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

by Colin Bryar

Amazon realized early on that if you don’t change the underlying condition that created a problem, you should expect the problem to recur.

Hitting every one of them would be a clear sign that the bar had been set too low.

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. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.”5

Sometimes it’s best to start slow in order to move fast.

After one meeting, I asked him how he was able to do that. He responded with a simple and useful tip that I have not forgotten: he assumes each sentence he reads is wrong until he can prove otherwise. He’s challenging the content of the sentence, not the motive of the writer.