Working Backwards Quotes

“And finally there is the product development process that gives this book its name: working backwards from the desired customer experience.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

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

“Amazon’s SVP of Devices, Dave Limp, summed up nicely what might happen next: “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

“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

“Even the best process can only improve the quality of your decision-making; no process will make the decision for you.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Amazon’s Leadership Principles6 Customer Obsession. Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Customer Obsession. Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Amazon relies far more on the written word to develop and communicate ideas than most companies, and this difference makes for a huge competitive advantage.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“The main components of an OP1 narrative are: Assessment of past performance, including goals achieved, goals missed, and lessons learned Key initiatives for the following year A detailed income statement Requests (and justifications) for resources, which may include things like new hires, marketing spend, equipment, and other fixed assets”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Like all good processes, it’s simple to understand, can be easily taught to new people, does not depend on scarce resources (such as a single individual), and has a feedback loop to ensure continual improvement.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

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

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

“The institutional no refers to the tendency for well-meaning people within large organizations to say no to new ideas. The errors caused by the institutional no are typically errors of omission, that is, something a company doesn’t do versus something it does. Staying the current course offers managers comfort and certainty—even if the price of that short-term certainty is instability and value destruction later on. Moreover, the errors of omission caused by the institutional no can be notoriously tricky to spot. Most businesses don’t have the tools to evaluate the cost of not doing something. And when the cost is high, they only realize when it’s too late to change.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Articulate the core elements of the company’s culture, as Amazon did with long-term thinking, customer obsession, eagerness to invent, and operational excellence. Then build these into every process and discussion. Do not assume that simply stating them and displaying them will have any significant effect.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Focus on controllable input metrics. Amazon is relentless about identifying metrics that can be controlled and have the greatest impact on outputs such as free cash flow per share. This is not an easy process, because it requires patient trial and error as you seek the input metrics that best allow you to assume control of your desired results. Note too that this is not an argument for abandoning output metrics.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Ban PowerPoint as a tool to discuss complicated topics and start using six-page narratives and PR/FAQ documents in your leadership team meetings. This can be implemented almost instantly. There will be pushback and grumbling, but we’ve found it produces results swiftly, and eventually your leaders will say to themselves, “We can never go back to the old way.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“The Working Backwards process is all about starting from the customer perspective and following a step-by-step process where you question assumptions relentlessly until you have a complete understanding of what you want to build. It’s about seeking truth. Sometimes the Working Backwards process can uncover some surprising truths. Some companies, in a rush to get a project to market, ignore that truth and keep building according to the original plan. In their attachment to the modest gains of that plan, they motivate the team to pursue it aggressively, only to realize much later that there was a much bigger gain to be had if they’d taken the time to question their own assumptions. The cost of changing course in the PR/FAQ writing stage is much lower than after you’ve launched and have an operating business to manage. The Working Backwards process tends to save you from the expensive proposition of making a significant course change after you’ve launched your product.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Jeff and I had a brief chat about Stewart’s comments. We’d both noticed the same thing—a phenomenon that Amazon would later refer to as “undifferentiated heavy lifting,” that is, the tasks that we could do for companies that would enable them to focus on what made them unique. This was an opportunity.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“After the launch, as we monitored the response, we had another surprise. Some of our biggest customers were not affiliates and not outsiders of any kind. They were Amazon software engineers. They found Amazon Web Services easier to use than some of our existing internal software tools they had been working with to build amazon.com. At this point there was little doubt that web services were going to become a new way of building things.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Like any company, we have a corporate culture formed not only by our intentions but also as a result of our history. For Amazon, that history is fairly fresh and, fortunately, it includes several examples of tiny seeds growing into big trees. We have many people at our company who have watched multiple $10 million seeds turn into billion dollar businesses. That first-hand experience and the culture that has grown up around those successes is, in my opinion, a big part of why we can start businesses from scratch. The culture demands that these new businesses be high potential and that they be innovative and differentiated, but it does not demand that they be large on the day that they are born. I remember how excited we were in 1996 as we crossed $10 million in book sales. It wasn’t hard to be excited—we had grown to $10 million from zero. Today, when a new business inside Amazon grows to $10 million, the overall company is growing from $10 billion to $10.01 billion. It would be easy for the senior executives who run our established billion dollar businesses to scoff. But they don’t. They watch the growth rates of the emerging businesses and send emails of congratulations. That’s pretty cool, and we’re proud it’s a part of our culture.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Throughout the development of these projects, we adhered to Amazon’s distinctive management practices. Above all, they are examples of Amazonian long-term thinking, customer obsession, willingness to invent, and operational excellence. Throughout, we were stubborn on the vision and flexible on the details.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“It seemed to me that going forward we had to get out of the never-ending cycle of bidding against Netflix and, later, Hulu. We didn’t want to pay studios additional fees for each and every country we entered. We had to control our own destiny. That led me to a startling conclusion: we had to create our own content. It was time to make our own movies and TV shows.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“The Amazon Deliver Results leadership principle states, “Leaders focus on the key inputs for their business and deliver them with the right quality and in a timely fashion. Despite setbacks, they rise to the occasion and never settle.” Shipping speed is a key input metric for Amazon. So, if you are customer obsessed, then you’re also obsessed with measuring and improving the shipping experience for customers.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“The institutional no can infiltrate all levels of the organization. It’s what causes a board of directors to say no to a big change of strategy (think Nokia and Microsoft missing the turn on smartphones). It’s what drives frontline managers to keep their top performers working on a current project and say no to their involvement in high-risk experiments that could fail but could also pay off handsomely later—especially if that payoff is likely to be after the manager has moved on to another role.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“The “institutional no” is a big reason why Amazon could have made an error of omission in this case. Jeff and other Amazon leaders often talk about the “institutional no” and its counterpart, the “institutional yes.” The institutional no refers to the tendency for well-meaning people within large organizations to say no to new ideas. The errors caused by the institutional no are typically errors of omission, that is, something a company doesn’t do versus something it does. Staying the current course offers managers comfort and certainty—even if the price of that short-term certainty is instability and value destruction later on. Moreover, the errors of omission caused by the institutional no can be notoriously tricky to spot. Most businesses don’t have the tools to evaluate the cost of not doing something. And when the cost is high, they only realize when it’s too late to change.”
― 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. A second noteworthy aspect of the story is that when Charlie returned from vacation and found out we had decided to build something akin to his idea, he joined the team charged with making Prime a reality, and played a vital role on it.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“We even evaluated rebates and points-based programs similar to the airlines’, but there’s an important difference between airlines and retailers. Once a plane takes off, its empty seats have no value. Therefore, airlines, in exchange for loyalty, can give away marginal inventory that would otherwise go unsold. Whereas in retail, giving away either product or shipping fees always has a cost. None of the ideas made it very far because they could not meet the three essential criteria.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“To optimize the ship-to-deliver segment, we would need many more fulfillment centers, and they would have to be located so that free, one-to-two-day delivery was both possible and cost effective. That meant a much greater presence near urban areas.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“To improve total delivery time, we would need to make big changes to our supply chain. Our current fulfillment network had been built to optimize for nearby access to our third-party shippers so we could reliably and cheaply ship products to customers in three to five days. This logistics topology had been convenient for Amazon, but not for the customers who wanted products delivered fast and free.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon