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

“Collaborative mindset possible while disagreeing within that framework. And in your book, you write that tenants give the reader an anchor point from which to evaluate the rest. But here's the best part. If the tenant itself is in dispute, it's easier to address that directly rather than take on all the logical steps that derive from that position. And sometimes you guys spent meetings after meetings just debating to get the tenants right, which I think is really great because it allows you to actually separate the thing that the tenant is and then what flows from that.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to actually go back to the tenets for a quick second and then pick up on a thread that you brought up. One of the things you call in, you described it as a caching mechanism for the leaders where you have to do a lot of context switching so they get to kind of revisit that cache when they have to get back into that context”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These were big numbers, a lot of money involved. If we're going to go spend that much money, we're going to go write up a deal memo that describes like, okay, we think we should acquire these films and TV shows. Here's what the package worked. Here are the detailed metrics that show why we think this is a good investment or why not in some cases because sometimes we would review it and say we've looked at this deal and we're not going to do it and why. And again, just because it's a Word document doesn't mean you can't put in a chart, a graph, an appendix put an Excel table. All those things can still be in there, but then the narrative needs to clearly state with a clear beginning and middle and end. Here's what we're proposing to do. We're not proposing to do and why.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's another important technique where you can actually add at the end of the document a fact section for frequently asked questions. So you're actually anticipating the kinds of questions that the audience are going to ask you. And a talented senior leadership team is going to ask you hard probing questions about things like, well, you say in your plan that you're going to go do X, but it seems to me that there's an important hurdle here of you're going to need this important partnership or you have this important dependency. What gives you confidence you're going to actually solve that problem? And you would answer it. Not only does that help reflect whether the author and the team have good mastery of the issues, but it also helps speed up the discussion and the decision making. A lot of my work leading prime video was making very expensive multi-year agreements with motion picture studios to acquire their films and TV shows for the service.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That we are not going to compromise on, or that we're going to fall back on when we have to make tough decisions. And that's front and center. Usually up in the beginning of the document, before we go over Amazon's pricing policy, I want to remind you here are the four tenets that we're following to make the following decisions. And to get to those tenants, it was difficult. It took several meetings just to say these are the correct set. That's a good caching mechanism because if you're a manager at a company that uses narratives, you're going to be contact switching and reviewing multiple ones every day. And sometimes we only meet with the team once a quarter and you want to be able to very quickly get up to speed.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They also work very well with design, which you may not think about at first, but if you're going over mock-ups, either UI mockups for an app or physical prototypes of some hardware or process that you're going to build, having a narrative actually helps set the stage to say before we take a look at anything, here's what we're trying to accomplish with the user experience. Here are our goals. Here are the challenges that we're trying to solve. I've been at mock-up meetings where everyone thinks they're a UI expert, but if you don't have that before and they comment on three or four things where we should move this over here, but you don't do that if everyone's on the same page with reading a short narrative beforehand. Another thing that can be in a narrative that's really powerful, especially for something that's going on on an iterative basis as if you're refining idea over time, are tenants. And those are really, okay, what are the design criteria?”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Amazon has different types of memos for different purposes. So if it's some monthly or quarterly or annual review, there's the typical what were the key wins? What did we do wrong? And what can we do better and what are the key initiatives coming up for the next year? You can have appendices too. And the appendices are supplemental data that everyone's not required to read in the narrative meeting. But if you do need to go jump to it to answer a question, you can.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“didn't actually really say what goes in the memo you observed that the memos can vary in form and format by function and purpose but can you at least describe what goes in the memo specifically like even the ingredients would help”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The one thing I would add is that a lot of first timers to narratives right after the people read, they say, let me walk you through the narrative. And you stop that right away. You know, you've just had that 20 minutes of high fidelity bandwidth. Why dumb it down with a two-minute verbal walkthrough of the document? You want to get to that feedback loop as quickly as possible just talking about the document.