Vídeo: Colin Bryar: E-commerce não é assim tão simples

🗣️ Transcrição automática de voz para texto.

a [Music] hello and welcome to another brand new episode of It’s not that simple today’s topic is going to be e-commerce and we’re thrilled to welcome another star studied guest to the show Colin Brer Colin is fantastic to have you former vice president at Amazon of course co-author of working backwards that fascinating book that really looks into the culture of Amazon the principles the strategies and the kind of path that you took along side Jeff Bezos to make it the most powerful uh e-commerce platform on the planet uh I’m really looking forward to uh having an opportunity to get your experience your expertise and helping us break down the topic of e-commerce what we’ve seen over the last decades where we are right now and where it’s going so uh welcome welcome to Portugal as well it’s fantastic to have you here and the first question has to be if you can roll back the year so to speak and take us to your first few years at Amazon what was the vision and what were the steps that you took to allow to take this fantastic uh uh Pathway to success oh sure well thank you for inviting me it’s a pleasure to be here and my first day at Amazon it was back in March of 1998 Amazon was actually a small company then we had just done $147 million in revenue for the prior year and there were about a 100 people in the corporate area I started out in the product development group so you could fit the whole product development team in a relatively modest sized conference room to say what do we build next but uh the first day I started I I met Jeff Bezos and he said you know he wanted to build Earth’s most customer Centric company and he held true to that word from that day I met him up through you know the time he left to become the chairman of the board at Amazon and he was all about uh customer Obsession I I will say it was not a done deal that Amazon was going to even be around in a couple years or the big success it is uh today and so we had a lot of hard work in front of us but we knew that we had to earn the uh Trust of our customers every day despite what the press the pundits competitors would say so it you know really was just focusing on serving customers they’re the ones who you place their trust in you they’re the ones who give you their money so you need to focus on them every day and they don’t let you slip or let your guard down it’s interesting you already used a few of the words that I really want to delve into during our our conversation words like trust um but when when when you talk about the the working backwards uh philosophy and and putting the customer at the center of everything you did this was quite revolutionary at the time especially to do it on the internet where perhaps no one else was doing it that way correct yeah yes we were um building products and you know customer obsessions Amazon’s first leadership principle and we realized we weren’t thinking about the customer enough to to be honest and so we wanted to come up with a way once we had an idea to make sure that the customer was with us for the whole journey taking that idea from the that small stage to launching and becoming a very large business and so uh Jeff created a different process called working backwards which is start from the customer perspective and work backwards from that to develop it sounds simple and you sounds like well everyone does it but a lot of companies build products with this skilled skills forward approach what are we good at what Market do we want to get into and uh you know how can we nudge into an adjacent market and that’s uh you don’t mention the word customer enough so that’s why we developed it to make sure that it delights customers from the very beginning through the end when the product launches we know that that obviously people make companies right so how important was it as well to get the right people and then instill the right culture the the you know the first scale scalable repeatable process was all about attracting the right people at Amazon it started in uh um 1999 so people are incredibly important they will make or break the the the company and we realized that we didn’t have a formal process to attract people to the company who really agreed with and lived by the Amazon core values and Leadership principles and so that was the we we realized everyone hired their own way you know do you like the person or you brought in whatever uh interviewing techn or technology or process you had from your old company and we didn’t want that we wanted to have people who came in who really lived and breed the Amazon leadership principles and core values and so we created it’s called the Amazon bar raiser process and remarkably it started in 1999 that process is still around today it’s still around in the form almost exactly the same form it was created in 1999 so it’s been a competitive weapon for Amazon too to consistently raise the bar with people who uh we you know precon will become tomorrow’s leaders at Amazon of course timing was important um but but so many other companies started at a similar time to Amazon and obviously they have not had the trajectory of spectacular success that that that Amazon enjoyed um what were some of the big differences really on a day-to-day week to week month-to-month uh product uh um kind of of of of uh differentiator that you had and and and the services that you thought were better and