Colin Bryar on Working Backwards

The Digital Agency Growth Podcast

Amazon is a massive success in part because of its principle of ‘working backwards’. Starting with the customer and working backwards to the technology has been Amazon’s core belief since the beginning, and is key to how the company operates. This week, episode 173 of The Digital Agency Growth Podcast is about working backwards: both the methodology and the book written by Colin and his co-author Bill Carr.
Watch our new recorded video training: Relationship-Driven New Business At-Scale

In this episode of The Digital Agency Growth Podcast, Colin Bryar shares the importance of not being afraid to fail to innovate and actionable steps you can take right now to improve your hiring process based on your leadership principles.
Colin Bryar co-authored Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon, a first-person account of how Amazon created and implemented the principles and processes that have made it successful. Colin spent 12 years at Amazon where he earned the moniker “Jeff’s Shadow”, after working alongside Bezos attending meetings, traveling with, and discussing work and life as his Technical Advisor. Colin has served as COO of IMDb and RedMart, and is co-founder of Working Backwards, LLC where we help companies learn how to work backwards.
In this episode, Dan and Colin discuss the following:

• Single-threaded leadership and what that means.
• The bar-raiser process for hiring, how it worked at Amazon, and how it can work for your agency.
• The importance of measuring inputs, not outputs.
• What really makes Jeff Bezos different than anyone who has worked alongside him.

Don’t forget to check out Working Backward: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon and let us know your thoughts on the book.
Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to follow, rate and review the podcast and tell me your key takeaways!
Learn more about The Digitial Agency Growth Podcast at https://www.salesschema.com/podcast/

CONNECT WITH COLIN:

Working Backwards

LinkedIn

Twitter
CONNECT WITH DAN ENGLANDER:

LinkedIn

Sales Schema
Watch our latest video training, How to Take Charge of Your Agency’s Future Revenue. During this training, you’ll learn how we get qualified appointments every week using tasteful and highly targeted email outreach.

Chapter

1. Colin Bryar on Working Backwards (00:00:00)

2. Working Backwards at Amazon (00:05:39)

3. When did you start writing the book and what inspired you to write it? (00:08:43)

4. What is the process like to have multiple authors on a book? (00:12:47)

5. Amazon’s first scalable, repeatable, repeatable process. (00:18:44)

6. How to mitigate the urgency bias that goes into hiring. (00:21:55)

7. How do you draw the distinction between leadership principles and values? (00:25:04)

8. Most effective employees are people who have balance in their lives. (00:30:27)

9. The importance of looking at both input metrics and output metrics. (00:32:43)

10. What are some of the principles that are more universal than others? (00:35:35)

11. A culture of innovation means you’re going to fail. (00:42:09)

12. What makes Jeff unique and special (00:45:48)