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

by Colin Bryar

Depict your flywheel. What are the drivers of growth for your company? Make a picture of them that shows how they act upon the flywheel.

Evaluate everything you do in light of its positive or negative effect on one or more drivers of the flywheel.

If you would like to learn more about how to apply the Amazon processes and principles and get your organization to start working backwards, visit our website at www.workingbackwards.com.

“You should write these down and put them at the top of your document every month, so we remember what we decided last time.” And thus, tenets were born. The next month I showed up with my document with the tenets front and center. It helped us all reload the cache, and made the rest of the meeting productive since we didn’t have to rehash our previous decisions.

Tenets help organizations make hard choices and trade-offs. A tenet breaks the tie between two benefits, values, or outcomes where there is a natural tension between them.

Tenet: We don’t make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions.

Tenet: When forced to choose between building something that’s convenient for customers or convenient for ourselves, we’ll choose the former.

Tenet: We don’t let defects travel downstream. When we notice a defect, we will not rely on good intentions to solve the problem. We’ll invent and build

The problem will not be solved by encouraging people to try harder or relying on the good intentions of customer service people.