were better suited as well to put the client first yeah it was really the the way I think that we approached serving customers so I talked about customer Obsession but also you know a spirit of invention and if you want to be an inventive company you also have to be prepared to fail you know it’s not an experiment if you know it’s going to work beforehand Jeff would always say so you you need to have a process to learn handle fail failures and learn from them and become better because we made a lot of failures along the way there was some luck too but um when we did have failures we would study them learn from them and and get better so that Spirit of invention and the Relentless focus on the customer and then just the discipline you know some of these processes are pretty easy to understand but they’re hard to do day in and day out uh you know diving deep into the data it’s amazing how much data you look at as an Amazon leader every day about the customer and that just takes discipline to do um each day but it’s ultimately what serves customers According to some data I saw from 2023 um uh right now e-commerce represents around 19% of global uh retail sales from from that year obviously that varies from country to Country here in Portugal it’s it’s lower than that I think in the United States and from the time I spent there to obviously a lot of uh uh friends I have uh culturally it’s quite it’s quite a a different experience to shop because people want it fast and they want it easy and they want it now whereas shopping in other uh uh cultures it’s it’s a lot more of a social uh experience as well I wanted to ask you about what some of the challenges of e-commerce have been where it’s in the United States or other other uh areas of the planet as well so the the challenge is what we tried to do was identify durable customer needs durable means they stay the same throughout time and we knew that customers 10 years from now would never say I like that Amazon but I just wish that their prices were higher and that it took longer to you know to get me the goods and so we knew if we injected energy into lowering the cost structure so we could lower prices getting Goods faster to you know to customers those are things customers care about and ultimately what’s going to change their behavior from from one alternative to another and uh you know it’s it there’s e-commerce moves moves fast there’s lots of new technology and you want to use that technology whatever it happens to be but you want to use it to lower prices to get Goods faster to have selection so we just focused on the things that would not change and uh really knew that that would ultimately win over the largest number of of customers when it comes to keeping prices low um what what what were some of the secrets that you allow to do that I guess scal ability is is is related to that right but then how much of a risk is it to scale the volume of product if you have if you’re not going to be able to move them so is that where some of the risk taking also came in how how would you describe the growth process that Amazon went through and and how much how aggressive it was in in in a way to to grow the business and keep prices low so fality is one of Amazon’s leadership principles and you know one simple example example is the desks at Amazon are door desks they’re made out of doors they’re 4x4s on on you know set on a door set on top of that it’s to remind you when you come in every day that you have to be frugal you can’t have the um high cost structure and be a lowcost retailer the other thing though that that um you know Jeff Bezos challenged us for is you know could you be a high service in lowcost retailer and you know Jeff wanted both of those he wanted the high uh service and in low cost so if you look at most of Amazon’s big businesses today they’re self-service businesses you can just sign up without talking to anyone at Amazon through AWS through the marketplace uh you third- party Marketplace sellers fulfillment by Amazon those are very large tens of billions of dollar businesses that really were built self-service so that’s just another example how can we do things Innova in a different way even though everyone thinks you have to talk to someone at a company in order to build a large business we said is there a way to do that um and serve the customers well and get them on board faster without us getting in their way it it’s interesting because when you talk about uh kind of of of putting all you know all all chips on the table and and going for a strategy that is that is uh as as successful as the Amazon one has been did did you ever think that you were moving too fast or what were the conversations that that you and Jeff were having not not in the late 90s but let’s say in the 2000s when you kept on growing and what were you thinking how big is this going to get are we going to continue to this to this path what were some of the decisions tough decisions that you were making well Amazon when we started it was really to get big fast so you could be a profitable small e-commerce company you could be a profitable large one but if you’re stuck in the middle you have to build all of the cost structure build all the infrastructure personalization delivery and that you don’t have you can’t spread that out over enough orders so we we knew that we had to get big and but you know everyone thinks Amazon resources were free and easy to get they were hard to get you had to convince a