to be quicker if you take some of these.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You really have to take the time and think big. That's what the PRFAQ process does. And if everyone can go write PRFAQs and you've got 30 or 40 different ones to review, then I'm here to tell you that the best ideas are going to bubble to the top pretty clearly based on this process. Whereas the MVP lean process really is just about cranking stuff out rather than first”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we were figuring out in digital media and AWS, what are we going to go build? And you parachuted into either one of those teams and said, heck, hey guys, how's it going? We said, oh my God, we're so frustrated because we just want to go and build this thing and get it out there that Jeff is insisting that we go through this PRFAQ process and figure this all out in advance. I was among the people who found this frustrating. And it was only in hindsight that I realized like how smart Jeff was to slow us down. And we co-opted this Marine Scout sniper staying, which is that slow is smooth and smooth is fast or measure twice, cut once, or sometimes Jeff would refer to himself as the chief slowdown officer when teams were sort of itchy to go pull the trigger and build and launch something. What I came to appreciate in retrospect is that to build to actually create value.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whether it's worth doing or how much to invest in it. Because one of the things that you ask when you go through the working backwards process is, is this big enough to be worth doing? So it may be a good idea, but it just may not have the impact and scope on your customers or the organization to make a difference to be worth devoting resources to.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing is that you want to ask all of the hard questions up front, and as we talked about, this is an iterative process. So in the review meetings, if there are a couple of questions that you don't know the answer to, you just append those to the document and say, great, let's come back in two weeks, however long it's going to take. The FAQ, you can basically break it up into two different components. One is an external FAQ that you're explaining how does this product work, how much does it cost, why should I use this service versus what's out there on the market or why do I need to change my behavior? And then the internal FAQs, what are the things that we need to go organize and solve in order to make this product or feature a reality? And then like you touched on, how big is this opportunity? What is the total addressable market? Then you can size up the opportunity and that'll tell you.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we spilled a fair amount of ink on the TAM part in the book because people with less experience sort of get this part wrong to not only think about how many people have this problem, but like how big is the need and for how many consumers is this problem really big enough that they're willing to spend money to do something about it? How much would they be willing to spend? And how many of these consumers actually have the characteristics or capabilities to actually make use of this product? And a lot of people don't really step through that clearly”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's actually an excellent point. If you parachute into a new company and you look at their product roadmap and there's not one thing on there, you'd write a press release about, then you've got a problem”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in many cases, they could have actually, if they'd instead spent more time upfront in the planning process, thought much bigger about what does the customer really need or wow, I've really created some significant value versus frankly these little incremental changes don't really even move the needle at all.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To me, the definition is like, oh, if I go build this thing, I have created a insert size of business here, 100 million, billion dollar business. I have enabled, if I'm right, then this opens the path for like something really big. And I see instead happening, okay, I've got a sprint. I've got a couple weeks. What can I get done in a couple weeks? What can I launch quickly to sort of test and learn, right? Where then you've created completely different constraints. And oh, by the way, if your whole dev team thinks of their whole roadmap and break into these little chunks of how do I iterate quickly, test and learn, then you're going to launch a lot of small things.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love Eric Rees for the record, but he himself is a first, and he's actually said it on this podcast that sometimes people get a little culty of the rule instead of the principles of it. I actually personally am a big believer having worked at Xerox PARC in the maximum viable product sometimes instead of the minimum viable product.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About that. But that precise point of starting with the PRFAQ to take what could have just been like, oh, here's some storage and here's how to provision the services you need to, here's how to create an entirely new business. That's a whole different game.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then, in terms of storage, there's a whole bunch of different types of storage that narrowed down to simple storage service was the very first thing. And then we would build out from that. I love that example because it really emphasizes this point that when you start with the PR FAQ, you're essentially starting with the differentiation because you're really thinking in terms of the value because there's a million options for people to pick from. So that's when you go from provision to compute because you're thinking if the customer is this kid in the dorm room having access to, you know, we often talk about the power, like actually Mark Andreessen in his original 2011 why software is eating the world op-ed points to the power of this movement like, you know, AWS is being huge in bringing, we even have this op-ed about why every company is a fintech company. We actually call it the AWS moment in FinTech. It's quite amazing the impact that AWS has had on the industry and there's no question.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that was just a powerful metaphor about okay, so what are we creating and what is this infrastructure that we really need? And starting from the customer experience, we had many, many small teams throughout the company just screaming at Jeff at the infrastructure team. I built my service. It's taken me too long to deploy it and get it out and ready for customers. And that's where it started off as provisioning, but it kind of morphed through this working backwards process to compute.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I would just say there are two very real use cases where Amazon used the working backwards process to create something from scratch. With AWS, cloud computing didn't exist. And as we're working through the Kindle issues, you talk about context switching. An hour later, we'd go to another conference room and we'd be with Andy Jassy, who's the CEO of Web Services, and we'd be reviewing Word documents about what would eventually become cloud computing. And it took us about two years to come up with what are we actually trying to create. And the first two were centered around storage and compute eventually, and where the press release, one area where it really helped crystallize everyone's thinking is we came up with saying that we want people in a college dorm room to have the same access as an Amazon developer to world-class infrastructure.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were magically already uploaded onto your device. All of those kinds of things would be described in the FAQ section to say, yes, here's hard problem one and here's how we're going to solve this problem or we don't know how we're going to solve this problem yet, but here's our path for how we're going to go work on that.