Working Backwards

Insights, Stories and Secrets from Inside Amazon

By: Colin Bryar, Bill Carr

Narrated by: Bill Carr, Colin Bryar, Robert Petkoff

Working Backwards gives an insider's account of Amazon's approach to culture, leadership, and best practices from two long-time, top-level Amazon executives.

In 2018 Amazon became the world’s second trillion dollar company after Apple: a remarkable success story for a company launched out of a garage in 1994. How did they achieve this? And how can others learn from this extraordinary success and replicate it?

Colin started at Amazon in 1998; Bill joined in 1999. Their time at Amazon covered a period of unmatched innovation that brought products and services including Kindle, Amazon Prime, Amazon Echo and Alexa, and Amazon Web Services to life. Through the story of these innovations they reveal and codify the principles and practices that have driven the success of one of the most extraordinary companies the world has ever known, from the famous 14-leadership principles, the bar raiser hiring process, and Amazon’s founding characteristics: customer obsession, long-term thinking, eagerness to invent, and operational excellence.

Through their wealth of experience they offer unprecedented access to the Amazon way as it was refined, articulated and proven to be repeatable, scalable and adaptable. Working Backwards shows how success 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 that you can apply at your own company, no matter the size.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2021 Colin Bryar and Bill Carr (P)2021 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

"Essential for any leader in any industry." (Kim Scott, best-selling author of Radical Candor)

About the culture and processes of amazon

The book is written by people that worked inside amazon. talks about culture, leadership and best practices. They call themselves “amazonians”. I also read the everything store, and it was equivalent, but the emphasis was more on the history of the company and this one more about the culture and processes.
Beyond the well known fact that they are very customer centric, the first chapters also talk about people. Very interesting how they have a hiring process. Including phone prospect, interview, written feedback, ~7 people making the interview (without any group or communication bias), including someone from HR and also a figure which is from an area called “raise the bar”, and then a debriefing.
In terms of organizational structure, they tried several ideas (2 pizza team - small team that 2 pizzas would be enough for dinner, independent staff, etc) before having a structure that would be independent with specific areas and staff working for it. Alexa/Echo project is an example that if it had a separate team of hardware and software instead of a project manager, managing these two areas would not be a successful project. For any of these projects to work out, they invested a lot to make sure that the “coding” could be independent (Curiosity: one of the coding part had the “obidos” nickname, which is a part of the amazon river which is narrow and is the fastest part of the river - and it could not grow without harming the rest of the code).
One other interesting fact (probably also very well known) is the end of powerpoint presentation. They only use a 6 page word document. The first 20 min of a 1h meeting should be to read the document before the discussion starts.

This method came from the process of creating a new product. Also it migrated from spreadsheets and presentations to the press release. When working on a new product they started with an approach focused on the client. This process gives the name of the book “ working backwards “. This process should include both internal and external questions. Internal would be related to the public, like How it should be used, what is the size, how the courier would use it etc. internal questions would be the total available market, pricing, costs and the necessity of people etc. One product example of this process was Melinda, it was a mailbox to receive grocery and deliveries.

For metrics they focus on managing the inputs, not the outputs.

With this methodology, they created several products. Important to remember, is that the company had books and DVDs representing >70% of revenues at the beginning. The book dedicates separate chapters for kindle, prime, prime video and AWS. It also mentions some failures like the fire phone.

One of the points in the culture of the company was a bias for action. And if they were on a wrong path they also had no problem stopping it quickly.

An incredible case study

Very thorough, in depth play book for how to scale big. As a startup guy some things were hard to relate to, but generally there is so much business gold here, it’s a must listen/read.

Excellent practical approaches, relatable examples

I especially enjoyed that the authors first covered the methodology and approach in an accessible way, and then showed how to apply these lessons in a broad set of familiar examples.

Explaining what is Amazon

Great book! Making it clear how Amazon works and very interesting insights from the creation of Prime and so on.

A great new book that'll change busines management

I've come across some of the concepts in this book before.
But like 2 pizza teams, I didn't know it had been superseded by single threaded teams / leaders.

I knew about working backwards but not The idea in detail and just how much Amazon embodies the process and how useful it is.

The fly wheel of growth is a very apt metaphor and explains well how to grow but how if you aren't adding energy to the wheel it'll eventually slow down.

The explanation by the end of how Amazon Prime video and Amazon Studios came to be as well as AWS was great even if Kindle was a more clear cut story.

Even the relatively important point of ensuring you reward people for long term performance not short term gains is a message people need to really hear.

I highly recommend this book to ANYONE who's running a business, in a business or thinking of managing projects even if it's in a government setting.
Especially the point about working backwards, Press Release FAQs and narratives instead of power point slides can be transformative.

Read or listen to this book.

Inspirational and eye opening

I’ve leaned a lot from this book. In fact I’ve listened to it twice now and each time I learn something new. I highly recommend it for anyone in corporate or entrepreneur.

Gets pretty boring pretty quickly

Possibly better to get the printed version. The ‘story’ is uninspiring. In the end it’s a ‘todo’ for how Amazon work.