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

by Colin Bryar

Reference Check

Offer Through Onboarding

At many companies, the hiring manager has the recruiter make the offer. This is another mistake. The hiring manager should personally make the offer and sell him/her on the role and company. You may have chosen the candidate, but that doesn’t mean the candidate has chosen you. You must assume that good employees are being actively pursued by other companies, including their current employer. There is always the risk that you could lose the candidate. Nothing is certain until the day they report to the office.

Sometimes we would send a “book bomb” to a candidate—a stack of books we thought they would like—or a handful of their favorite DVDs.

Variations on the Bar Raiser

Bar Raiser and Diversity

As discussed earlier in this chapter, personal biases naturally occur in an unstructured interview and hiring process.

Hire and Develop the Best

Of great importance, the Amazon hiring process has a flywheel effect—it pays greater and greater dividends the longer it is used. Ideally, the bar continues to be set higher, so much that, eventually, employees should be able to say to themselves, “I’m glad I joined when I did. If I interviewed for a job today, I’m not sure I’d be hired!”

I’m glad I joined when I did. If I interviewed for a job today, I’m not sure I’d be hired!”

The answer lies in an Amazon innovation called “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 single-threaded leadership model emerged at the tail end of a long, zigzag journey of well-informed trial and error.

Growth Multiplied Our Challenges

Technical Dependency Number One: Gotchas in Shared Code

Technical Dependency Number Two: Protectors of the Database

As a vital safeguard, a steering group had been set up to review every proposed change to acb, approve the proposal (or reject it), and then figure out the best time to implement it. This group was known colloquially, and accurately, as “DB Cabal” and comprised three senior executives—the CTO, the head of the Database Administration team, and the head of the Data team.

Database protectors

Organizational Dependencies

Too much of any kind of dependency not only slows down the pace of innovation but also creates a dispiriting second-order effect: disempowered teams.

Disempower

When a team is tasked with solving a particular problem and is judged by their solution, they should expect to have the tools and authority to complete the job. Their success should be a source of team pride. But Amazon’s tightly coupled software architecture and org structure too often made owners heavily dependent on outside teams, over whom they had little influence. Few teams were fully in control of their own destiny, and many were frustrated by the slow pace of delivery that was beyond their control. Disempowered workers increasingly became discouraged, unable to pursue innovative ideas in the face of so much structural resistance.

Better Coordination Was the W...

This change in our thinking was of course nudged along by Jeff. 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. When you view effective communication across groups as a “defect,” the solutions to your problems start to look quite different from traditional ones. He suggested that each software team should build and clearly document a set of application program interfaces (APIs) for all their systems/services. An API is a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications and defining how software components should interact. In 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.

Not to solve the wrong problem

NPI—An Early Response to Organizational Dependencies

New Project Initiatives (NPI),

Force-Ranking Our Options

Here’s how NPI worked: Once every quarter, teams submitted projects they thought were worth doing that would require resources from outside their own team—which basically meant almost every project of reasonable size. It took quite a bit of work to prepare and submit an NPI request. You needed a “one-pager”; a written summary of the idea; an initial rough estimate of which teams would be impacted; a consumer adoption model, if applicable; a P&L; and an explanation of why it was strategically important for Amazon to embark on the initiative immediately. Just proposing the idea represented a resource-intensive undertaking.

How NPI works

Choosing Our Priorities

the two-pizza team,

A two-pizza team will:

Two- pizza team explained

Be small.

Be auton...

Be evaluated by a well-defined “fitness function.”

Example: a team that is in charge of adding selection in a product category might be evaluated on: a) how many new distinct items were added for the period (50 percent weighting) b) how many units of those new distinct items were sold (30 percent weighting) c) how many page views those distinct items received (20 percent weighting)

Example on goals and metrics

Be monitored in real time.

Be the business owner.

Be led by a multidisciplined top-flight leader.

Be self-funding.

Be approved in advance by the S-Team.

The most important of these adaptations are worth exploring here in more detail.

Adaptations to two pizza team

Tearing Down Monoliths

The First Autonomous Teams

In the 2016 shareholder letter, even though he wasn’t explicitly talking about two-pizza teams, 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.

Some Challenges Still Remained

Two-Pizza Teams Worked Best in Product Development

Fitness Functions Were Actually Worse Than Their Component Metrics

Great Two-Pizza Team Leaders Proved to Be Rarities

Sometimes You Need More Than Two Pizzas

later came to realize that the biggest predictor of a team’s success was not whether it was small but whether it had a leader with the appropriate skills, authority, and experience to staff and manage a team whose sole focus was to get the job done.

time. Thus, “single-threaded leaders” and “separable, single-threaded teams” were born.

Evolution of two pizza team

Bigger and Better Still—The Single-Threaded Leader

Amazon’s SVP of Devices, Dave Limp, summed up nicely what might happen next: “The best way to fail at inventing something is by making it somebody’s part-time job.”6

Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA).