Book Review: Working Backwards
Learn how to do things the 'Amazon' way, from 6-pagers to bar raisers, single-threaded leadership to PR/FAQs.
“I’m passionate about learning, and love to read. Writing up book summaries lets me consolidate learning and share my best reads with others. Enjoy…”
At Coconut, my second startup, we employed some of Amazon’s working practices - namely the 6 pager and the PR/FAQ. I wish I’d have read ‘Working Backwards’ to really understand the power and provenance of these tools.
The book, by Bill Carr and Colin Bryar, offers readers a behind-the-scenes look at Amazon's culture, leadership principles and unique processes. Many ex-Amazonians have since taken the practices to other companies now. When people say their company does things in an ‘Amazon way’, this book has helped me understand what they mean.
No powerpoint, 6 pagers, PR/FAQs aka Working Backwards, leadership principles, bar raisers to name a few, Amazon have developed a number of counter-intuitive but highly effective practices that every company should consider deploying.
Amazon Leadership Principles
Most companies try to steer their culture by codifying values that they want their employees to live by. These will typically live on a careers or about page on a company’s website and serve both to communicate to customers the brand values of the business, whilst also being used to assess new hires, and measure employee performance.
Amazon does things differently. They have a set of ‘Leadership Principles’ instead. There are 16 of them. Way more than any company would have for its equivalent ‘values’.
They do however have four ‘principles’: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Maybe these are their ‘values’. But it’s a fundamentally different architecture to most companies.
The leadership principles are:
Customer Obsession: Amazon places customers at the centre of everything it does. This principle emphasises the importance of understanding customer needs and relentlessly working to exceed their expectations.
Ownership: Amazon values leaders who take ownership of their projects and decisions. This principle encourages accountability and the willingness to go above and beyond to deliver results.
Invent and Simplify: Amazon promotes a culture of innovation and continuous improvement. Leaders are encouraged to question the status quo and seek innovative solutions to problems.
Are Right, A Lot: This principle highlights the importance of making data-driven decisions and being willing to admit when you're wrong. It encourages a culture of constructive debate and learning from mistakes.
Learn and Be Curious: Amazon encourages employees to never stop learning and to continuously seek new knowledge and skills. This promotes a culture of personal and professional growth.
Hire and Develop the Best: Amazon places a strong emphasis on hiring exceptional talent and investing in their development. Leaders are expected to raise the bar for talent within their teams.
Insist on the Highest Standards: This principle underscores the importance of maintaining high-quality products and services. It's about setting and achieving ambitious goals.
Think Big: Amazon encourages employees to think long-term and envision bold, ambitious projects. This principle promotes innovation and the pursuit of transformative ideas.
Bias for Action: Amazon values quick decision-making and action. It emphasises the importance of avoiding paralysis by analysis and being willing to take calculated risks.
Frugality: Amazon is known for its efficient use of resources. This principle encourages employees to be mindful of spending and to find cost-effective solutions.
Earn Trust: Trust is paramount at Amazon, both with customers and among colleagues. This principle emphasises the importance of integrity and transparency.
Dive Deep: Amazon leaders are expected to understand the details of their business thoroughly. This involves digging into data and being hands-on when necessary.
Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit: Healthy debate is encouraged, but once a decision is made, it's important to commit fully and execute with determination.
Three more have been added since the book was written: Deliver Results, Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer, and Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility.
Two-pizza teams
You’ve probably heard of two pizza teams. What you might not have heard about was that this was partially borne from Amazon’s early monolithic architecture, aka ‘Obidos’ - named after the fastest part of the Amazon River. But also - the narrowest part. As the tech scaled, dependencies multiplied, and shipping small changes to one part of the system would cause things to break in seemingly unrelated areas.
Amazon decided to reorganise itself into small, autonomous teams. Ones that can be fed with just two pizzas. Combined with a focus on building tech and API-based services that sought to reduce dependencies in order to achieve team autonomy, and rapid execution.
Not to conflate this with micro-services. Amazon themselves have gone back and forth with micro-services. It’s about building your organisation team-first, respecting Conway’s law, and finding the natural fracture planes that let you split your teams in a way that supports manageable cognitive load and ‘single-threaded’ leadership.
Single-threaded Leaders
You may have read Peter Thiel’s book Zero to One, where he talked about his approach at PayPal of giving each leader just one thing to focus on. Well Amazon does this too. They called it being ‘single-threaded’, focusing on just one goal. It enables leaders to avoid doing many things badly, instead doing just one thing brilliantly.
No PowerPoint
Amazon famously banned PowerPoint presentations in favour of well-structured narratives. This encourages clear thinking and effective communication. They commonly use 6 pagers to read at the start of meetings, replacing the typical slides+presenter process as part of a meeting kick off. Why do this? They explain:
Slide decks don’t allow the connections between ideas to be made versus written narratives
Too much weight is given to presenter ability to determine the success or failure of the meeting
Meeting participants can easily derail a presented narrative by jumping ahead with questions, breaking the presenters flow and worse still undermining them in the process.
Group think can ensue by completing a polished presentation and asking for questions at the end - first to speak will set the tone.
Presenting written narratives at the start of the meeting, and swapping the presentation time for reading time means:
Ideas speak for themselves, rather than being carried (or failed by) by presenter gravitas
Readers have time to write questions and contemplate the information, before hearing and being influenced by others’ contributions.
No time is wasted, since the reading time would have been used by presenting time anyway.
They warn not to require the document to be circulated beforehand - it adds pressure to the preparers and the readers to read in advance. And inevitably at least some people won’t read in advance, meaning you need to take the reading time anyway or start the meeting with everyone out of sync.
I personally love this approach, and plan to use it more than I have done in the past. It feels incredibly unnatural, but it makes a lot of sense.
‘Working backwards’
The "Working Backwards" process is central to Amazon's product development. It starts with writing a press release and FAQ document (aka a PR/FAQ) for the product before any code is written, forcing teams to think through the customer experience first.
We used these at Coconut, they’re great. They focus the team on the customer impact, market opportunity and connecting the solution to it. It makes sure that the product solution keeps its focus on solving the customer problem. And acts as an artefact for product marketing and launch communications from the very start of the project.
‘Bar Raisers’
Amazon sets high hiring standards, and the company is constantly working to raise the bar for talent. Leaders are expected to be actively involved in the hiring process.
I recently went through an Amazon-esque interview process, and it was quite different to other companies I’ve interviewed with for a few reasons:
Interviewers dive deep into one principle/value, rather than trying to cover them all off.
All interviews are one to one, not one to many (not sure if this is an Amazon thing)
As a result they are much more conversational, more fluid, I think because of the dive deep approach - it means interviewers can continue the conversation by building on the previous question. Rather than having to move on in a hurry trying to cover off all the company values in a single session. I much preferred this and it’s made me reflect on my own interviewing style.
The job of the ‘Bar Raiser’ at Amazon is to make sure the process is followed to ensure great talent gets hired. Once interviews are complete, interviewers must write up their feedback straight after including a hiring recommendation - (strongly) inclined/not include to hire - undecided is not an option.
These recommendations have to be put forward without having any feedback from other interviewers to avoid leading the witness. Finally, they come together and discuss the feedback as a group for the hiring manager to make a decision based on the recommendations. The Bar Raiser in the room also gets a veto, should the hiring manager make an obviously wrong decision - something Amazon only have on record happening 3 times in their history.
What stands out about Amazon’s processes is that they really understand our human biases, and create processes to minimise their impact and save us from bad decisions.
Web Services, Prime, Fire, Kindle and more
The second part of the book goes into detail on the journey delivering many of Amazon’s famous initiatives, the failures that took place to get to the products we know today, all while referencing the implementation of the practices it discusses in the first part of the book. I won’t go into any of these here, but if you’ve consumed any of Amazon’s services (who hasn’t?), you’ll find this a fascinating read.
You can buy Working Backwards on Amazon.