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

by Colin Bryar

Amazon Prime is a great example of the tremendous value you can unlock by ruthlessly applying the principles of customer obsession and long-term thinking to a problem—in this case, increasing revenue growth. To do so, we had to accept the fact that the current logistics infrastructure we had painstakingly built over the years, though doing reasonably well at the time, wouldn’t cut it in the long run. We had to change the expected payback period of our decision from the next quarter or two to five or even seven years ahead. Given that focus on the customer experience and our willingness to think long term, doing Amazon Prime made perfect sense.

We were all swimming in the same primordial soup. Yet it was Amazon who took the first step in web services and said, “Why don’t we build a set of tools that any developer can use to build anything they want, even if it has nothing to do with our core business?” As mentioned earlier, it was largely because of the Amazon focus on invention. Part of the Invent and Simplify leadership principle states, “As we do new things, we accept that we may be misunderstood for long periods of time.”

Some companies, in a rush to get a project to market, ignore that truth and keep building according to the original plan. In their attachment to the modest gains of that plan, they motivate the team to pursue it aggressively, only to realize much later that there was a much bigger gain to be had if they’d taken the time to question their own assumptions. The cost of changing course in the PR/FAQ writing stage is much lower than after you’ve launched and have an operating business to manage. The Working Backwards process tends to save you from the expensive proposition of making a significant course change after you’ve launched your product.

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. We did not allow ourselves to be so driven by what our competitors might do that we would launch a product without first having thought very carefully about how our customers would use it and benefit from it. To put it another way, Working Backwards was the process that enabled us to put into action the principle of Customer Obsession.