Working Backwards Quotes

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

“We made no exceptions for the fact that this was Hollywood. We used the Bar Raiser process to hire each member of the Studios team, and they would have to get accustomed to our frugal ways, including working in small, shared offices or open workspaces, a base salary capped at $160K, no cash bonus program, and riding in coach, not first class. This made for some hard conversations.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Why would I fire you now? I just made a million-dollar investment in you. Now you have an obligation to make that investment pay off. Figure out and clearly document where you went wrong. Share what you have learned with other leaders throughout the company. Be sure you don’t make the same mistake again, and help others avoid making it the first time.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside 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

“made clear that the candidate would have to accomplish large and complex tasks in “one-third the time that most competent people think possible.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“If the two organizations had started the process by writing a press release, they would have had to agree on the features, cost, customer experience, and price. Then they could have worked backwards to figure out what to build, thereby surfacing the challenges they would face in product development and manufacturing.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“In other words, his first action was not a “what” decision, it was a “who” and “how” decision. This is an incredibly important difference.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“The fact that we entered as total beginners and emerged as industry leaders is in no small part a result of our adherence to being Amazonian in our principles and our way of thinking, including thinking big, thinking long-term, being obsessed with customers, being willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time, and being frugal—principles that few companies are capable of maintaining in the face of quarterly reporting requirements and the daily gyrations of the stock market.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“In an interview after the Fire Phone was withdrawn, Jeff was asked about its failure and answered, “If you think that’s a big failure, we’re working on much bigger failures right now—and I am not kidding.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“better customer experience, like trade show booths, big teams, and splashy marketing campaigns. Amazon Music and Prime Video are examples of how we kept our investment manageable for many years by being frugal: keeping the team small, staying focused on improving the customer experience, limiting our marketing spend, and managing the P&L carefully. Once we had a clear product plan and vision for how these products could become billion-dollar businesses that would delight tens, even hundreds of millions of consumers, we invested big. Patience and carefully managed investment over many years can pay off greatly. Invention”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Contradictory as this may sound, variation in data is normal. And unavoidable. It’s therefore critical to differentiate normal variation (noise) from some fundamental change or defect in a process (signal).”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully. They are vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing. Leaders do not believe their or their team’s body odor smells of perfume. They benchmark themselves and their teams against the best.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Exception reports come in many flavors, but the following Contribution Profit (CP) example should illustrate the basic concept and its usefulness. CP is defined as the incremental money generated after selling an item and deducting the variable costs associated with that item.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“There’s another familiar lesson in this graph: output metrics—the data we graphed above—are far poorer indicators of trend causes than input metrics. It turned out in this case that the cause of our decelerating growth was a reduction in the rate of acquiring new customers—but nothing in these graphs gives any clue to that cause. With a sizable existing business, if you only pay attention to the output metric “revenue,” you typically won’t see the effects of new customer deceleration for quite some time. However, if you look at input metrics instead—things like “new customers,” “new customer revenue,” and “existing customer revenue”—you will detect the signal much earlier, and with a much clearer call to action.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“The WBR is Amazon’s most expensive and impactful weekly meeting, and every second counts—plan ahead and run the meeting efficiently.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“The WBR is a tactical operational meeting to analyze performance trends of the prior week. At Amazon, it was not the time to discuss new strategies, project updates, or upcoming product releases.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“People like talking about their area, especially when they’re delivering as expected, and even more so when they exceed expectations, but WBR time is precious. If things are operating normally, say “Nothing to see here” and move along. The goal of the meeting is to discuss exceptions and what is being done about them.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“The meeting attendees should include the executive team and their direct reports as well as anyone who owns or is speaking to any specific section in the deck.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Adding more junior members of the company to the WBR can increase their engagement in the business and further their growth and development—by allowing them to observe the discussions and thinking of more seasoned leaders.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“If you immediately jump to the Improve stage, you’ll be working with imperfect information on a process you likely don’t fully understand yet, and the actions you take will be much less likely to generate desired results.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“he assumes each sentence he reads is wrong until he can prove otherwise. He’s challenging the content of the sentence, not the motive of the writer. Jeff,”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

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

“Good intentions don't work, mechanisms do!"
That's because people already have good intentions when the problems cropped up in the first place.
"If you don't change the underlying conditions that created a problem, you should expect the problem to reoccur!"

E.g. of Good intentions:
- We must try harder!
- Next time, try to remember to improve the process to solve the problem or the mistake...”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“The answer lies in an Amazon innovation called “single-threaded leadership,” in which a single person, unencumbered by competing responsibilities, owns a single major initiative and heads up a separable, largely autonomous team to deliver its goals.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“One question that often gets a telling response is, “If given the chance, would you hire this person again?” Another is, “Of the people you have managed or worked with, in what percentile would you place this candidate?”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“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

“First, the interviewer wants the candidate to provide detailed examples of what they personally contributed to solving hard problems or how they performed in work situations like the ones they will experience at Amazon. Second, the interviewer wants to learn how the candidate accomplished their goals and whether their methods align with the Amazon Leadership Principles.”
― 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.”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“Better Coordination Was the Wrong Answer”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon