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

by Colin Bryar

One of the major pitfalls of needing to hire a lot of new people very quickly is urgency bias: the tendency to overlook a candidate’s flaws because you are overwhelmed with work and need bodies.

As much as we respect PowerPoint as a visual communication tool and speaking aid, we learned the hard way that it’s not the best format to communicate complex information about initiatives and ongoing projects in a one-hour meeting. 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.

The job description he wrote for his very first employee said, “You must have experience designing and building large and complex (yet maintainable) systems, and you should be able to do so in about one-third the time that most competent people think possible.”

“When I interview people I tell them, ‘You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three.’”

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…),” or “Ensure 99.99 percent of all calls to software service ‘Y’ are successfully responded to within 10 milliseconds,” or “Increase repeat advertisers from 50 percent to 75 percent by Q3 of next year.”

The kicker, following an unusually long pause: “Tell me something about yourself that isn’t apparent by reading your résumé.”

Jeff often said in those days, “We want missionaries, not mercenaries.”

They are in it to make a fast buck for themselves, they don’t have the organization’s best interests at heart, and they don’t have the resolve to stick with your company through challenging times.

we wanted people who would thrive and work at Amazon for five-plus years, not the 18–24 months typical of Silicon Valley.

Focusing on candidate qualities that don’t reliably predict performance can also skew decisions in the wrong direction.

In not insisting on high standards (one of the Amazon Leadership Principles), she was in fact lowering them.

Along the way, a bad hire is a weak link who can bring the entire team down to their standards, a long-term cost that lingers long after they leave the company.

It takes almost no time to spot the superstars and to weed out the duds, but the majority of candidates, alas, falls somewhere in between, and that is when biases tend to kick

It’s either decisively defined, nurtured and protected from the inception of the organization; or—more typically—it comes about haphazardly as a collective sum of the beliefs, experiences and behaviors of those on the team. Either way, you will have a culture. For better or worse.”

The issue was that not only did the new director have no way of knowing what Amazon considered a worthy hire, but there was also no oversight or process to teach him or prevent him from filling his team with subpar talent.

Amazon Bar Raisers receive special training in the process. One participates in every interview loop. 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.

the JD is for a new position, members of the interview loop often begin by meeting with the hiring manager and Bar Raiser to review the description and ask clarifying questions. Typically, this process reveals aspects of the job that the hiring manager has failed to identify.

The people doing the phone screens and in-person interviews need to be clear on the JD so they can ask the right questions to collect the information required to make their decision.

Typically, the most effective loops consist of five to seven interviewers.

Second, no loop participant should be more than one level below the level of the position the candidate will hold.

This involves assigning one or more of the 14 Leadership Principles to each member of the interview panel, who in turn poses questions that map to their assigned leadership principle, seeking to elicit two kinds of data.

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?”

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. Some interviewers create a document with the questions, which they use to record

The role of the interviewers is to help the hiring manager gather data and make an informed decision, not to block the hire. The best practice for the hiring manager is to listen and learn and to speak infrequently. The process is designed to prevent urgency and bias from negatively affecting the decision,

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,

“The best way to fail at inventing something is by making it somebody’s part-time job.”

Before we get to those issues, would someone please tell me who’s the most senior single-threaded leader for this initiative?

Speed, or more accurately velocity, which measures both speed and direction, matters in business.

Yet many companies find themselves struggling against their own bureaucratic drag,

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.

During this phase, we became aware of another, less positive trend: our explosive growth was slowing down our pace of innovation.

As Obidos grew in size and complexity to support an ever-expanding suite of features and functionality, it began to exhibit the flip side of that once-cheerful analogy. Obidos is the fastest part of the river because it’s also the narrowest. Our entire website still flowed through one huge, growing block of code that presented a steadily rising barrier of dependencies.

When a software architecture includes a large number of technical dependencies, it is said to be tightly coupled, a bad thing that frustrates all involved when you are trying to double

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

Where was it written in stone that every project had to involve so many separate entities?

We didn’t yet have the new solution, but we finally grasped the true identity of our problem: the ever-expanding cost of coordination among teams.

When you view effective communication across groups as a “defect,” the solutions to your problems start to look quite different from traditional ones.

This gave rise to a process called New Project Initiatives (NPI),

comparing every project under consideration to decide which ones were worthy of doing immediately and which ones could wait.

NPI was our best solution at the time for ranking our global options intelligently and picking the winners. No one liked it, but it was a necessary evil given our organization then. 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.

screen all the NPI submissions. A project could be cut in the first round if it wasn’t thoroughly explained, didn’t address a core company goal, didn’t represent an acceptable cost/...

This step typically happened in real time in a conference room where a leader from each major area could review the project submission, ask any clarifying questions, and provide an estimate on how many resources from their area would be required to complete the project as stated. Usually 30 or 40 attendees were on hand to review a full list of projects, which

every project team leader would receive an email about their submission that came in one of three forms.

attract world-class talent and create an environment in which they had maximum latitude to invent and build things to delight customers

We needed to find some way to stem the tide of challenges, and we finally realized that the most effective way to do that was to recognize the assumption we’d been operating under was incorrect.

We could do this, he said, by reorganizing software engineers into smaller teams that would be essentially autonomous, connected to other teams only loosely, and only when unavoidable.

the two-pizza team, so named because the teams would be no larger than the number of people that could be adequately fed by two large pizzas.

Be small. No more than ten people. Be autonomous. They should have no need to coordinate with other teams to get their work done.