There's a saying at Amazon: "Good intentions don't work. Mechanisms do." For well over a decade, Colin Bryar and Bill Carr worked in tandem with Jeff Bezos, building out the mechanisms and leadership principles that shaped the company into what it is today. How'd they do it? They started with a relentless focus on the customer – and worked backwards from there.
Colin and Bill were in the trenches for the creation of some of Amazon's most innovative products and services including Kindle, Amazon Prime, Amazon Studios, and Amazon Web Services. And on today's episode of Seeking Wisdom, they sit down with DC and talk about what Amazon was really like in the early days, the development of critical processes like the PR FAQ, single-threaded teams, and their best practices for hiring the right talent.