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“Our culture is four things: customer obsession instead of competitor obsession; willingness to think long 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.”
the Bar Raiser hiring process that ensures that the company continues to acquire top talent; a bias for separable teams run by leaders with a singular focus that optimizes for speed of delivery and innovation; the use of written narratives instead of slide decks to ensure that deep understanding of complex issues drives well-informed decisions; a relentless focus on input metrics to ensure that teams work on activities that propel the business. And finally there is the product development process that gives this book its name: working backwards from the desired customer experience.
We found, instead, that a six-page narrative written by a given team is the method that best enables everyone in a meeting to get up to speed quickly and efficiently on the project that team is working on.
Before we start building, we write a Press Release to clearly define how the new idea or product will benefit customers, and we create a list of Frequently Asked Questions to resolve the tough issues up front. We carefully and critically study and modify each of these documents until we’re satisfied before we move on to the next step.
Another of Jeff’s frequent exhortations to his small staff was that Amazon should always underpromise and overdeliver, to ensure that customer expectations were exceeded.
Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree,
There’s a saying often heard at Amazon: “Good intentions don’t work. Mechanisms do.”
Amazon realized early on that if you don’t change the underlying condition that created a problem, you should expect the problem to recur.
S-Team goals must be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely (SMART). An actual S-Team goal could be as specific as “Add 500 new products in the amazon.fr Musical Instruments category (100 products in Q1, 200 in Q2…),”
S-Team goals are aggressive enough that Amazon only expects about three-quarters of them to be fully achieved during the year. Hitting every one of them would be a clear sign that the bar had been set too low.
At many companies, when the senior leadership meets, they tend to focus more on big-picture, high-level strategy issues than on execution. At Amazon, it’s the opposite. Amazon leaders toil over the execution details and regularly embody the Dive Deep leadership principle, which states: “Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details, audit frequently, and are skeptical when metrics and anecdotes differ. No task is beneath them.”
This structure ensures that every goal that’s important to the company has someone—an accountable owner—working on it.
The wrong kind of compensation practice can cause misalignment in two ways: (1) by rewarding short-term goals at the expense of long-term value creation, and (2) by rewarding the achievement of localized departmental milestones whether or not they benefit the company as a whole.
Amazon’s compensation is, by contrast, simple and oriented toward the long term. As one is promoted at Amazon, the ratio of cash to equity compensation becomes more and more skewed toward long-term equity.
Even the smartest interviewer can wander off script and ask questions that lack a clear objective, leading to answers that reveal nothing about a candidate’s likely job performance.
Unstructured hiring decision meetings can give rise to groupthink, confirmation bias, and other cognitive traps that feel right at the time but produce poor decisions.
First, the fact that the team members shared their thoughts after each interview increased the likelihood that subsequent interviewers would be biased.
Brandon’s evaluation, for example, showed that his interview questions had lacked specificity and purpose. He commented that Joe “has a solid background owning and driving strategy” but did not provide any detailed, credible examples of what Joe actually had accomplished in that regard.
The feedback meeting itself had been relatively unstructured, which had given rise to groupthink among a team that valued each other’s approval and wanted to help solve the problem by making a hire.
In not insisting on high standards (one of the Amazon Leadership Principles), she was in fact lowering them.
Another harmful one is personal bias, the basic human instinct to surround yourself with people who are like you.
Another force that works against successful hiring is the lack of a formal process and training.
Working without the framework of a formally defined interview and hiring process, managers will often be driven by urgency, biases, and convenience rather than purpose, data, and analysis.
The Bar Raiser Solution
The as-app’s role was to make sure that only quality hires were made. They would not be penalized if the role went unfilled, and thus their decisions were unlikely to be influenced by urgency bias.
The Bar Raiser was granted the extraordinary power to veto any hire and override the hiring manager.
Sometimes the hiring manager isn’t sure about a candidate but still invites them to go through the interview loop, hoping that this will assist in the hiring decision. This is a mistake.
