Working Backwards Quotes

“The best way to fail at inventing something is by making it somebody’s part-time job.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“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”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“When you encounter a problem, the probability you’re actually looking at the actual root cause of the problem in the initial 24 hours is pretty close to zero, because it turns out that behind every issue there’s a very interesting story.” In the end, if you stick with identifying the true root causes of variation and eliminating them, you’ll have a predictable, in-control process that you can optimize.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“I 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.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“The customer is also at the center of how we analyze and manage performance metrics. Our emphasis is on what we call controllable input metrics, rather than output metrics. Controllable input metrics (e.g., reducing internal costs so you can affordably lower product prices, adding new items for sale on the website, or reducing standard delivery time) measure the set of activities that, if done well, will yield the desired results, or output metrics (such as monthly revenue and stock price). We detail these metrics as well as how to discover and track them in chapter six.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Sometimes it’s best to start slow in order to move fast.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“The NPI process was deflating for morale. But figuring out how to “boost morale” is not Amazonian. Other companies have morale-boosting projects and groups with names like “Fun Club” and “Culture Committee.” They view morale as a problem to be solved by company-sponsored entertainment and social interaction. Amazon’s approach to morale was to attract world-class talent and create an environment in which they had maximum latitude to invent and build things to delight customers”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“The Effects of Personal Bias and Hiring Urgency There are other types of cognitive biases that affect the hiring process. Another harmful one is personal bias, the basic human instinct to surround yourself with people who are like you. People have a natural desire to hire those with similar characteristics: educational background, professional experience, functional expertise, and similar life experiences. The middle-aged manager who holds a degree from the University of Michigan, worked at McKinsey, lives in the suburbs with a partner and kids, and plays golf will tend to be attracted to candidates with similar attributes.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Along the way to Seattle, he wrote his business plan. He identified several reasons why the book category was underserved and well suited to online commerce. He outlined how he could create a new and compelling experience for book-buying customers. To begin with, books were relatively lightweight and came in fairly uniform sizes, meaning they would be easy and inexpensive to warehouse, pack, and ship. Second, while more than 100 million books had been written and more than a million titles were in print in 1994, even a Barnes & Noble mega-bookstore could stock only tens of thousands of titles. An online bookstore, on the other hand, could offer not just the books that could fit in a brick-and-mortar store but any book in print. Third, there were two large book-distribution companies, Ingram and Baker & Taylor, that acted as intermediaries between publishers and retailers and maintained huge inventories in vast warehouses. They kept detailed electronic catalogs of books in print to make it easy for bookstores and libraries to order from them. Jeff realized that he could combine the infrastructure that Ingram and Baker & Taylor had created—warehouses full of books ready to be shipped, plus an electronic catalog of those books—with the growing infrastructure of the Web, making it possible for consumers to find and buy any book in print and get it shipped directly to their homes. Finally, the site could use technology to analyze the behavior of customers and create a unique, personalized experience for each one of them.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“With all other things being equal, the organization that moves faster will innovate more, simply because it will be able to conduct a higher number of experiments per unit of time.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“In a company known for its inventiveness, separable, single-threaded leadership has been one of Amazon’s most useful inventions. We discuss it in chapter three. This is the organizational strategy that minimizes the drag on efficiency created by intra-organizational dependencies. The basic premise is, for each initiative or project, there is a single leader whose focus is that project and that project alone, and that leader oversees teams of people whose attention is similarly focused on that one project.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“At last we realized that all this cross-team communication didn’t really need refinement at all—it needed elimination. Where was it written in stone that every project had to involve so many separate entities? It wasn’t just that we had had the wrong solution in mind; rather, we’d been trying to solve the wrong problem altogether. 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. This change in our thinking was of course nudged along by Jeff. In my tenure at Amazon I heard him say many times that if we wanted Amazon to be a place where builders can build, we needed to eliminate communication, not encourage it. When you view effective communication across groups as a “defect,” the solutions to your problems start to look quite different from traditional”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“our explosive growth was slowing down our pace of innovation. We were spending more time coordinating and less time building. More features meant more software, written and supported by more software engineers, so both the code base and the technical staff grew continuously. Software engineers were once free to modify any section of the entire code base to independently develop, test, and immediately deploy any new features to the website. But as the number of software engineers grew, their work overlapped and intertwined until it was often difficult for teams to complete their work independently. Each overlap created one kind of dependency, which describes something one team needs but can’t supply for itself. If my team’s work requires effort from yours—whether it’s to build something new, participate, or review—you’re one of my dependencies. Conversely, if your team needs something from mine, I’m a dependency of yours. Managing dependencies requires coordination—two or more people sitting down to hash out a solution—and coordination takes time. As Amazon grew, we realized that despite our best efforts, we were spending too much time coordinating and not enough time building. That’s because, while the growth in employees was linear, the number of their possible lines of communication grew exponentially. Regardless of what form it takes—and we’ll get into the different forms in more detail shortly—every dependency creates drag. Amazon’s growing number of dependencies delayed results, increased frustration, and disempowered teams.