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things you might do at the end of the document is make a clear section after you've presented all the facts to say, what are the decisions we need to make today and then list those out? Or what are the important parts of this plan where we need your feedback and input? Like we're not sure whether we should go down path A or path B. A. Good document will clarify what are the decisions we're going to make.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are a variety of different kinds of documents you'd review in a meeting. It could be an annual operating plan. It could be a monthly business review. It could be PRFAQ about a new product. So the conversation literally what you do once people stop reading is you just go page by page or alternatively if it's a smaller group and let's say there's just 10 or 15, you could literally just go around the room and say, okay, Sunnel, you're first. What questions and comments do you have on the document? And so you would get the feedback, questions and comments from all participants. And then the document itself would present some sort of specific proposal. It's asking for some budget amount. It's asking for are we going to launch this new product? And at the end of the meeting, you are tying it up and wrapping it up and saying either, no, we agree that what you've written in this document, that plan works, approved, go ahead, or you debate and discuss it.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Amazon meetings with narratives are strange to the uninitiated. It'll be the chit-chat before meeting when they were in person or this online people are starting to come in. But then there's silence for about 20 minutes. And during those 20 minutes, people are just focused on reading, there's no sound, they're entering questions and sometimes the presenting team can answer the quick questions right in the comments. So for that 20 minutes, really, there's a huge”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And disjointed conversation you have with a PowerPoint. And if you miss the meeting, you can just read that document. So there are so many ways in which the narrative method is superior to PowerPoint that, as you can tell, we could never go back.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we could go on about this forever. But the other part is it actually is a great way to get your team more engaged from top to bottom, especially in a COVID time. The way that these meetings work is you share the document and whether it's with G-Suite or with Word, then everyone can then use the comment feature. And it doesn't matter whether the person making the comment is a C-level person or a fresh out of college individual contributor. All of those comments get seen and heard. And then when you get it to the discussion phase, all those people actually can then understand why we're making the decisions we're making. When you do a PowerPoint, you have to wait to get to the punchline. And while you're waiting, you're not sure like, well, what are we actually doing in this meeting with a narrative? You just take all that in. And so then you can have high quality discussion versus that interruption.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Allowed the S team to stay connected at a much deeper level as Amazon started to move into more and more businesses, the spanning control of the S team. It didn't grow by 100x. It's still relatively small team, and they are just as involved when it was a small company as they are now when it's a large company. The other thing I'd add about narratives is it does remove a lot of bias from the process where you can have a charismatic speaker with a so-so or even a bad idea that convinces your company to do something that you should not do. The converse is also true if you have a shy engineer with a great idea, but it's a boring. Presentation, it's one way in which Amazon removes bias to make better decisions in the idea of floats to the top rather than how good of a talker the person is.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, by the way, if you spend 10 hours a day reading detailed narratives, like I got to tell you, it can be mentally exhausting. But when people muse like, how does Amazon do it? Like, how is it possible that they can effectively manage such diverse businesses? One of my number one arguments is that they use narratives to conduct meetings, not PowerPoint. And actually, a former colleague of mine, Derek Anderson, who is now the chief financial officer at SNAP, I think he made the observation once the Amazon has like a narrative information multiplier. It's a strategic advantage that the company has over other companies because their executives are like seven to eight times better informed about what's happening in their company and they're able to give Super granular specific feedback to those teams.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, in fact, the best narratives of many of them are written by software development engineers who may not have even focused on their writing skills. A good narrative, it's very databased and fact-based document. And writing good narratives is way harder than making a good PowerPoint. And I think honestly, a lot of companies don't do this just because it's hard when Colin and I have brought this to other companies. What tends to happen mostly is that the author will vomit out about 25 pages of just sort of raw data at you. Getting that person to then shape it and narrow it down to six pages of well-thought-out narrative is really hard.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When evaluated by today's So, a common misconception is well, now it's just the best writers instead of the best presenters that kind of win out in narratives. We haven't found that to be the case. It's really the best thinkers write the best narratives. And some of the best narratives I've ever read are by people whose first language is not English.