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

by Colin Bryar

If we can identify a customer need and if we can further develop conviction that that need is meaningful and durable, our approach permits us to work patiently for multiple years to deliver a solution.

The other key is frugality. You can’t afford to pursue inventions for very long if you spend your money on things that don’t lead to a better customer experience,

When we have invented, our long-term, patient approach—driven by customer need—has been fundamentally different from the more conventional “skills-forward” approach to invention, in which a company looks for new business opportunities that neatly fit with its existing skills and competencies.

And once Jeff made up his mind, he exercised the Bias for Action leadership principle.

it takes exceptionally patient and unwavering leadership to persevere through the prolonged process of building a new business and navigating through transformative times in an established industry with entrenched interests.

This change would be one of the first major examples of the single-threaded leader org structure concept at Amazon. Before Steve moved over to head Digital,

invention is a more challenging path than fast following. The roadmap for fast following is relatively clear—you study what your competitor has built and copy it. There is no roadmap for invention.

For example, the six-page document and S-Team goals allowed Jeff to stay aligned on all major retail and marketplace programs and give feedback in an efficient manner,

This kind of alignment existed not because Jeff was CEO but because we had a process in place that enabled it. The same process could allow teams at any company to work autonomously

Our people were autonomous with respect to their ability to achieve the goals that they had agreed

We applied the new two-pizza structure to every part of the org chart below Steve and his direct reports.

Each engineering category had a two-pizza team for each major component of the software services (e.g., content ingestion and transformation) and for client application software.

typical company that wanted to grow would take stock of its existing capabilities and ask, “What can we do next with our skill set?”

figure out what the customers’ needs were and then ask ourselves, “Do we have the skills necessary to build something that meets those needs? If not, how can we build or acquire them?” Once we determined what was necessary to create value for our customers and to differentiate ourselves from our competitors,

You can’t outsource a customized, integrated, end-to-end experience.

Customer Obsession. Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.

Deliver Results. Leaders focus on the key inputs for their business and deliver them with the right quality and in a timely fashion. Despite setbacks, they rise to the occasion and never settle.

Super Saver Shipping was built in much the same way that Amazon Prime was later developed. Both projects started with a decisive move, and an insanely compressed timeline, leading up to a public launch.

Customer expectations are not static. They rise over time, which means you cannot rest on your laurels.

One way in which we tracked our shipping performance was with a metric called “Click to Deliver.” This was the total amount of time from the moment the customer placed an order (click) to the moment the package arrived at its final destination (deliver).

The second segment—the ship-to-deliver—was the time between the handover and the customer receiving their package.

Viewed through the Customer Obsession and Insist on the Highest Standards leadership

Many companies have the “business people” tell the “technical people” what to build. There’s little discussion back and forth, and the teams stay in their own lanes.

In other words, Charlie was, in Amazonian terms, a “strong general athlete” (SGA). These customer-obsessed, inventive, long-term thinkers take pride in operational excellence and embody

Jeff and other Amazon leaders often talk about the “institutional no” and its counterpart, the “institutional

The institutional no refers to the tendency for well-meaning people within large organizations to say no to new ideas. The errors caused by the institutional no are typically errors of omission, that is, something a company doesn’t do versus something it does.

Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit: “Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion.

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.

We had conducted an internal employee-only beta test, but we failed to use the results as an opportunity to slow down, carefully review the customer feedback, and take the time needed to make real changes to improve the quality of the customer experience.

We were just focused on shipping. We had prioritized speed, press coverage, and competitor obsession over the customer experience. We had been decidedly un-Amazonian.

Amazon’s commitment to long-term thinking includes its investment in people. They understand that when you innovate and build new things, you will frequently fail. If you fire the person, you lose the benefit of the learning that came along with that experience.

“Why would I fire you now? I just made a million-dollar investment in you. Now you have an obligation to make that investment pay off.

Hughes examines the plane closely, running his fingers along the surface of the fuselage. His team watches anxiously. Hughes is not satisfied. “Not enough,” he says. “Not enough. These rivets have to be completely flush. I want no air resistance on the fuselage. She’s got to be cleaner. Cleaner! You understand?”

Netflix has a track record of long-term thinking and willingness to be misunderstood for long periods of time, both of which have contributed to their great success.

Throughout, we were stubborn on the vision and flexible on the details.

The answers to both questions come down to single-threaded teams ruthlessly iterating with the Working Backwards process, and obsessing over the customer experience,

The culture demands that these new businesses be high potential and that they be innovative and differentiated, but it does not demand that they be large on the day that they are born.

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.”

That sense of urgency is codified in Amazon’s Bias for Action leadership principle.

The Working Backwards process is all about starting from the customer perspective and following a step-by-step process where you question assumptions relentlessly until you have a complete understanding of what you want to build. It’s about seeking truth.

can say confidently that the extra time we spent slowing down to uncover the necessary truths was ultimately a faster path to a large and successful business.

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.

Being Amazonian means having to change habits and ways of doing things, deferring gratification, and persisting through challenging times, but also reaping distinct rewards.

Defining the basics of the culture, articulating leadership principles, regularizing essential practices—Bar Raiser hiring, teams with single-threaded leaders, written narratives, Working Backwards, focusing on input metrics—all these things have proved to be essential to us in other endeavors.

Amazon is clear up front about seeking people who obsess over the customer experience and who value long-term success and continuous innovation over making a quick buck or earning a fancy title.

Ban PowerPoint as a tool to discuss complicated topics and start using six-page narratives and PR/FAQ documents in your leadership team meetings.

Focus on controllable input metrics. Amazon is relentless about identifying metrics that can be controlled and have the greatest impact on outputs such as free cash flow per share.

Move to an organizational structure that accommodates autonomous teams with single-threaded leaders. As noted in chapter three, this takes time and requires careful management, as it invariably raises questions about authority and power, jurisdiction, and “turf.”

Articulate the core elements of the company’s culture, as Amazon did with long-term thinking, customer obsession, eagerness to invent, and operational excellence.

Define a set of leadership principles. These must be developed with participation from many contributors.