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Better customer experience leads to more traffic. More traffic attracts more sellers seeking those buyers. More sellers lead to wider selection. Wider selection enhances customer experience, completing the circle. The cycle drives growth, which in turn lowers cost structure. Lower costs lead to lower prices, improving customer experience, and the flywheel spins faster.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“start by defining the customer experience, then iteratively work backwards from that point until the team achieves clarity of thought around what to build.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Most of Amazon’s major products and initiatives since 2004 have one very Amazonian thing in common—they were created through a process called Working Backwards.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“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.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“These include: the Bar Raiser hiring process that ensures that the company continues to acquire top talent; a bias for separable teams run by leaders with a singular focus that optimizes for speed of delivery and innovation; the use of written narratives instead of slide decks to ensure that deep understanding of complex issues drives well-informed decisions; a relentless focus on input metrics to ensure that teams work on activities that propel the business. And finally there is the product development process that gives this book its name: working backwards from the desired customer experience. Many of the business problems that Amazon faces are no different from those faced by every other company, small or large. The difference is how Amazon keeps coming up with uniquely Amazonian solutions to those problems. Taken together, these elements combine to form a way of thinking, managing, and working that we refer to as being Amazonian, a term that we coined for the purposes of this book. Both of us, Colin and Bill, were “in the room,” and—along with other senior leaders—we shaped and refined what it means to be Amazonian. We both worked extensively with Jeff and were actively involved in creating a number of Amazon’s most enduring successes (not to mention some of its notable flops) in what was the most invigorating professional experience of our lives.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“If you are hungry, you don’t walk into the kitchen and fix what you want. You ask for a menu, then choose an item from it. If you want something that is not on that menu, you can ask the waiter, who will send a request to the cook. But there is no guarantee you’ll get it. What happens inside the walled-off area in question is completely up to the single team that owns it, so long as they don’t change how information can be exchanged. If change becomes necessary, the owners publish a revised set of rules—a new menu, if you will—and all those who rely on them are notified.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“As Amazon grew, we realized that despite our best efforts, we were spending too much time coordinating and not enough time building. That’s because, while the growth in employees was linear, the number of their possible lines of communication grew exponentially.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“every résumé received from a female applicant automatically led to a phone screen. It’s important to say that this solution did not lower the hiring bar, nor did it favor unqualified candidates on the basis of gender. If the candidate did not pass the phone screen, they would not move forward to the next step in the process. This technique made it clear that when a candidate’s name implied the gender as female, an unconscious bias had been affecting the résumé screening. The result was that well-qualified female candidates were apparently being rejected too early in the process.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“the Amazon hiring process has a flywheel effect—it pays greater and greater dividends the longer it is used. Ideally, the bar continues to be set higher, so much that, eventually, employees should be able to say to themselves, “I’m glad I joined when I did. If I interviewed for a job today, I’m not sure I’d be hired!”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“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 theory held that by raising the bar with each new hire, the team would get progressively stronger and produce increasingly powerful results.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“We want missionaries, not mercenaries.” We have all encountered mercenaries in our career. 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.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“In other industries, such as media and financial services, a large percentage of executive compensation is doled out in annual performance bonuses. These short-term goals (and yes, a year is definitely short term) can generate behaviors that are detrimental to creating long-term value.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“S-Team goals are aggressive enough that Amazon only expects about three-quarters of them to be fully achieved during the year. Hitting every one of them would be a clear sign that the bar had been set too low.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“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.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Another of Jeff’s frequent exhortations to his small staff was that Amazon should always underpromise and overdeliver, to ensure that customer expectations were exceeded.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“We found it helpful to think of such cross-functional projects as a kind of tax, a payment one team had to make in support of the overall forward progress of the company. We tried to minimize such intrusions but could not avoid them altogether. Some teams, through no fault of their own, found themselves in a higher tax bracket than others. The Order Pipeline and Payments teams, for example, had to be involved in almost every new initiative, even though it wasn’t in their original charters.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“2006 interview by Jim Gray, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels recalled another watershed moment: We went through a period of serious introspection and concluded that a service-oriented architecture would give us the level of isolation that would allow us to build many software components rapidly and independently. By the way, this was way before service-oriented was a buzzword. For us service orientation means encapsulating the data with the business logic that operates on the data, with the only access through a published service interface. No direct database access is allowed from outside the service, and there’s no data sharing among the services.3 That’s a lot to unpack for non–software engineers, but the basic idea is this: If multiple teams have direct access to a shared block of software code or some part of a database, they slow each other down. Whether they’re allowed to change the way the code works, change how the data are organized, or merely build something that uses the shared code or data, everybody is at risk if anybody makes a change. Managing that risk requires a lot of time spent in coordination. The solution is to encapsulate, that is, assign ownership of a given block of code or part of a database to one team. Anyone else who wants something from that walled-off area must make a well-documented service request via an API.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon