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

by Colin Bryar

We decided that there would be separate leaders for business and tech for each digital product category—books, music, and video. Each of these category leaders would hire leaders for each business function, such as product management, marketing/merchandising, and vendor/content management (licensing digital content from publishers, studios, and record companies). Each general manager (GM) category leader had a corresponding peer leader on the engineering side. 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. This was mostly a pragmatic decision based on the skills of the leaders. For example, I had no experience at that time managing an engineering organization.