Working Backwards Quotes

“Be led by a multidisciplined top-flight leader. The leader must have deep technical expertise, know how to hire world-class software engineers and product managers, and possess excellent business judgment. Be self-funding. The team’s work will pay for itself. Be approved in advance by the S-Team. The S-Team must approve the formation of every two-pizza team.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“received (20 percent weighting) Be monitored in real time. A team’s real-time score on its fitness function would be displayed on a dashboard next to all the other two-pizza teams’ scores. Be the business owner. The team will own and be responsible for all aspects of its area of focus, including design, technology, and business results”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“management as follows. A two-pizza team will: Be small. No more than ten people. Be autonomous. They should have no need to coordinate with other teams to get their work done. With the new service-based software architecture in place, any team could simply refer to the published application programming interfaces (APIs) for other teams. (More on this new software architecture to follow.) Be evaluated by a well-defined “fitness function.” This is the sum of a weighted series of metrics.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Jeff proposed that instead of finding new and better ways to manage our dependencies, we figure out how to remove them. We could do this, he said, by reorganizing software engineers into smaller teams that would be essentially autonomous, connected to other teams only loosely, and only when unavoidable. These largely independent teams could do their work in parallel. Instead of coordinating better, they could coordinate less and build more.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Morale is, in a sense, an output metric, whereas freedom to invent and build is an input metric. If you clear the impediment to building, morale takes care of itself.”
― 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—and you can’t do that if every quarter some faceless process like NPI smites your best ideas.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Here’s how NPI worked: Once every quarter, teams submitted projects they thought were worth doing that would require resources from outside their own team—which basically meant almost every project of reasonable size. It took quite a bit of work to prepare and submit an NPI request. You needed a “one-pager”; a written summary of the idea; an initial rough estimate of which teams would be impacted; a consumer adoption model, if applicable; a P&L; and an explanation of why it was strategically important for Amazon to embark on the initiative immediately. Just proposing the idea represented a resource-intensive undertaking.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“This gave rise to a process called New Project Initiatives (NPI), whose job was global prioritization. Not global in the sense of geographic expansion, but rather in comparing every project under consideration to decide which ones were worthy of doing immediately and which ones could wait.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“biggest impact to the business. This gave rise to a process called New Project Initiatives (NPI), whose job was global prioritization.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“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 ones. He suggested that each software team should build and clearly document a set of application program interfaces (APIs) for all their systems/services. An API is a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications and defining how software components should interact. In other words, Jeff’s vision was that we needed to focus on loosely coupled interaction via machines through well-defined APIs rather than via humans through emails and meetings. This would free each team to act autonomously and move faster.”
― 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.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

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

“During this phase, we became aware of another, less positive trend: 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.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“The best practice for the hiring manager is to listen and learn and to speak infrequently. The process is designed to prevent urgency and bias from negatively affecting the decision, which could result in wasted time and months of agony.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“To avoid bias, the interviewer may not see or discuss other members’ votes, comments, or feedback until their own feedback has been submitted.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Written feedback is expected to be specific, detailed, and filled with examples from the interview to address the Leadership Principles assigned to the interviewer. The feedback should be written shortly after the interview is complete to ensure that nothing of value is forgotten. We found it wise to block out fifteen minutes immediately afterward to complete the feedback.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“The method that Amazon interviewers use for drilling down goes by the acronym STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result): “What was the situation?” “What were you tasked with?” “What actions did you take?” “What was the result?” A good interviewer continues to ask questions until they feel they have a good understanding of what the interviewee personally accomplished versus what the team did.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“However when assessing how well a candidate exhibits the Amazon Leadership Principles, we adopted a technique called Behavioral Interviewing. This involves assigning one or more of the 14 Leadership Principles to each member of the interview panel, who in turn poses questions that map to their assigned leadership principle, seeking to elicit two kinds of data.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Eventually the most important goals of the interview process became clear: to assess how well a candidate’s past behavior and ways of working map to the Amazon Leadership Principles. Managers and interviewers soon learned that the basic information about the candidate—the details of education and employment—are less reliable predictors of the candidate’s ability to work in accord with the Amazon principles.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“but still invites them to go through the interview loop, hoping that this will assist in the hiring decision. This is a mistake. In most cases, the questionable candidate will not get the job, and a lot of time will have been wasted in the process. The hiring manager should not bring a candidate in for the time-consuming and expensive interview loop unless they are inclined to hire them after the phone interview.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Again, most hiring managers are desperate to get the process started, and without this review process, they tend to get fuzzy and/or out-of-date job descriptions. It is very hard to recover from this mistake. The hiring process will inevitably run into trouble—even fail—if the JD does not clearly articulate the job responsibilities and required skills. The people doing the phone screens and in-person interviews need to be clear on the JD so they can ask the right questions to collect the information required to make their decision.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“A good job description must be specific and focused.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Many would ask if exceptions could be made. But of course, this was part of the problem—hiring almost always felt urgent. We know of no instances where managers were allowed to take shortcuts. Successful managers would quickly realize that they had to devote a considerable amount of their time to the process and would redouble their efforts to source, recruit, and hire candidates who were Amazonian. Managers who failed to put in the time (in addition to their day job) to recruit and interview didn’t last. There is no substitute for working long, hard, and smart at Amazon.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“We will make this point again and again: Amazon has faced many of the same problems all companies face. The difference is that Amazon has come up with novel solutions that deliver a significant competitive advantage, and this is true of its approach to hiring.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Jeff often said in those days, “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. Missionaries, as Jeff defined the term, would not only believe in Amazon’s mission but also embody its Leadership Principles. They would also stick around: we wanted people who would thrive and work at Amazon for five-plus years, not the 18–24 months typical of Silicon Valley.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“In other words, my (Bill’s) team working on Amazon Music might have had 23 goals and initiatives in our 2012 operating plan. After reviewing our plan with us, the S-Team might have chosen six of the 23 to become S-Team goals. The music team would still have worked to achieve all 23 goals, but it would be sure to make resource allocation decisions throughout the year to prioritize the six S-Team goals ahead of the remaining 17.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“OP2 aligns each group with the goals of the company. Everybody knows their overall objectives, including targets for revenue, cost, and performance. The metrics are agreed upon and will be supplied as part of every team’s deliverables. OP2 makes it crystal clear what each group has committed to do, how they intend to achieve those goals, and what resources they need to get the work done. Some variances are inevitable, but any change to OP2 requires formal S-Team approval.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“The panel then reconciles any gaps between the bottom-up proposal and the top-down goals the group has been asked to meet.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Once these high-level expectations are established, each group begins work on its own more granular operating plan—known as OP1—which sets out the individual group’s “bottom-up” proposal. Through the narrative process (described in chapter four), Amazon aims to evaluate about ten times as much information as the typical company does in a similar time frame.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“The S-Team begins by creating a set of high-level expectations or objectives for the entire company.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon