Working Backwards Quotes

“According to Sequoia Capital, the average startup in Silicon Valley spends 990 hours to hire 12 software engineers!1 That’s more than 80 hours per hire, and all that time taken away from a team that’s already understaffed and working on deadline only adds to the urgency to staff up.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“At many companies, when the senior leadership meets, they tend to focus more on big-picture, high-level strategy issues than on execution. At Amazon, it’s the opposite. Amazon leaders toil over the execution details and regularly embody the Dive Deep leadership principle, which states: “Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details, audit frequently, and are skeptical when metrics and anecdotes differ. No task is beneath them.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Jeff wanted us to know that we couldn’t just charge down the first available and most convenient path to chase after this opportunity. We needed to think through our plan in detail.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Though it’s unclear whether Jeff knew about Charlie’s idea before sending out his directive to launch a free shipping program in October, it doesn’t really matter—the story is noteworthy for a couple of reasons. First, customer-focused ideas come from all areas within Amazon. 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. Amazon is not like this at all. It’s everyone’s job to obsess over customers and think of inventive ways to delight them.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“The data we’d collected over the years through many tests just reinforced this. Shipping promotions drove significantly higher growth than any other type of promotion. The perceived value of free shipping was higher than straight discounting of product prices. Put another way, if the average discount of a free shipping promotion was 10 percent, we’d see significantly more demand lift (called elasticity) by offering free shipping than by discounting product prices by 10 percent. It wasn’t even close. Free shipping drove sales. We just had to figure out a sustainable way to offer free shipping.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Amazon Bar Raisers receive special training in the process. One participates in every interview loop. The name was intended to signal to everyone involved in the hiring process that 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. The Bar Raiser could not be the hiring manager or a recruiter. The Bar Raiser was granted the extraordinary power to veto any hire and override the hiring manager.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Jeff often used an analogy in those days when describing our efforts to innovate and build new businesses. “We need to plant many seeds,” he would say, “because we don’t know which one of those seeds will grow into a mighty oak.” It was an apt analogy. The oak is one of the sturdiest and longest-living trees in the forest. Each tree produces thousands of acorns for every one tree that eventually rises to the sky.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“We have an unshakeable conviction that the long-term interests of shareowners are perfectly aligned with the interests of customers.”2 In other words, while it’s true that shareholder value stems from growth in profit, Amazon believes that long-term growth is best produced by putting the customer first. If you held this conviction, what kind of company would you build? In a talk at the 2018 Air, Space and Cyber Conference, Jeff described Amazon this way: “Our culture is four things: customer obsession instead of competitor obsession; willingness to think long term, with a longer investment horizon than most of our peers; eagerness to invent, which of course goes hand in hand with failure; and then, finally, taking professional pride in operational excellence.” That”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Long-term thinking levers our existing abilities and lets us do new things we couldn’t otherwise contemplate,” Jeff wrote. “Long-term orientation interacts well with customer obsession. 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.”2 Key word: patiently. Many companies will give up on an initiative if it does not produce the kind of returns they are looking for within a handful of years. Amazon will stick with it for five, six, seven years—all the while keeping the investment manageable, constantly learning and improving—until it gains momentum and acceptance.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“We need to plant many seeds,” he would say, “because we don’t know which one of those seeds will grow into a mighty oak.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“This is my self-assessment that I wrote in my performance review that year: Overall, my performance was dreadful in 2006. In Unbox, our launch was poorly received, partly due to DRM [digital rights management] and licensing issues that restrict content usage, and selection, partly due to bad product choices we made for consumers (erring on the side of quality over download speed) and partly due to engineering defects. In any case, I didn’t manage these issues appropriately and the result was a weak launch with weak consumer response and negative press reaction. Net my performance versus goals can be summarized by a poor execution percentage in terms of projects completed and the main project that is complete (Unbox Video) is not a compelling customer experience (yet) and the rate of sales is pitiful. I think a grade of ‘D’ for my performance vs. goals would be generous.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“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. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“You can’t outsource a customized, integrated, end-to-end experience.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“We shouldn’t be afraid of taking on hard problems if solving them would unlock substantial value.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“The most successful teams invested much of their early time in removing dependencies and building "instrumentation" - our term for infrastructure used to measure every important action, before they began to innovate, meaning, add new features.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“This can have devastating consequences for the fast-growing company. Over a short period of time, say a year, the number of employees can leap from 50 to 150 in a startup, or from 150 to 500 or more during a later phase of rapid growth when the business model is promising and the funding is in the bank. Seemingly overnight, the new employees can vastly outnumber their predecessors, and this dynamic can permanently redefine the corporate culture. Brent Gleeson, a leadership coach and Navy SEAL combat veteran, writes, “Organizational culture comes about in one of two ways. It’s either decisively defined, nurtured and protected from the inception of the organization; or—more typically—it comes about haphazardly as a collective sum of the beliefs, experiences and behaviors of those on the team. Either way, you will have a culture. For better or worse.”2”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“we wanted 95 percent of detail page views to display a product that was in stock and ready for immediate shipping.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“When asked how they did it, the team revealed their very simple solution: every résumé received from a female applicant automatically led to a phone screen.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“growing as rapidly as Amazon, which jumped from roughly 600 employees in 1997 to 9,000 in 2000, and then to 100,000 by 2013 (as of this writing, in 2020, Amazon is approaching one million employees).”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“The Just Do It Award is an abnormally large, well-worn Nike sneaker given to employees who exhibit a Bias for Action. It usually goes to a person who has come up with a clever idea outside the scope of their job. What’s peculiarly Amazonian about the award is that the idea doesn’t have to be implemented—nor does it have to actually work if it is—in order to be eligible.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“This initial set of Leadership Principles was basically an articulation and synthesis of the ethos of the people Robin interviewed. In a few cases, a principle was based on the leadership activities of a single person.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“sound decisions draw from ideas, not individual performance skills.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon