Working Backwards: Insights Stories & Secrets from Inside Amazon

By Colin Bryar & Bill Car

🚀 Product Management at Amazon in 3 Paragraphs

1. Working Backwards takes the most fundamental and business-differentiating building blocks and principles from the authors’ time at Amazon and presents them first as principles and later shows how those principles were applied in spinning off new gigantic businesses such as Kindle, Prime, and AWS. The principles at the highest level center around creating business practices that increase speed in consuming and utilizing data, experimentation (which requires failures), and starting with solving customer needs and pain points. It is a seminal work on Product Management at Amazon
2. The principles of product management at Amazon include the following eight ideas: 1) Defining the basics of the culture, 2) articulating leadership principles, 3) regularizing essential practices, 4) Bar Raiser hiring, 5) teams with single-threaded leaders, 6) written narratives, 7) Working Backwards from customer needs, 8) focusing on input metrics. Many of the tactics center around finding the right people through interviewing, increasing the productivity of meetings using well-composed six-page narratives rather than PowerPoint, truly defining what you are building before starting by iterating on press releases and FAQ documentation before building, ensuring that leaders are adequately resourced towards efforts and are held hugely accountable for a well-defined and scoped area of work through single-threaded leadership, and focusing on input metrics rather than output metrics, meaning using metrics that can be controlled and get at both the root causes of operations and the company’s raison d’être (e.g. the flywheel).

3. The principles above were highlighted by describing the launch of some of Amazon’s biggest successes. Kindle was the entry point for Amazon’s pivot to digital business and was amongst its most important. In this pivot to digital, they worked through serious business questions and decided what differentiated, integrated customer experience they could deliver. These successes and lessons enabled Amazon to build strong businesses in video and music. The birth of AWS came from wanting to enable B2B customers to customize their own stores through an API. This then evolved into more services, turning developers, both internally and externally, into customers.

🎨 Impressions

I liked this book. It demystified some of what I’d heard about Amazon operations. My time at 98point6 brought me into contact with these principles, as there was heavy Amazon influence there. 98point6 was trying to build a more humane version of Amazon culture, which was reflected in the core values and the hiring process.

I think the Product Organization could have benefitted from enhanced focus with single-threaded leadership teams that could have relentlessly focused on core issues, instead of letting perceived market demand dictate the company’s focus on too much. The product brief process could have been improved by doing something more along the lines of the Press Release/FAQ documentation, as features were often more isolated and less cross-functional than they could have been.

How I Discovered It

This was one of the books selected for the 98point6 PM Book Club.

Who Should Read It?

Those interested in business or product management will find value in reading Working Backwards. It was one of my favorite books I read this year and has changed the way I look at product management for the better.

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

I think my approach to stakeholder management will change after reading this book. In startup culture I often show ownership by getting involved in various areas, which has distracted me from focusing on what I consider to be most important. I plan to shift the meetings I facilitate towards using narratives to structure ideation with stakeholders. I’ll also experiment with writing PR/FAQ documentation when proposing new initiatives.

✍️ My Top Quotes

• 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.
• If you’re faced with a challenge that’s growing exponentially, meeting it head – on with equal but opposing force just locks you into exponentially growing cost — a dead – end strategy.
• “Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow.
• The best way to fail at inventing something is by making it somebody’s part – time job.