The Exchanges

Q thing anyway. Let's actually go deeper into the single threaded leader piece since you mentioned it. It's actually come up a lot on this podcast of people working this way, where they have a single threaded leader. And so clearly it's worked. And I guess let's just help people understand what is, what does a single-threaded leader actually mean? And then why is it such an effective way of working?

A So the concept of, of single-threaded leadership was first born, you know, was born from this time of, of complexity at Amazon and where, again, large, you know, once you get to a certain scale, you get to a point of where there are competing departments, competing interests, and they are competing for some centralized pool of resources. For all of you who are working for a tech company, this is the pool of engineering resources or today data science and AI resources. Um, there may be other constrained resources often designed as a constrained resource, but the point is now all these teams want, you know, that pool of resources to go build stuff for them, but they're competing in competition with each other. So most companies solve this by having like an intense centralized, highly collaborative process. We decided to go in the other direction because for the reasons I mentioned, which were that we just find that we're spending all our time in these meetings planning and a lot of the work we were doing, the artifacts we'd create, the documents, the projections were actually not very useful either. We're kind of, uh, bureaucratic time wasters, um, largely because a lot of the assumptions built into them are, were deeply flawed. So you're, you're debating numbers. In these documents that are based on flawed assumptions, which is a waste of time. So what we realized instead was ho…

AI assessment note: “let's create teams that are, can stand alone where there's a single leader”

Q Let's go back to the countermeasures topic. And then even just a little more broadly, you talked about one thing that was important to put in place before you move to the single threaded leader model, which is creating APIs and basically breaking apart this monolith. What are some other things that you think you need to put in place to be successful in trying to shift to this model?

A The other thing was these, these functional countermeasures. So let's just, let's stick with the, the engineering for an example. So In, you know, 2004, 2005 ish. I started managing a single threaded team, uh, actually managed two different ones, one for music and one for video, which are now, you know, Amazon music and prime video. They weren't called that in those days, but, um, I started managing, uh, a small team of software engineers at that point. Well, I have never, well, I have written lines of code, but that would be back in high school. And, you know, we're talking about like, uh, basic and Pascal. I have a, Master's in business. I'm, you know, a background in sort of marketing. I mean, I'm a generalist, ok? So I'm not equipped to coach. I couldn't possibly conduct a code review. I couldn't possibly conduct an architectural review. I couldn't possibly coach or mentor an engineer on how to improve, you know, their, their craft. But I was one of many of these examples. And there could be reverse examples where Instead of me being a business leader, I was purely an engineer, and now I'm managing a team that does marketing and business development, and I, you know, I wouldn't know anything about those things if that had been my background. So what we did in the, I'll stick with the engineering example, is what we, we, we came up with various countermeasures. Like, one exa…

AI assessment note: “The other thing was these, these functional countermeasures.”

Q client handover. And that's not all. Find out more at wix.com slash studio. Okay. So then when you go work with a company to implement this idea of working backwards, what are the very tactical things that you do to help them here? I know PR FAQ is a part of that. So let's chat about how to actually implement that. What are the steps to shift to working backwards?

A Yeah. So the first shift is to, is to take this, you know, So that's just a concept, right? Working backwards. Well, how do I turn that concept into a scalable, repeatable process? And that's exactly where Jeff's mind went. And eventually, without getting into the origin story, we came up with this process called the PR FAQ process. So what it, what it means is that whenever we're devising a new product or feature, we're going to start by writing a press release describing the feature and describing it in a way that speaks to the customer Um, and to some degree, you know, the external press and world where the idea is in my description of this, it better jump off the page or something like, wow, you know, I really, you know, as a customer, I will really need this. And so what I work first is to say, okay, for your product development process, let's start by, you know, using, using this method to, as the method to decide what am I going to go build? And, and, and oh, by the way, to use it as a method to sort between a lot of different choices of what you might build. You know, in summary, the way that process works is that you're in, in the PR, you're going to describe very carefully and clearly, like, who's the customer, what's their problem, and what's the solution that you're planning to build? That sounds really simple and easy, but if you, it's actually very hard to do, to …

AI assessment note: “in the PR, you're going to describe very carefully and clearly, like, who's the customer”

Q I imagine everyone has that image of the Amazon flywheel in their head with the little orange circle in the center and the black arrows. On the topic of input metrics, just briefly, what is an example of a good input metric? Because I imagine people are listening like, oh, shit, I gotta think about my metrics as input and output now. What's, what's a sign that's a good metric?

A Sign that's a good input metric is, first of all, map Your end-to-end customer experience. Like, I never worked at Airbnb, but okay, step one is that they clicked on some ad somewhere and showed up in the website or the, the app. Now you're in the app. Now you're looking at this first screen. Well, the first thing what they're doing is they're browsing and they're, and or they're searching. Okay. How are we measuring the speed, quality, and ease of that browsing and searching? Now they've got onto a different, a detail page for an individual property. How are we measuring the speed, ease and quality of the different actions they may take? Like, you know, reserve, um, forgive me if I get any of my terminology wrong. I'm not an Airbnb.

AI assessment note: “Sign that's a good input metric is, first of all, map Your end-to-end customer experience.”

Q Such a cool process. Two questions along these lines. One is, who has the final decision in hiring? Is it the hiring manager? And this is just advice from the bar raiser.

A Yeah, so this often gets confused. The decision maker is the hiring manager. The, the, the whole interview loop and the bar raiser are actually just there to help the buyer hiring manager make the right decision. Now, oftentimes, The hiring manager could, you know, feel like this is actually a bureaucratic process and a group of people that I have to sell. And they're just in my way between me and hiring this person, which is kind of a natural feeling to have. But one of the feedback I would always give managers who are new to this is like, no, no, no, that's not the way to think about it. Think about these people are helping you because the amount of time you're going to put into the hiring process, um, may seem like a lot, but if you hire the wrong person, boy, that amount of time, you're going to have to deal with managing that person. That's going to be a lot more, the impact on the team, impact on you. So making a great decision here is important. They're here to help you. So yes, the final decision was with the hiring manager. Technically speaking, the buyer could block them from a decision to hire someone, but they would allow, well done, they would help the hiring manager see the reasons not to hire the person through kind of a Socratic method and how they would guide the discussion.

AI assessment note: “The decision maker is the hiring manager.”

Q Next question. What's a favorite life motto that you often find yourself coming back to sharing with friends that you find useful?

A Well, one that I end up coming to, um, a lot professionally and somewhat personally is this, um, one called, uh, slow is smooth and smooth is fast. This is a, um, I believe the origins of this one are actually from, uh, the Marine Corps for the scout snipers. So not trying to promote, um, uh, you know, the, that particular craft, but the point of it is that, um, Actually, and we did this a lot at Amazon. It really, oftentimes to really to go fast, you actually need to kind of go slow first and to be very clear on like what you're doing and where you want to go. And most people confuse, you know, speed with velocity. And the difference between the two is that, you know, speed, velocity has both speed and a vector to it, meaning you're some specific destination. And so I see a lot of people who are going very, very fast. But the destination isn't very clear. They haven't really sort of thought that out well. So slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.

AI assessment note: “one that I end up coming to... is this, um, one called, uh, slow is smooth and smooth is fast.”