Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr
Date read: 10/8/21. Recommendation: 8/10.
This is a great directional resource for companies to fine-tune their own top-performing culture. Bryar and Carr cover everything from leadership principles and hiring during their time at Amazon to the product development approach, relentless focus on customer experience, and communication processes. I’m a big fan of Amazon’s communication style, favoring narratives (written documents) over slides. While I believe the themes and general concepts found in this book are valuable, when you read books like this there’s always a temptation to apply the entirety of the content back to your own company and experience. But the exact processes and systems that work for Amazon will not work the same way for your business. The real value is using this as inspiration then leveraging interesting concepts or approaches to fit your team.
See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.
My Notes:
Amazon’s culture:
“Our culture is four things: customer obsession instead of competitor obsession; willingness to think longer term, with a longer investment horizon than most of our peers; eagerness to invent, which of course goes hand in hand with failure; and then, finally, taking professional pride in operational excellence.” Jeff Bezos
Amazon’s leadership principles:
Customer obsession: Start with customer and work backwards
Ownership
Invent then simplify
Are right, a lot: “Leaders are right a lot. They have strong judgment and good instincts.”
Learn and be curious
Hire and develop the best
Insist on the highest standards
Think big: “Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy”
Bias for action: “Speed matters in business”
Frugality: “Accomplish more with less. Constraints breed resourcefulness, self-sufficiency, and invention. There are no extra points for headcount, budget size, or expense.”
Earn trust
Dive deep
Have backbone; disagree and commit
Deliver results
Two-pizza teams are:
Small: no more than ten people.
Autonomous: No need to coordinate with other teams to get their work done.
Monitored in real-time
Business owners
Led by a multidisciplined top-flight leader
Self-funding: team’s work will pay for itself
Approved in advance by leadership
Autonomous team setup:
Well-defined purpose: “For example, the team intends to answer the question, ‘How much inventory should Amazon buy of a given product and when should we buy it?’
Boundaries of ownership are well understood
Metrics to measure progress are agreed upon upfront
Specifics of how the team will solve its challenge and achieve its goal is entirely up to the team. They must figure that out for themselves.
Narratives:
Six-pager: Describe, review, or propose just about any idea, process, or business. Maximum length 6 pages.
PR/FAQ: Working backwards process for new product development.
“The reason writing a good 4 page memo is harder than ‘writing’ a 20 page powerpoint is because the narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what’s more important than what, and how things are related. Powerpoint presentations somehow give permission to gloss over ideas, flatten out any sense of relative importance, and ignore the interconnectedness of ideas.” Jeff Bezos