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

by Colin Bryar

One clear downside to this approach is that other companies with deep pockets can try to hire away your best employees with big cash offers. It’s true, some employees leave for a short-term jump in their cash compensation. But on the positive side, Amazon’s approach reinforces the kind of culture it seeks to develop.

The Bar Raiser process was one of Amazon’s first and most successful scalable, repeatable, and teachable operational practices.

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.

The name was intended to signal to everyone involved in the hiring process that every new hire should “raise the bar,” that is, be better in one important way (or more) than the other members of the team they join.

There are eight steps in the Bar Raiser hiring process: Job Description Résumé Review Phone Screen In-House Interview Written Feedback Debrief/Hiring Meeting Reference Check Offer Through Onboarding

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.

“single-threaded leadership,” in which a single person, unencumbered by competing responsibilities, owns a single major initiative and heads up a separable, largely autonomous team to deliver its goals.

The switch to microservices removed the shackles that had prevented the Amazon software teams from moving fast, and enabled the transition to small, autonomous teams.

number of detail pages, which we refined to number of detail page views (you don’t get credit for a new detail page if customers don’t view it), which then became the percentage of detail page views where the products were in stock (you don’t get credit if you add items but can’t keep them in stock), which was ultimately finalized as the percentage of detail page views where the products were in stock and immediately ready for two-day shipping, which ended up being called Fast Track In Stock.

It turns out that the Amazon version of the Andon Cord empowered the right people, those on the front lines who were talking directly to customers. It surfaced serious issues as soon as they were noticed. It proved once again that giving employees the right tools to solve problems and relying on their good judgment is a powerful combination. It is used widely across Amazon.

In other words, his first action was not a “what” decision, it was a “who” and “how” decision. This is an incredibly important difference. Jeff did not jump straight to focusing on what product to build, which seems like the straightest line from A to B. Instead, the choices he made suggest he believed that the scale of the opportunity was large and that the scope of the work required to achieve success was equally large and complex. He focused first on how to organize the team and who was the right leader to achieve the right result.

The institutional no refers to the tendency for well-meaning people within large organizations to say no to new ideas.

undifferentiated heavy lifting,” that is, the tasks that we could do for companies that would enable them to focus on what made them unique. This was an opportunity.

Bias for Action is an important leadership principle at Amazon, and with AWS we were certainly under time pressure to launch this product before our competitors did. But Bias for Action does not obviate the need for the painstaking aspects of the Working Backwards process.

Ban PowerPoint as a tool to discuss complicated topics and start using six-page narratives and PR/FAQ documents

Establish the Bar Raiser hiring process.

Focus on controllable input metrics.

Move to an organizational structure that accommodates autonomous teams with single-threaded leaders.

Revise the compensation structure for leaders so that it encourages long-term commitment and long-term decision-making.

Articulate the core elements of the company’s culture

Define a set of leadership principles.

Depict your flywheel.