lot of people to get uh you know new people or dollars approved for an initiative and that constraint on getting Capital again because we’re a lowcost retailer meant that um you know we had constraints but that constraint bro uh drove Innovation and uh so when we would plan every year you know we would have you know growth Target but the cost structure had to be you know we had 100% control over our costs and and so we did it in a way that we know as we got bigger it would start to pay dividends and the business itself would generate more cash which would funnel back into the customer experience and growth so no we didn’t know how big it could be but the market that Amazon was in it was so large you can consider unconstrained so we knew that there was there’s still even today Amazon is not the largest retailer in the US Walmart is so that that’s how big the the the retail Market is and you know worldwide Amazon share is even smaller than it is in the US so going after big markets um and Relentless day after day year after year that’s how you can build long longlasting businesses perhaps we’ll get into the comparison with Walmart or or other big retailers in in the states a little bit later because obviously they have a strong physical element to their stores as well whereas Amazon obviously has less of a percentage of of physical stores than than a Walmart does of course nationally in the States but you mentioned frugality and obviously that brings up The Importance of Being profitable right uh and it’s always been a a challenge to sustain that especially then when you have constant delivery costs and you’re not controlling where you’re shipping the goods obviously you have constantly have to to adjust for that um what’s that equation like when you’re bringing in of course uh as far as overhead costs at at at your at your uh uh Depots you’re trying to keep them as low as possible but there’s only so much you can do about delivery how are you trying to streamline and minimize costs when it comes to to delivery and other uh costs that came into the equation you know it’s again the bigger you get with the logistics the the lower your cost structure is going to be you can fill up the trucks you know full you can afford to build fulfillment centers closer to customers which reduces the transportation cost while cutting down delivery time so in the US we like to say you can have your cake and eat it too you can grow and and and then become even more profitable so you know projecting what does this business look like 10 years out and are we willing to um stick with that uh vision for 10 plus years that’s another thing Amazon does I think they have a longer term uh time Horizon investment time Horizon than most of their their peers so you know you plant seeds but takes you know three to seven years for those seeds to become saplings and large oak trees so you have to have patience and and think thinking long term so you know those are a couple of things that really you know the math has to work too by the way as it gets bigger you have to do it in a way where you can become more profitable but once you get that gain that conviction it’s that’s not enough you have to have the right time Horizon to think about it Amazon has often been described as a a datadriven company and I think it’s it’s practically impossible possible to run any successful e-commerce platform nowadays especially with all the technology at our disposal without being datadriven so when did that kind of philosophy or or perspective start and how important has it been to the success of of of the operation overall so it’s always been there since the day I started in 1998 yes all the way back then yeah and you know you had and we didn’t have the formal systems to get that data either so you had to um figure out how to get it um you know if you were a software engineer you could scrape the data yourself but the tools eventually you know get uh became more we became more proficient building tools to get the right set of data but I would say one thing that’s different about the datadriven focus of Amazon is if you were to flip through a weekly Business review for instance it’ probably be you know 400 metrics you know 50 60 pages long and 3/4 of the the metrics there would would measure somehow the customer experience so we had a firm belief that you know if we served our customers right you you know the outputs the like Revenue uh free cash flow and profitability would would come so but you can manage your input so the data driven focus on Amazon is a lot on customer facing inputs what did our customers what did we promise our customers when did we let them down um you know how long did it take for this good to get to to a particular customer when when we missed our promise why did we do that so that’s what most of the data is at Amazon and that data is really the raw material that gives you insights on how do we innovate to solve real customer problems so the data driven wasn’t about what do we want customers would do and how can we nudge them to one area or another it was really studying customer Behavior internalizing it and learning from it so it Amazon is quite unique on how it uses a lot of that data but how much attention did you pay to the profile of the customer and the importance of having their data and knowing what kind of uh what kind of customer they were um breaking it down into different segments of of audience and and customer how much work was done across that area yeah quite a lot of work and what we you know we first started playing around with personas and segments but we realized with compute power it’s it’s getting cheaper every year you don’t need those segments you can look at the individual customer so we we had a vision about when you came to Amazon we would the homepage would adapt to who you were not what segment we thought you were what Persona when was this happening this was happening as ear you know late 90 early 2000s now I’m not saying we perfected it then but we really tried to say why do you you use personas before because Gathering data was expensive identifying who a particular customer you weren’t able to do that but you are an e-commerce so you can tailor The Experience directly to you know who I I am when I’m going to the site how can Amazon help me not not a segment so that’s it evolved into that and um again the raw material technology that you’re working with it follows Moore’s Law so it’s you know it’s getting cheaper you know every year and uh once again thinking long term you don’t take that cost and put it to the bottom line you say these are things that we could do that have never been done before so because compute power will allow us to compute the homepage for every indiv idual that that that’s that’s fascinating that 20 years ago or more than 20 years ago you’re already personalizing customizing uh the homepage uh uh experience um you’ve mentioned Innovation a few times what are what are some of the Innovative kind of processes that you’re most proud of so you know a couple of them one is uh Amazon innovated really to move in a completely different direction in a completely new business so Amazon web Services uh is is one you know started out as a book retailer online book seller and became invented the Cloud Computing industry and that was really again noticing technology trends that were happening which you know web services and and and XML was a new format and then uh looking at new ways of building software and we we had released with these self-services businesses we had released a couple of experiments with web with XML and we just saw an astounding amount of innovation that was created and you know so Jeff in particular thought how can we generalize this and and basically give the same worldclass compute infrastructure to a a college student in their dorm room that an Amazon developer had and uh you know it took several years to build we didn’t know whether we would be first to Market there was some luck there um but uh we got a seven-year Head Start in that but that was one Innovation I think I was particularly proud of for Amazon when you talk about e-commerce nowadays and especially at the scale uh that than an Amazon has or or or other big e-commerce platforms around the world um the the the topic of of the carbon footprint comes up uh when did you start thinking about this as as a company and and having a responsibility to be as sustainable as possible so um there are two amaz when when you know it it was an evolution it wasn’t one day the light went on you know switched to say okay now we’re we’re thinking about it we would always look at the you know what how does how much what’s the carbon footprint of having a truck go and delivering 50 packages to 50 households versus having the 50 households drive or take whatever transportation to a mall and you look at that carbon footprint so we knew that um overall it was you know a reduction in in footprint a carbon footprint once you get the the the route density but Amazon added another leader two leadership principles when Andy jossi took over as as CEO and you know one of them is is about sustainability and that Amazon occupies it started in a garage and Jeff bezos’s garage but Amazon’s no longer there it occupies a much more important place in society and Amazon employees need to act like that so you know Amazon doesn’t add leadership principles that often there are only two r since 2005 uh I’m excited to see some of the Innovations that’ll come out you know directly from that leadership principle but uh you know it is important and it’s you know becoming more important every day did you feel pressure or Jeff specifically Fel pressure at a certain point in time to reduce waste as well when it comes to packaging and trying to make everything as efficient and again sustainable as possible yeah efficient but it’s also a better customer EXP experience you know you don’t want excess packaging you don’t want to open a box inside a box and and then there’s another box inside and um you you know you also tied into Innovation there’s one story I remember we got feedback from uh the this one woman who was an Amazon customer she was an elderly lady and said oh I love um getting my Amazon packages I set them aside and I wait for my son to come over so he can open the packages cuz they’re too hard for me to open and you know so she was trying to give us a compliment but we thought why can’t she open the packages and it was to prevent theft and you know protect the the the the packages and so that was for us you know and so we we re um redesigned the packaging so it was both um lighter and easier to open so you know again the with these things you can have your cake and eat it too if you try to innovate your way outside of the box you said that a few times we I guess that was a topic of conversation yeah internally if you ask Jeff and either or should we do a or b the answer often is well let’s do both um so you that’s just we’re hard we were hardwired to think that way how can you have both high cost I mean high high service and low cost how can you get sustainability and also make it uh you know a better delivery experience do you think that it is a preoccupation for the big eCommerce Platforms in the world right now or think you think it it depends in what region they are uh uh of the world as well yeah I’m not as familiar with the you know sustainability plan so let me just you know I haven’t really done a big study on that but I I do think that it’s one customers are demanding it not just of uh an individual package but they want to see com what’s a company sustainability uh goals how are they going to reduce their carbon carbon footprint get down to carbon neutral and even carbon negative so I you know I think thankfully customers are actually demanding that of all companies not just e-commerce companies obviously the the kind of last mile delivery is is a part of that because um not only is it important for the kind of bottom line of of of the delivery and the cost of the delivery but also from u a carbon footprint perspective I mean it’s different for example you have a bunch of bikes delivering that last mile or last few miles or if you have a drone for example tell us what’s happening in this technology landscape for deliveries right now as we speak and what what you think can happen over the next few years yeah so when Amazon first started really we took advantage of the thirdparty delivery networks and you know in the the FedEx UPS DHL the United States Post Office um deuts posts and uh but now the technology is happening and just even getting bike delivery uh you know Messengers and services those are just becoming almost like SAS Services uh so you know there it’s which is right for Innovation and so you know drone delivery won’t work in a lot of settings but it’s you will be the perfect uh delivery method for you know some settings so it’s not a one siiz fits all what is the best way to get a package from A to B but you know that again you you look at that as a problem that is something that you can work on for years and years and and perfect for different products different locations you know different modes of delivery so I’m you know again I’m excited to see what’s going to happen that what you mentioned a lot of those things are already happening and they are just going to scale up and I think improve the the customer experience improve sustainability too and we and when it comes to that kind of Last Mile uh delivery I mentioned drones but we’ve got you know self-driving Vehicles when you look into your Crystal bowl and I know it depends on what setting uh uh it is but you expect to see a lot more of this happening in the future oh definitely and you know the I I wouldn’t I would be afraid to pick which one I because again I think it’s not a win or take all thing there are going to be different modes of delivery but there this is an area that is uh fertile ground for for innovation in terms of you know again how do you get a good from point A to point B and Amazon has been doing that not just from The Last Mile but middle Mile and first mile too you know Amazon now has an airline Fleet for instance you know a couple I think 60 or more a airplanes and that’s just a more efficient way to move uh Goods within the Amazon Network so you’re going to see Innovation all over that supply chain when you talk about tech technological uh uh Innovations you have to talk about artificial intelligence right I mean in any kind of business it’s a Hot Topic um how how how much is it present in in in uh in e-commerce global globally from your from your uh uh uh knowledge and and how important will it be moving forward in order to I guess cut costs in a way and in another uh uh increase audience and consumer insights I think it’s going to be incredibly important you know that the internet was the one of the first waves of you know it wasn’t obviously fad uh you know go going to web services and cloud computing mobile was another one and I think AI is on par or even has more potential than than than those and so uh in terms of I’ll give you one example it was in the mid2 um you 10 so 2015 is Amazon saw this trend about machine learning and artificial intelligence and this is pre um chat gbt and llms and every uh group at Amazon in their annual planning had to answer the question um what do you know about machine language and artificial intelligence and what are you doing about it in your organization and the personalization team I talked about you know spent about 20 years perfecting algorithms to recommend products which means lots of smart people looked at data and came up with algorithms and machine learning flips it on its it you know it’s the other end where you just say here’s the behavior we want to see here’s all the data go figure that out and in a relatively short period of time the 20 years of uh personalization work was replaced by Machine learning and Ai and Amazon was pretty good I would say world class in that area and even the AI disrupted that pretty quickly uh I I think that you know again you take some technology and and the question is do we use it just to reduce the you know cost but if that particular cost is a small part of your overall fixed cost you know infrastructure you’re only going to get a small gain from that so I think the bigger gains are going to be what types of problems can AI solve that were unsolvable