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That these S team meetings, it's the wrong tool for what we're trying to do, and let's switch over to narratives, which are really just now a six-page memos. One thing that is a little bit misunderstood is these ideas don't come out fully formed. They started as four-page memos. It ended up that six-page was about the right length for an hour meeting. But we did it because narratives convey about 10 times as much information. You know, the pixel density is about seven to nine times the pixel density. People read faster than people talk. And you can have multi-causal arguments in a narrative much better than a hierarchical PowerPoint. But we realize we just needed a better way to analyze complex situations and make better decisions. So we just experimented with this. And the first ones were not good.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Amazon started experimenting with writing narratives in 2004, and it was a result of weekly meetings four hours every week with the S-Team Jeff's Direct Reports, where two to three teams would come in and give either updates on their business. It could be a decision that needed to be made or investigating new areas to go into. And the business was growing fast, and we realized that we were not making the right types of decisions. Some of the meetings would go over. We never really accomplished what we wanted to. I was Jeff's TA at the time. We had been looking at other ways to conduct meetings, and we were big fans of Edward Tufte, who's professor emeritus at Yale. He came down Amazon to speak a couple of times. And after one particularly painful meeting, it was later on in the week, it was toward the end of the day, Jeff said, let's stop doing PowerPoints.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talk you out of it. What are you talking about? And he said, Well, you didn't do a good enough job because you didn't present the evidence to me in a persuasive enough way to make me realize why your point of view was so important. And so it's thinking about it and framing it that way about bringing forward the right data and the right information. And then it's also the job of leader to solicit that to make it. Decision”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When those leaders are confronted with those decisions, that more often than not, they pick the right door. But the second part of the definition refers to, more importantly, how those leaders make decisions, which is a lot of people think that leadership is about their very strong opinion, arguing their opinion, and winning that argument. And what great leaders do actually is they can stake out a position, but they are willing to update, mean, change their mind on what is the right answer based on new information. And even Steve Jobs talked about this at Apple, where some product that they launched ended up being a mistake. And there was one of his reports had been telling him all along, we shouldn't do this, we shouldn't do this, we shouldn't do this. And then after it launched and it failed, he came back to that person and said, why didn't you talk me out of this? And the guy said, wait a minute, I tried.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this is, and just to be clear, of course, we did not write that. That is Amazon's words that Jeff and the S team being his direct reports painstakingly reviewed to come up with that exact language to define that principle. As with all 14 others, they sweated over the details of every word, every sentence. And this principle write a lot in some ways it's very straightforward, which is that as you move up an early stage CEO as they grow and progress, they need to be more in the mode of delegating important work and auditing work. But their most important job, frankly, is to make decisions. And many decisions will come to you whether it's presented with a spreadsheet, a document, PowerPoint. There's all kinds of data that we presented to you with those decisions. But there are very, very few problems where the data gives you the answer. At the end of the day, you're going to have to use your judgment, what write a lot refers to is, number one,”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can't be part of every decision. And so to me, what's most remarkable and notable is that Jeff sought to figure out ways to actually inject His lens of thinking into all those meetings and then sought to create a bunch of processes that would reinforce the way he would think about the work or do the work itself”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would first start by going back in time a little bit and place you sort of where Jeff Bezos was where all entrepreneurs start out. So at the beginning, Jeff worked out of a simple office building with a handful of employees and he would be hands-on for everything. The very first customer support emails like Jeff wrote or co-wrote. He could review the work and think about all the policies. He could direct the team and set the tone and the pace. Well, that works just fine when you're an early stage company and there's fewer than 20 of you and you can all do a stand up each morning and give me hands-on. But guess what? That completely breaks once you start to grow like a weed and you found product market fit and suddenly you look around and realize you've got a team of 130, 200, 500. And you realize that there's all kinds of decisions and meetings happening around you.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Different, they require different expertise, they're different customer sets, AWS is B2B, there's streaming video, there's that e-commerce business, but they all have one thing in common, and that's what we talk about in the book, and we call it the invention machine, which was the process and principles that Amazon used to develop these businesses. And the ones that we talk about, they started off as ideas on a whiteboard or emails, which many people were skeptical we should even do. Some of them grew into household names, but they all started off very small and with just one or two people.”
2021-02-08 · a16z Podcast · Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source