Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

by Colin Bryar

Speed and quality are always important, but, when forced to make a choice between the two, we will always prioritize quality.

Tenet: We don’t make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions.

Tenet: When forced to choose between building something that’s convenient for customers or convenient for ourselves, we’ll choose the former.

We don’t let defects travel downstream. When we notice a defect, we will not rely on good intentions to solve the problem. We’ll invent and build systematic methods to eliminate that defect.

Earn Trust leadership principle states, “Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully. They are vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing. Leaders do not believe their or their team’s body odor smells of perfume. They benchmark themselves and their teams against the best.”

What were the biggest mistakes we have made last period, and what have we learned from them? What are the key inputs for this business? What is the single biggest thing we can do to move the needle in this business, and how will we organize to do just that? What are the top reasons we should not do what we’re proposing today? When push comes to shove, what are the things we won’t compromise on? What’s hard about the problem we are trying to solve? If our team had X more people or Y more dollars, how would we deploy those resources? What are the top three new initiatives, products, or experiments our team has launched in the past X months, and what did we learn from them? What dependencies do we have in our area today over which we wish we had control?