up to up until today and how can we use AI as a tool to go solve those problems I think the incremental innov value you get from that Innovation will far outweigh the cost savings that you’ll get and there will be significant cost savings too so it’s basically getting getting AI to help us solve some of the uh issues that could be present in the industry by thinking outside the box and and and obviously bringing in as many factors as possible as quickly as possible that that weren’t weren weren’t there before um is is there anything that kind of scares you from the influence that AI can have and especially when we’re talking about e-commerce because quality control obviously is very important we have humans as as the customer and being customer Centric you have to consider them to be humans so what what what scares you what what are some of the threats that could be there well you know there there are some safeguards that are being the industry is thinking to put around AI in in in general um you know I think that that thought process has to continue to evolve it has to get there uh before the laws you know government uh regulations and laws will will be there because the those those will take too long so I’m you know hoping that um there is some type of uh you know Global consensus on on how to manage some of these things but in terms of uh you know how is AI going to be integrated into you know different uh you people jobs all along technology has actually made uh people’s lives better in you know in the vast majority of cases you know you can go back 200 years in terms of uh you know the Industrial Revolution and there are some uh jobs that you know AI may be able to do better but I think that the overall benefit and you need to uh will will be uh greater than uh you know the the the harm but you do need to figure out for these jobs that are moving away how do you retrain and per you know repurpose people um because there’s more work ahead of us you know to do and you know how do you retrain the workforce to do some of these things that that um you need to do moving forward kind of kind of related to this and the relationship between you know customer and and and brand or customer and and service provider is is the whole human element and uh how important for you is it or not uh you think for the big e-commerce platforms to still have a physical store so we talked a little bit about Walmart before obviously traditionally and when I lived in the states it it was very very common to go to Walmart on a week- toe basis if not day-to-day bases because uh it was the first time in my life that I saw a store open 247 um and obviously e-commerce is 247 so it physical store doesn’t need to do that anymore but H how important is it to have a physical presence in people’s lives these days or not well I I think if you look at the data 80% of Commerce is still uh on offline so you know customers are saying even today it’s it’s very important and uh and you know I don’t see e-commerce going anywhere close to uh you know 100% uh certainly not in in in my lifetime but uh but so it is very important and you know there different ways you know they they’re a ton of different retailers they have different approaches you know thankfully and that are very successful and yeah some people will want to go to a physical store whether it’s you know holding fruit and food and looking at it or even flipping through books you know there there’s physical stores aren’t going away um I think combining them is you know online and offline is again another area um of of of innovation you know we were we were surprised in the early days of Amazon that they um the the brick and mortar companies uh didn’t do more of that Walmart is actually doing a pretty good job at integrating their stores into their e-commerce uh platform right now when you look at at some of the platforms as a consumer that that you may utilize uh what are some of the pet peeves that that you kind of see on on a platform saying I can’t believe they’re doing this like what are some of the uh big mistakes that you see maybe some e-commerce platforms making these days I would say um well I’ll give you a little one if I see a site that has an icon guide I’m like well your icons aren’t really working you need to get your icon so they’re supposed to make it easier for people to understand but in terms of some of the the bigger you know mistakes uh you know if if if I go into a company you know I I will look at well can you show me your weekly Business Review I want to look at what data they’re they’re looking at every day to make their make their decisions and you know it’s it’s you need in order to make high quality decisions you need high quality unbiased data you know objectively coming in so if if companies are just looking at the outputs you know Revenue um customer satisfaction scores and not what drives them but just looking at the score I I’m wonder if whe they’re going to be successful contining to be successful because they’re just looking at the you know the the lower quality of data to make those high quality decisions so you can’t make those consistently over time that so that that is one um you know how do you make what’s the time frame where you make decisions and if it’s this month or this quarter often those things do Drive short-term benefit but they detract from the long-term customer value and so I would see that as one a sinking chip um you know eventually it may it’s a slow