2021 WorkingBackwardsInsightsStories
- (Bryar & Carr, 2021) ⇒ Colin Bryar, and Bill Carr. (2021). “Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon.” St. Martin's Publishing Group. ISBN:9781250267597
Subject Headings: Amazon, Inc., Working Backwards PR FAQ, Amazonian Principle, Amazonian Leadership Principle.
Notes
Cited By
- http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%222021%22+Working+Backwards%3A+Insights%2C+Stories%2C+and+Secrets+from+Inside+Amazon
- https://google.com/books/edition/Working_Backwards/YF6IzQEACAAJ
- https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250267597/workingbackwards
Quotes
Book Overview
Working Backwards is an insider's breakdown of Amazon's approach to culture, leadership, and best practices from two long-time Amazon executives—with lessons and techniques you can apply to your own company, and career, right now.
In Working Backwards, two long-serving Amazon executives reveal the principles and practices that have driven the success of one of the most extraordinary companies the world has ever known. With twenty-seven years of Amazon experience between them—much of it during the period of unmatched innovation that created products and services including Kindle, Amazon Prime, Amazon Studios, and Amazon Web Services—Bryar and Carr offer unprecedented access to the Amazon way as it was developed and proven to be repeatable, scalable, and adaptable.
With keen analysis and practical steps for applying it at your own company—no matter the size—the authors illuminate how Amazon’s fourteen leadership principles inform decision-making at all levels of the company. With a focus on customer obsession, long-term thinking, eagerness to invent, and operational excellence, Amazon’s ground-level practices ensure these characteristics are translated into action and flow through all aspects of the business.
Working Backwards is both a practical guidebook and the story of how the company grew to become so successful. It is filled with the authors’ in-the-room recollections of what “Being Amazonian” is like and how their time at the company affected their personal and professional lives. They demonstrate that success on Amazon’s scale is not achieved by the genius of any single leader, but rather through commitment to and execution of a set of well-defined, rigorously-executed principles and practices—shared here for the very first time.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part One BEING AMAZONIAN Introduction to Part One 1. Building Blocks: Leadership Principles and Mechanisms 2. Hiring: Amazon’s Unique Bar Raiser Process 3. Organizing: Separable, Single-Threaded Leadership 4. Communicating: Narratives and the Six-Pager 5. Working Backwards: Start with the Desired Customer Experience 6. Metrics: Manage Your Inputs, Not Your Outputs
Part Two THE INVENTION MACHINE AT WORK Introduction to Part Two 7. Kindle 8. Prime 9. Prime Video 10. AWS
Conclusion: Being Amazonian Beyond Amazon
Appendix A: Interview Feedback Examples Appendix B: Sample Narrative Tenets and FAQs Appendix C: Timeline of Events in the Book
Introduction
Part One
BEING AMAZONIAN
Introduction to Part One
...
... In a company known for its inventiveness, separable, single-threaded leadership has been one of Amazon’s most useful inventions. We discuss it in chapter three. This is the organizational strategy that minimizes the drag on efficiency created by intra-organizational dependencies. The basic premise is, for each initiative or project, there is a single leader whose focus is that project and that project alone, and that leader oversees teams of people whose attention is similarly focused on that one project. ... p.4
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1. Building Blocks: Leadership Principles and Mechanisms
2. Hiring: Amazon’s Unique Bar Raiser Process
3. Organizing: Separable, Single-Threaded Leadership
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Growth Multiplied Our Challenges
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Dependencies - A Practical Example
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Organizational Dependencies
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Better Coordination Was the Wrong Answer
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NPI - An Early Response to Orgnizational Dependencies
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- Force-Ranking Our Options
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- Choosing Our Priorities
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First Proposed Solution: Two-Pizza Team
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- Tearing Down Monoliths
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- The First Autonomous Teams
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A well-instrumented two-pizza team had another powerful benefit. They were better at course correcting - detecting and fixing mistakes as they arose. In the 2016 shareholder letter, even though he wasn’t explicitly talking about two-pizza teams, Jeff suggested that “most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.” 5
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- Two-Pizza Teams Worked Best in Product Development
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- Fitness Functions Were Actually Worse Than Their Component Metrics
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- Great Two-Pizza Team Leaders Proved to be Rarities
The original idea was to create a large number of small teams, each under a solid, multidisciplined, frontline manager and arranged collectively into a traditional, hierarchical org chart. The manager would be comfortable mentoring and diving deep in areas ranging from technical challenges to financial modeling and business performance. Although we did identify a few such brilliant managers, they turned out to be notoriously difficult to find in sufficient numbers, even at Amazon. This greatly limited the number of two-pizza teams we could effectively deploy, unless we relaxed the constraint of forcing teams to have direct-line reporting to such rare leaders.
We found instead that two-pizza teams could also operate successfully in a matrix organization model, where each team member would have a solid-line reporting relationship to a functional manager who matched their job description — for example, director of software development or director of product management — and a dotted-line reporting relationship to their two-pizza manager. This meant that individual two-pizza team managers could lead successfully even without expertise in every single discipline required on their team. This functional matrix ultimately became the most common structure, though each two-pizza team still devised its own strategies for choosing and prioritizing its projects.
- Sometimes You Need More Than Two Pizzas
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Bigger and Better Still - The Single Threaded Leader
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The Payback
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4. Communicating: Narratives and the Six-Pager
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5. Working Backwards: Start with the Desired Customer Experience
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- 1. The Flywheel
- Inpu Metrics Lead to Output Metrics and Back Again
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- Analyze
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... when he said, "When you encounter a problem, the probability you’re actually looking at the actual root cause of the problem in the initial 24 hours is pretty close to zero, because it turns out that behind every issue there’s a very interesting story.”
In the end, if you stick with identifying the true root causes of variation and eliminating them, you’ll have a predictable, in-control process that you can optimize. p.132
...
6. Metrics: Manage Your Inputs, Not Your Outputs
Part Two
THE INVENTION MACHINE AT WORK
Introduction to Part Two
7. Kindle
8. Prime
9. Prime Video
10. AWS
Conclusion: Being Amazonian Beyond Amazon
Appendix A: Interview Feedback Examples
Appendix B: Sample Narrative Tenets and FAQs
Appendix C: Timeline of Events in the Book
References
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| Author | volume | Date Value | title | type | journal | titleUrl | doi | note | year | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 WorkingBackwardsInsightsStories | Colin Bryar Bill Carr | Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon | 2021 |