On Saturday morning, 15 October, Chợ Tốt had the chance to welcome Colin Bryar to our office and co-host the warm meeting for Vietnam’s tech start-up community with BLOCK71 Saigon and Ms. Ruby Nguyen (Founder & CEO of Curieous).
Colin Bryar is a world-class expert with more than 30 years of experience, he is the former Chief of Staff at Amazon, former COO at RedMart, currently the Co-founder at Working Backwards, LLC, and Advisor at Carousell Group - Chợ Tốt parent corporation. As our special guest, Colin brought us the topic "Working Backwards - How Amazon Built An Invention Machine”.
At this memorable event, Colin revealed an insider's breakdown of Amazon's approach to business problems and created mechanisms to become one of the fastest-growing companies in the world.
Key takeaways:
- “Working backwards from the desired customer experience” is the core of how Amazon develops its products.
- "Good intentions don’t work, mechanisms do!" - that’s why Amazon's 16 leadership principles were created and updated over time to assure consistent decision-making and what it means to be Amazonian.
- “The best way to fail at inventing something is by making it somebody’s part-time job” - single-threaded leadership has been one of the most useful inventions of Amazon for highly efficient innovation.
- “Every new hire should “raise the bar,” that is, be better in one important way (or more) than the other members of the team they join.” - The hiring process should be repeatable and scalable to ensure the company continues to acquire top talents.
- “The use of written narratives instead of slide decks to ensure that deep understanding of complex issues drives well-informed decisions” - the 20 minutes spent on reading the narratives make the 40 minute-discussion much more meaningful.
- “A relentless focus on input metrics to ensure that teams work on activities that propel the business.” - controllable inputs if managed properly can yield desired results.
In addition to Colin’s sharing session, our attendees joined the most interesting panel discussion and a comfortable networking with other enthusiast entrepreneurs. We believe all of them could gain valuable insights to apply for their business development.
Thanks BLOCK71 Saigon for co-hosting this event with Chợ Tốt. Thanks Curieous and Ms. Ruby Nguyen for being such an energetic host for our event. Last but not least, great thanks to all the participants for joining us and making this Kopi Chat episode successfully happen!