Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon, by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr
Working Backwards is a deep-dive by 2 longtime Amazon executives into the processes and systems that have made Amazon successful. It was also one of the most interesting yet frustrating business books I can remember reading.
What are some of the things that has made Amazon so successful?
Small, focused teams. Amazon is famous for its "2-pizza teams" small enough to be fed by 2 pizzas. Over time, this evolved into "single threaded leadership," where a leader has absolute ownership over a project. A key focus for them is eliminating dependencies and bottlenecks - a team should ideally be able to push the work forward without relying much on other teams / products, which can slow them down. If a project is important, it is expected that it will be the single threaded leader’s key priority, and they'll spend little to no time on other things. "The best way to fail and inventing something is by making it somebody's part time job"
Written communication: Amazon's famous 6-page memos are fairly well-known by now. Powerpoint, it argues, allows people to make lazy arguments with incomplete or sloppy logic (e.g., bullet point that says "new plan drives meaningful growth"). Another reason they do memos, I learned, is to level the playing field between presenters. A great presenter can make a bad idea sound far more persuasive than a mediocre presenter with a great idea. Amazon also blocks out the first 20 minutes of every meeting for people to read the memos. This maximizes time by 1) ensuring everyone has read it 2) allowing people to absorb the information faster (reading is 3x faster than listening)
Hiring: Amazon uses "bar raisers," experienced employees that help facilitate the hiring process. Ideally every hire raises the bar and makes the overall quality of the team higher. To do this, interviews deeply push on behavioral questions, and interviewers submit their feedback independent of each other (as if somebody tells you they liked a candidate, you are likely to view than candidate in a more positive light and ask confirmatory and leading questions)
Working backwards: New product ideas at Amazon start with 2 documents: a fictional "press release" announcing the product to the outside world, and a list of "Frequently Asked Questions," both internal and external. The press release helps orient the team to the customer's point of view and articulate why the product matters (or inform product decisions themselves). The FAQ addresses both external questions (what is the refund policy for this?) and internal questions (what is our target gross margin?), and helps to frame the key questions to ensure the team isn't missing anything (and ensure this is a good idea). Both of these are valuable in "perspective taking," and getting people to take a more objective view at their product.
Some reactions:This book was frustrating as it is one of the least actionable unless you are in a position of meaningful power. Much of what makes Amazon "Amazon" are systems which have buy-in across the entire organization - like memos over powerpoints, for example. If you work somewhere where powerpoint is required, sure, you can write memos yourself, but you'll ultimately need to conform with whatever output you are expected to produce
But a way, this gives Amazon even more of an advantage (if you assume their systems are better), as their practices are simply hard and unlikely to be implemented by other companies. Getting executives to focus and read one document uninterrupted for 20 minutes is hard. Convincing people to buy into single-threaded leadership and 100% ownership and accountability is hard (collaboration feels fun and productive). Focusing on inputs (which are the right ones?) and not being distracted by your stock price is hard
I think the hiring is an underrated part of the machine and flywheel. Many of Amazon's other practices are unique and only attract a certain type of person (memo writing, deep focus on execution). By hiring people who fully buy in, those practices because even stronger, further attracting those types of people (I've never worked at Amazon, but my outside-in view is people who like having a large impact, embrace ownership and getting stuff done, and who are less motivated by perks, etc - people who like the work for the works sake)
One irony, though, is how much of the system seems to come from Jeff Bezos. It felt like half the anecdotes in the book were "we proposed doing this, but Jeff said, why don't you do that instead? It was really hard, but we did it, and now it's best practice here." (Kind of how like the Steve Jobs biography was basically "somebody presented something to Steve, Steve said it was the worst piece of work he had ever seen, and Steve started crying). While Amazon has clearly built a system by now, it was very dependent on one person for a while
I would've been more curious for stories on what it's like to work at Amazon. Amazon is well-documented as being a hard place to work (on the corporate side, obviously even harder in the warehouses). How is it able to continuously attract talent and motivate people? Have things changed at all?
Overall, I really enjoyed this book. Amazon comes across as an interesting place to work - data-driven, hyper-rational, focused on optimizing processes and fanatical on execution. That being said, the best way to experience this is to...work at Amazon.