TEI 323: Product management insights, stories, and secrets from inside Amazon – with Colin Bryar & Bill Carr

How product managers can work backwards to amazing products

In a few weeks, the name of this podcast will be changing to Product Masters Now. You don’t need to do anything to keep listening, but I want you to know the name change is coming. If your player is like mine that lists podcasts alphabetically, it will be displayed further in your list of subscribed podcasts as the first letter of the name is changing from “E” to “P.” The logo will look the same—just the name is changing. 

To be a better product manager, it is worthwhile to examine organizations known for their product management capabilities. Amazon is such a company.

In this episode we are joined by not one but two product professionals who built much of their career at Amazon—13 and 15 years. They are Colin Bryar and Bill Carr. They document the process Amazon uses to create successful products in a book titled Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon. And, they are here to share their insights with us. 

Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers

[2:42] What makes Amazon so innovative?

Innovation is a necessary part of everyone’s job. Our 14 leadership principles are woven into the DNA of everyone who works there and every process in the company, and six of them are directly related to innovation:

* Customer obsession—people wake up every day trying to figure out how to delight their customers.

* Invent and simplify—leaders expect invention and innovation from their teams, and they’re always finding ways to get better.

* Leaders are right, a lot—they seek diverse perspectives and try to prove themselves wrong to make sure they have the right thought.

* Insist on the highest standards—we’re continually finding ways to get better.

* Frugality—constraints breed innovation.

Necessity also drives Amazon to innovate. Amazon operates at a scale that often can’t be supported by any commercial solutions, so they have to create solutions themselves. Amazon accepts failure as part of invention. If you’re not failing enough, you’re not inventing enough. When we started working at Amazon in 1998 and 1999, Amazon was an ecommerce business when ecommerce was completely new. We were inventing a whole new form of commerce from the beginning. The people who found it fun and exciting to invent something new thrived. As the company progressed, that mindset pervaded the company and drove them to move outside ecommerce. Also, some of Amazon’s raw materials like computing power, storage, and bandwidth, get cheaper over time. We use those advancements to invent new things, like scanning and storing every book in the world.

[7:47] How did you see customer obsession encouraged at Amazon?

Remarkably, Jeff Bezos and Amazon figured out how to create reinforcing processes to make customer obsession part of people’s jobs. Weekly business review meetings included a section called Voice of the Customer. At these meetings, a leader of the customer service group brought forward a customer problem that Amazon didn’t have a good solution for. The senior leadership assigned people to tackle the problem and create a solution so it never happens again. Another process, the COE (Correction of Error) process, tasked teams with diving deeply into the details of a defect, figuring out why the customer had the problem, and creating a detailed plan to fix the problem. Unlike most companies, Amazon created methods for leaders to programmatically seek out problems and solutions.

[11:40] Who is responsible for innovation at Amazon?

Everyone. Innovation is the lifeblood of the company. We don’t have a chief innovation officer, because that would be like having a chief breathing officer—everyone has to innovate, so you don’t assign that task to one person.