There are many variables (the role, the hiring manager, the volume and quality of candidate résumés screened) that affect the rate at which candidates pass the phone screen and are brought in for the in-house interview, but one in four is a reasonable average.
The hiring manager constructs the interview loop. They decide how many interviewers should be on the loop, as well as the mixture of roles and disciplines, job levels, and types of expertise that should be represented. Typically, the most effective loops consist of five to seven interviewers.
no loop participant should be more than one level below the level of the position the candidate will hold. Nor should there be an interviewer who would become a direct report of the candidate.
It’s uncomfortable for the candidate during the interview, and the direct report will learn about the candidate’s weaknesses, and other employees’ views of those weaknesses, during the debrief—which could lead to problems for the future functioning of the team. Also, nothing good happens if a future direct report is not inclined to hire the candidate and you hire that person anyway.
First, the interviewer wants the candidate to provide detailed examples of what they personally contributed to solving hard problems or how they performed in work situations like the ones they will experience at Amazon. Second, the interviewer wants to learn how the candidate accomplished their goals and whether their methods align with the Amazon Leadership Principles. General, open-ended questions such as “Tell me about your career” or “Walk me through your résumé” are usually a waste of time
The method that Amazon interviewers use for drilling down goes by the acronym STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result): “What was the situation?” “What were you tasked with?” “What actions did you take?” “What was the result?”
The Bar Raiser is involved in every interview loop, and ensures the process is followed and bad hiring decisions are avoided.
As noted in the Green Corp. example earlier, written feedback is essential to an effective hiring process, and this means that every interviewer must take detailed notes—as close to a verbatim record as possible.
We found it wise to block out fifteen minutes immediately afterward to complete the feedback. The write-up should be thorough and clear enough that the author need not be present for their conclusions to be understood.
There are only four options—strongly inclined to hire, inclined to hire, not inclined to hire, or strongly not inclined to hire. There is no “undecided” option.
To avoid bias, the interviewer may not see or discuss other members’ votes, comments, or feedback until their own feedback has been submitted.
The meeting begins with everyone reading all the interview feedback.
“Now that everyone has had a chance to read all the feedback, would anyone like to change their vote?”
The effective Bar Raiser uses the Socratic method, asking questions that jump-start the critical thinking process, to lead and guide the dialogue with the goal that everyone, or at least the majority, will arrive at the same conclusion about the candidate.
It is extremely rare for a Bar Raiser to exercise their veto power.
One question that often gets a telling response is, “If given the chance, would you hire this person again?” Another is, “Of the people you have managed or worked with, in what percentile would you place this candidate?”
In my tenure at Amazon I heard him say many times that if we wanted Amazon to be a place where builders can build, we needed to eliminate communication, not encourage it.
other words, Jeff’s vision was that we needed to focus on loosely coupled interaction via machines through well-defined APIs rather than via humans through emails and meetings. This would free each team to act autonomously and move faster.
Amazon’s belief that focusing on controllable input metrics instead of output metrics drives meaningful growth. Morale is, in a sense, an output metric, whereas freedom to invent and build is an input metric. If you clear the impediment to building, morale takes care of itself.
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.
Amazon uses two main forms of narrative. The first is known as the “six-pager.” It is used to describe, review, or propose just about any type of idea, process, or business. The second narrative form is the PR/FAQ. This one is specifically linked to the Working Backwards process for new product development.
In his essay, Tufte proposed a solution. “For serious presentations,” he wrote, “it will be useful to replace PowerPoint slides with paper handouts showing words, numbers, data graphics, images together. High-resolution handouts allow viewers to contextualize, compare, narrate, and recast evidence. In contrast, data-thin, forgetful displays tend to make audiences ignorant and passive, and also to diminish the credibility of the presenter.”
Powerpoint-style presentations somehow give permission to gloss over ideas, flatten out any sense of relative importance, and ignore the interconnectedness of ideas.
