Note: this project has been taken and is no longer available.

The Weekly Business Review (WBR) is a operational review meeting created in Amazon. Every Wednesday morning, Amazon’s leadership reviews 400-500 metrics in 60 minutes. In 2022 I worked with ex-Amazon executive (and second Bezos shadow) Colin Bryar to explicate some of the principles of the WBR for his clients. (You may read more about the WBR here).

I’m currently attempting to put the WBR to practice within Commoncog. This project has two stages:

1. You will build and release a free XmR chart tool, so that anyone may upload a CSV file and a yaml configuration file and get back a set of XmR charts (the XmR chart is a type of chart to separate signal from noise in business metrics. It is extremely simple to compute and plot). This project should be in Typescript, and ideally should work completely within the browser, without a server component.
2. You will take some internal WBR software that I have and modify it for ease of use. At minimum, I’d like to incorporate some XmR functionality into the charts. If that’s not easy, I’d like to build a few other quality of life improvements. This code base is in Python (Flask) and Javascript. It’s likely that any and all changes we make will have to be open sourced, and contributed back to Colin Bryar and Bill Carr.

I do not expect this project to take longer than two months.

What You’ll Learn

(Assuming you’re interested. If you just want to treat this as a freelance project, skip this section.)

The lessons associated with this project will be operational, not technical. Over the course of this project I’ll teach you to become data driven.

At some point I’ll be able to write about all that I’ve learnt about the WBR from Colin (under the terms of my NDA, I cannot talk publicly about that work until the tutorials I wrote are published). But right now, I’m trying to internalise those lessons by testing them in practice. I will bring you along with me. As a software developer on this project, you will walk away with a deep understanding of what it means to be metrics driven, and what it looks like when an operator is trying to build a causal model of their business in their heads.

My promise as a boss or client: I’ve been on the other side of the table before, and I know what bad clients are like. I promise that I won’t waste your time. My specifications will be small and tightly scoped, I won’t shove last minute changes down your throat, and any iteration that happens will occur in clearly defined cycles.

If you want to structure this as an internship, I commit to doing code reviews with you.

This project should not take longer than two months to complete. In practice, the journey to fully building a causal model of the business might take longer — but I promise to give you updates and letting you in on metrics meetings until that process is completed.

How Much?

This depends on whether you’d like to structure this as an internship or a freelance project. If you’d like this to be an internship, I’ll have to treat this as a full-time gig and will be responsible for your training; I won’t pay you as much as if you were a freelancer. We can have that conversation when we talk.

If you’d like to work part-time freelance, email me and we’ll discuss rates. I’m good with either per-project rates or per-hour rates.

Next Steps

If you’re interested, please email me at cedric [at] commoncog.com. Link your LinkedIn or Github, and tell me which project you’re interested in working on.

I’ll set up an hour long call with you, and will decide within five days after the call.

Who Am I?

My name is Cedric Chin. If you’re in Singapore, the following references might make sense to you: I helped create the NUS Hackers back when I was a student. (I created Friday Hacks and organised the first Hack&Roll).

I wrote the Two Tiers of Singapore’s Tech Companies essay back in 2017, which should give you an idea of how I think about Singapore’s software engineering labour landscape (I’ve been told the essay affected policy, but I’m not 100% sure). From late 2014-2017 I ran the Vietnam engineering office for a Singapore company, helped my boss pivot the company from consulting to product, and then helped him bootstrap the business alongside him to S$4.5m in annual revenue. I hired three people to replace me and left. In 2019-2020 I helped Holistics reposition their company and doubled their annual recurring revenue in eight months, without any additional marketing spend.

If you’d like a reference for what I’m like to work with, feel free to ask NUS Hackers alumni!

I spend a fair amount of time now working on Commoncog, and some time on other bets — or at least projects that I find interesting (the WBR project was one such bet!)

I look forward to working with you.