Glide path but um you know that it’s not it doesn’t increase the overall size of the pie so those are two a couple of different areas where I look cat I want also wanted to tap into your uh experience working in the online groceries uh uh business of course you were with redm Mar in in Singapore um what were some of the biggest differences that you kind of encountered right off the bat and saw challenges that maybe you hadn’t considered when when you were at Amazon yeah so the a couple things the inventory uh especially in Singapore that you know fresh fruit and vegetables it lasts you can measure it in terms of hours or single digit days where you know a book can sit on the shelf for years and years and doesn’t depreciate you know Electronics depreciate fairly quickly but you know it’s on the order of a couple percent a month but you know piece of lettuce on head of lettuce is going to be um not worth anything in a couple of days so that that certainly was one thing the other thing was um you know at Amazon when we first started we view delivery as an unconstrained resource so you could just push as much of the orders as you had and you knew it would get delivered with uh you know a scheduled delivery you have to start from those delivery slots so it’s actually a different starting point um you’re there’s no point in taking uh demand if you can’t get it to you know customers in time and then the other one was it’s an you you can use AI to help solve this problem but you predict not is the inventory good now but will it be good 3 days after it gets to the the the customer so those are some different things that make groceries uh online grocery delivery exciting but hard it’s interesting because when I lived in the UK and we’re talking about over over 10 years ago it was quite common already to have people uh uh have their their groceries delivered in in Portugal I believe grocery Commerce represents about 2% of the market uh while non food will be a little bit less than 10 10% um do do you see with uh also the the increase in in technology maybe the the availability of more of more products when it comes to to grocery closer to to people do you see an increase in this in this area of of e-commerce or do you think that at the end of the day human beings still want to touch what they’re going to eat I you know I think it will you have to earn their trust because actually with um online grocery delivery and so okado in the UK they do a great job and you know they they’re ahead of the game that ahead of where Amazon was with grocery delivery service but you know it gets handled fewer times you know that ripe Peach that you see in the store there a lot of people who’ve picked it up and given it a squeeze and uh you know if you in an online uh if you can do it right in an online setting it’s less handling cost less waste you know cheaper overall but but you know you have to earn the trust and so we found in with groceries people would order the heavy bulky things first and then oh maybe I’ll try eggs and see if they come and they’re not cracked and then you know I’ll maybe I’ll do one apple this time and so it’s a gradual Journey but for the people who did get there it was more like a subscription business then because you have to go with food you have to go to the store a couple times a week so you could have deliveries but uh it it it it takes a long time and all it takes is some melted ice cream or you know a peach that’s gone bad where they’re like I’m just I’m I’m done with that yeah trust takes a long time to build but you can lose it overnight there’s no question about that I think also uh uh when it comes to to perishable Goods when it when it comes to deliveries as well uh They al they also could be more affected by the the the weather conditions that there could be at a particular time I mean uh what what were what was maybe the the key takeaway that you you brought from from working in in that industry maybe the the key kind of of knowledge point that you would that you would be willing to share so so um what what I brought from Amazon there was uh when you map out the customer Journey it doesn’t really matter whether it’s online groceries or whatever business you need to measure every single step so from when it gets from the farm to the Fulfillment center onto a truck into a delivery vehicle to the customer’s door and then you get the feedback for each of those stages you have need to have concrete metrics that measure the speed quality and cost of every one of those and so you’re dealing with hundreds of metrics right there but you know you don’t know where the problem is going to be and that’s the discipline of Amazon is okay we’re going to have to measure every step because any it has to be perfect at each of these uh steps and when it’s not we need to do some root cause analysis to figure out what went wrong and improve it and you those winds they’re tiny but they’re compounded over time so when you say well it works now what made it work it’s almost a nonsensical question it was you know quarter after quarter you know month after month of getting better and looking at what matters to customers so you know that that’s what I brought to redmart and that’s what you know what we try to teach with at looking at metrics and being data driven what that really means as we start wrapping up uh our conversation Colin it’d be great to to get a view from you now that you also left left Amazon been out for a while like when you look at