Jeff Bezos once said, “Humans are unbelievably data efficient.” In my 15 years as an Amazon VP, I saw Jeff apply this idea to various structures inside Amazon. This is the key concept behind the Amazon Weekly Business Review:
Jeff’s general point was that humans need much less data to learn effectively than machines do, and that humans can ingest and understand data very quickly and intuitively. This observation led us to design the Weekly Business Review (WBR) around the idea of reviewing and gaining valuable information from as many metrics as possible.
To review metrics, most companies use a variety of visual representations of the data. This can represent each individual metric very clearly, but the combination of many different visual representations results in cognitive overload for the audience.
Each new table or chart requires the reader to reorient and interpret the results in a new way.
So, at Amazon, we developed a metrics-sharing process to improve the ability to quickly access information about each metric. We standardized visualization formats so the executive team could scroll through hundreds of metrics in less than one hour while still gaining valuable insights and clarity on what parts of the business were on track or off track.
The result of this format is that executives get a deep weekly look at hundreds of individual metrics within a very short period of time. Many executives lack a depth of knowledge of their business’s operations because they operate at a high level and do not have the bandwidth to go deep.
The Amazon WBR method allows them to go deep, even with the constrained bandwidth of a busy executive.
To learn more about how Amazon runs the WBR, take our input metrics course: https://lnkd.in/eMaWzbZm
How does your company share metrics? Is it effective?