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would submit that, in fact, that's what this process is actually designed for. In 2004, when we started on digital media, the way ebooks were, you could only read them on your PC. There were no like offline readers and tablets and devices in those days. They were priced way too high, like the same price as the hardcover book. The e-books had existed for four or five years before the Kindle launched in 2007, but it was a tiny, tiny business. And it was a tiny business because no one had imagined, well, what do I need to create? What's the new thing I need to build to make ebooks work? We defined what would be the ideal reading device, everything from it would be always connected to the internet, which, by the way, devices weren't that way back in 2007, that you wouldn't have to create some separate account or link your account to some mobile carrier, that when you got it out of the box, it already knew who you were. And so if you had actually bought a bunch of...”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then that's defines okay, what are the hard problems we're gonna have to go tackle to make this exciting product a reality? So we switch to that method and it was halting progress. And have we not really taken that approach like we would not ended up with what turned out to be a breakthrough product, which was the Kindle?”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he said, you know, we should write the press release because normally that comes last. And he said, you know, normally the engineering group and the product group, they go and they come up with the idea for the product. And then at the very end, when it's time to sell it, they chuck it over the wall to the marketing team and say, okay, figure out how to go sell this thing. And he said, but what if by the time that thing got to the marketing team, they said, yeah, well, the thing you built for that really to work, we actually need that to have a price point of $99, but you've built it in such a way that it's costing us $150 to manufacture each one. So yeah, we're not going to be able to sell too many. In other words, if you had known up front that you needed to hit a bomb of less than $99 to make this product go, then you would have designed the whole thing very differently and understood the constraints. It might have a whole lot of, there might be vaporware, there might be concepts that you don't know how you're going to solve, maybe business model problems, but then in the F-”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A better idea. Why don't we, everyone in this room, write up the idea for what they think we should go build in digital will write those things up and we'll come back in a few days and we'll read those and we'll go from there. And this is before we'd done narratives. We had not figured out this PRFAQ concept yet. But once we did that, everything changed and suddenly we were reading one document was describing like a puck that would sit on your countertop and you would talk to the puck and could order groceries from the puck. I described a document about what we might go do in digital music. Another one was describing an early version of what Kindle might become. But some of these documents were like eight pages long. We needed to get this to be more pithy and”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I didn't have any mock ups at that point. I was doing, you know, like, oh, here's the projection. It all gets started and we'll start like working on like launching a better ebook store. And by where the mockups would, he meant was, well, you know, this is all super interesting or not really actually is what he was saying. But what's more interesting is like, what is going to be the customer experience? And more to the point, as we started to debate and discuss different ideas, whether it be in digital music or ebooks, the discussion was about, well, why would we bother building like a MeToo versus what, you know, Apple's already got, the iPod, and iTunes? So what's in it for the customer to have just another knockoff of that service? Like, what can we build that actually creates real value for customers? Something new we should invent on their behalf. And we tried mockups for a little while, but frankly, there were sort of like so many questions and so many details we hadn't thought out. And Jeff one day said, okay, I got.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we didn't know how, so what I did pulling out my bag of tricks from business school is marched into meetings with Jeff with like, here's our projections for, you know, how big the ebook business will be over the next 10 years. And here's our projected market share. And here's what the pro forma P&L looks like. And here's the kind of deals we'll make with publishers. And here's the competitive landscape. And I was so proud of all this work. And he looks up at me and says, Bill, where are the mockups?”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In fact, the origin story of how we got to the PRFAQ at least a part of it, both Col and I were present for this because in 2004 I landed on a new role working as one of the founding members of the digital media team at Amazon. For perspective, at the end of 2003, 77% of all of Amazon's worldwide revenue was media products, but it was all physical media products. It was books, CDs, DVDs, VHS tapes. And the writing was on the wall that this business is not here to last. There are already a couple million iPods that were sold. Millions of people were using Napster to file share. It's pretty clear that like, okay, now that we have the internet, it's just a matter of time before people consume their media digitally.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Amazon has put in deliberate mechanisms to make sure that the customer is front and center from the very first iteration of an idea. So if anyone has raised their hand and say, I have a great idea, the first thing that the manager or the person or group will say, that's great. Why don't you go write a working backwards document? And what that is, it's two things. It's a press release and then a frequently asked questions document. The press release has to clearly explain to the customer what it is you're building, what's the problem you're trying to solve for the customer, and why does it make their life better. It can be something very small or can be moving into a brand new industry. It's a fractal process, which is great. Another thing is these PRFAQ documents, it's an iterative process. First of all, most of the ideas that go through it don't make it out on the other side. And second is that it takes several iterations.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I was in business school and taught to think about how you expand and grow, as Colin already described, you create a SWAT analysis. Opportunities, threats, right? But there's no C, there was no customer.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At its heart, the working backwards process is really starting from the customer perspective and everything you do works backwards from that. The PRFAQ, the press release and FAQ, that is the tool that Amazon uses to achieve the perspective of starting from the customer. It's different than how a lot of companies develop ideas and products. A lot of companies use the skills forward approach. What are we good at? What are our core competencies? What are our competitors doing? How do we nudge into this adjacent market? How much market share can we get?”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For new How does that work? Great point because the other thing I also saw is like whenever you hired someone new in within a matter of a week, they would want to go relitigate. They too would trip across. Well, why don't we do blank or”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was like, we don't do that. We didn't do that back at Amazon. Well, why is that? And one is the use of a tenant, which is that all that debate and discussion can land on a fundamental issue about like what this company should or should not do. And if you don't come to a common agreement on it, then you will be constantly, you waste so much time with relitigating these issues. The second reason is that what the narrative process forces you to do is by actually putting down a piece of paper not only the tenant, but then here's, so here's the specific plan, then you set the date for the meeting and everyone reads it and then you decide. And I realized that a lot of those things get relitigated. So it was one of the ways which Amazon was very effective, which people don't realize as a management company.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source