The WBR process is a powerful process-control tool for tracking and improving your business through data-driven decision-making. Each week, executives review hundreds of metrics in a WBR to obtain data-driven answers to three fundamental questions: 1. How did our business do last week? 2. Are we on track to hit our targets? 3. What did our customers experience last week?
The WBR App is a web application that takes your input and output metric data and builds an HTML-based report called a WBR Deck, so that you may implement an Amazon-style WBR process in your organization. The App is designed for you to get up and running quickly.
This free, open-source application, along with instructions on how to install it within your organization, can be found in this GitHub repository.
Here is a sample Weekly Business Review (WBR) Report using the Amazon Weekly Business Review report style in the 4-blocker or 6-12 report format. The Weekly Business Review report format includes a handful of tables but because most metrics are graphed similarly, there is zero cognitive load. Instead of spending brain cells orienteering on the chart or table format, the brain is focused on the information and gathering insights. The format makes it incredibly easy to spot trends and gain a nuanced understanding of hundreds of metrics.
I (Bill) was an Amazon Vice President from 1999-2015. I was also a Bar Raiser as well as a member of the Bar Raiser Core team which selects and trains Bar Raisers. I conducted an average of five interviews each week for a wide variety of positions across Amazon ranging from University Interns to Vice Presidents and Senior Vice Presidents. Here are my 10 tips for how to ace an interview at Amazon.
Start with the customer and work backwards—harder than it sounds but a clear path to innovating and delighting customers—a useful working backwards tool: writing the press release and FAQ before you build the product. Here are instructions and a template for the PR FAQ method.
Here is a template for writing and conducting a COE employing the “Five Whys” method (or other root cause analysis tool) to drill down to the root cause(s) of the issue. Five whys (or 5 whys) is an iterative technique used to explore the cause-and-effect relationships underlying a particular problem. Each answer to the question “why did this occur” then becomes the starting point for the next why.
Here is an example of a well written Correction of Errors (COE) report that illustrates the information and data required in each section.
This article provides a step-by-step instruction manual for organizations using Looker for data visualization who wish to generate WBR Reports per the specifications used at Amazon.
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