different regions of the world and if you look at culturally uh uh what what the the the customer is looking at and the priorities that are there there um what are what are what are some of the non-negotiables that need to exist in order for um a global uh e-commerce platform to be successful one is that the the culture inside the company has to be the same because you need to be able to make consistent decisions so when Amazon moves into a new region um we’ll call it in a away team we copied the term from Star Trek you would send people from you know at the corporate office and they would live there for for months until we knew that that office would adopt the Amazon culture and live and breathe it so you need that just to start those are table Stakes um and you also have to look at well um what is what is the same and you really question like when we moved into Amazon moved into Japan everyone was telling us well you have to do a joint venture because you know that’s the way it’s always done and we couldn’t find a reason why and so when Amazon moved into Japan it was a whole you know it was Amazon Japan which 100% owned by Amazon turns out that that you know was you can actually move into that region but you know looking at the differences they’re usually legal um you know regulatory transport payments those are things that are quite different in regions so you have to you know your playbook has to be flexible and um and then you look at what’s not going to change so low prices Everyone likes I don’t think anyone wants to pay higher prices you know faster delivery and and being able to find what you want so those are things that were non non-negotiable uh so those are a couple of different things to look at both from inside the company and then you know when you move into a new market it’s hard to get those right by the way uh you Amazon moved into China uh there was the Playbook we were too focused on the Playbook and not really what the market landscape was so that was not a very successful experiment and then when Amazon moved into India we said okay well let’s rip up the Playbook because this Market’s very different too and so you have to know when to be stubborn on the vision but flexible with the details because again if the audience has a different Behavior you have to be a uh adaptable and flexible to be able to adapt to that right just because it was so successful in the United States maybe in this in this landscape it’s completely different maybe yes yeah you can’t have customers conformed to what you want you have to it’s has to be the other way around you conform to the customer needs and that’s the way to build a successful business back to being customer obsessed um Colin we’re going to wrap up the the the chat with a few quick fire questions that we ask all our guest so in one sentence more or less I’d like you to answer these these questions what is one personality trait that a good leader could really benefit from having being humble and being a great listener okay um what’s the biggest challenge that humanity is facing at the moment in your in your opinion well you know people are worried about what’s going to happen to the the earth I with all the climate uh change Earth’s going to be fine it’s the people I’m worried about so unless we you know change some of our behaviors pretty soon um we’re going to be the ones who are going to be in trouble so that’s the biggest one for me if you could change one thing uh in the world right now by by by Magic what would it be I I would say making decisions with the right time Horizon cuz you know we’re doing things that are going to impact our kids and our grandkids and so we need to really um keep that in mind and so that would be the one thing like how can we make this world a better place for future generations and and and have people uh um with with that mindset as they make decisions that can affect our future right yes final one um what’s the most important learning of your career in life well in my career it really was you know and Jeff Bezos told me this it was uh don’t be proud of your gifts because they’re given to you and uh you be proud of what you do with with the gifts and so that that is one thing that I really took to heart and that’s why we wrote working backwards we were in the right place at the right time and just wanted to share some of these things that Amazon had created for people to study so that’s just one concrete example of living what I learned Colin um it’s been an absolute pleasure to have an an opportunity to talk about uh the the the successful ride you were on for for so many years at Amazon but not only that uh really appreciate you sharing your your insight into uh this topic of e-commerce which is a daily part of our Lives now whether we like it or or not and will continue to grow in years to come uh understand what some of those key decisions were and the the word trust right at the center of everything that that that is done in order to be successful so absolute pleasure Colin to to talk to you uh continued success in your in your in your Ventures and I’m sure our audience was um was uh really uh valuing what what you had to share so thank you well thank you very much it was an honor uh really appreciate Colin uh stopping by and talking to us on it’s not that simple hope you enjoyed his insights and his expertise we’ll be back shortly I’m sure with another big interview with the big expert on another relevant topic see you soon [Music]