Notes on Working Backwards by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr

I recently finished reading Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr. I really loved it!

It was the perfect blend of stories with lots of juicy details and principles/techniques that can be applied to the future and other business situations. I really enjoyed the full detailed examples in the appendix as well. While I had heard of many of the ideas before, it was nice to read them fully fleshed out and in a lot more detail. It was also fun in the second half of the book to read the in-depth stories behind Kindle, Prime, AWS, and other big projects.

I highly recommend this for any technology leader or someone hiring engineers or leading a software project. Below are some of my main notes and takeaways.

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Intro
Customer obsession
Long term
Operational excellence
Bar raiser hiring process
Separable teams with leaders
Written narratives
Input metrics
Product development process
Work hard, have fun, make history

Part 1 being Amazonian

Intro
Leadership principles
Goals and alignment
Single threaded leadership
6 page narrative
Bar raiser
Working backwards with press release and faq
Controllable input metrics

1 building blocks: leadership principles and mechanisms
Customer obsession
Unrelentingly high standards
Simple rule: it has to be perfect
Under promise and over deliver
Need to work hard, smart, and long
Relentlessly and unreasonably high principles
Interviews and performance reviews against the principles
Leadership principles
Customer obsession. Start with the customer and work backward. Earn and keep their trust. Pay attention to competitors but obsess over customers.
Ownership. Leaders are owners. Think long term and don’t sacrifice long term value for short term results. Act on behalf of entire company not just team. Never say that’s not my job. 
Invent and simplify. Expect innovation. Look for ideas from anywhere. Not limited by not invented here. 
We are right a lot. Leaders have good judgment and instincts. Seek diverse perspectives to disconfirm their beliefs. 
Learn and be curious. Never done learning. Always seek to improve. 
Hire and develop the best. Raise the bar with every hire. Recognize exceptional talent. Leaders develop leaders. 
Insist on the highest standards. Relentlessly and unreasonably high standards and continually raising the bar. 
Think big. Bold direction that inspires results. 
Bias for action. Calculated risk taking. 
Frugality. Get more done with less. Self sufficiency and invention. 
Earn trust. Vocally self critical. Don’t believe your body odor smells like perfume. Benchmark self against the best. 
Dive deep. Audit frequently and stay connected at all levels. Skeptical when metrics and anecdotes differ. No task is beneath them. 
Backbone. Disagree and commit. Do not compromise for sake of social cohesion. 
Deliver results. Focus on key inputs for business. Never settle. 
Awards with fun names and prizes for each principle
Mechanisms reinforcing leadership principles
Annual planning process
S team meetings
Annual planning OP1 and OP2
Begins in summer
High level objectives for company from execs
OP1 bottom up plan for each team
Narrative, key initiatives, learnings from past, Requests for hires and marketing
OP2 updates plans for actual results following end of year
S team goals
Selected goals from teams to prioritize top goals from each
Specific, measurable, attainable
Aggressive that hitting 75% is expected
Execs toil over execution details and dive deep
Finance tracks all s team goals green yellow or red
Compensation supports long term thinking 
Equity earned over years
Base salaries low

2 hiring: bar raiser process
Hiring urgency and personal bias bad
Ask for SAT scores of everyone
Random quiz questions like why manhole covers round
Good intentions don’t solve the problem
Need mechanism to not make mistakes again
Consistent hiring standard
Bar raiser in each interview who can veto the candidate and doesn’t report to hiring manager and not penalized if role goes unfilled
Job description
Specific and focused
Review meeting with bar raiser and hiring manager 
Phone screeners need to be clear on the JD
Resume Review
Select candidates against JD
Phone screen
One hour phone interview
Structured interview
Don’t push questionable candidates unless excited to hire them after the interview 
In house interview
Bring 1 in 4 phone screens on site
5-7 hours to complete
5-7 interviews
Half day interview training course
Interviewers around level of candidate 
Behavioral interviewing
Assigning principles to interviewers to ask questions about
Examples of times candidate did stuff related to the principles and how
Star situation task action result
Dig into what candidate did versus team
What was the toughest call on project x and who made it
If you didn’t work on project x what would’ve happened
Bar raiser
Conducts an interview
Coaches others
Determines if candidate will raise bar 
Written feedback
Specific and detailed and filled with examples from interview
Write it immediately after interview
Do not see or discuss feedback with others 
Debrief
Everyone read everyone’s feedback
Offer to change vote
Make two column list of principles and note where candidate meets them or not
Bar raiser facilities debrief
Hiring manager listens and learns and speaks infrequently
Reference check
Candidate supplies 4-5 references of former managers 
Hiring manager not recruiter calls the references
If given the chance, would you hire this person again
Of the people you have managed or worked with, in what percentile would you place this candidate
Offer and Onboarding
Hiring manager to make the offer and all them on it not recruiter
Keep candidate excited 
Send stack of books or DVDs to candidate
Enlist others to help close

3 organizing: separable, single threaded leadership
Best way to fail at something is to make it someone’s part time job
Single person owns a single initiative and heads up team to solve it
Untangle monolithic architecture
Every dependency creates drag
Gotchas in shared code
Eliminate coordination communication not increase it
Instead build clear APIs and loosely coupling systems 
New project initiatives (prioritization across projects)
Two pizza team
No more than 10 people
Autonomous
Service based software architecture
Evaluated by well defined fitness function
Weighted sum of metrics
Monitored in real time on public dashboard against other teams 
Be the business owner
Full stack ownership across functions
Led by multidisciplined top flight leader
Self funded
Approved in advance by s team
Tearing down monolith
Service oriented
Encapsulate the data with the business logic together
Only access is through published interface and no direct database access
No data sharing among services
First autonomous teams
Instrumentation
Removing dependencies
Two pizza teams work best for product development but not business functions because those don’t suffer from tangled dependencies
Fitness functions worse than component metrics
Just agree on input metrics
Functional matrix of leaders with dotted line to product lead who could be different than HR manager 
Single threaded leaders
Be stubborn on vision but flexible on details

4 communicating narratives and the six pager
Awkward silence at start of meetings 
Ban on PowerPoint
Shift to narratives
Six pager for any idea proposed
PR FAQ for new product development 
Ideas not presenters matter most
First 20 min of meeting everyone reads narrative and then discuss
Six pager lists tenets on which it’s based and includes faq
3 minutes reading time per page so 6 pages is 18 min reading then 40 min discussion for 60 min meeting. Cut in half for 30 min meeting. 
Don’t orally walk through document
Can go around and each person gives feedback on the doc
Discussion where audience asks questions of presenter
Someone else takes notes at discussion
Read narrative with skepticism and challenge it

5 working backwards: start from desired customer experience
Write press release and FAQ before you build the product
Press release less than 1 page
FAQ 5 pages or less
More senior attendees speak last in discussion meetings to avoid influencing
Line by line feedback on doc in hour meeting
PR heading, subheading, problem paragraph, solution paragraphs, quotes, getting started
Consumer needs sent total addressable market
Not to exceed price point
List dependencies

6 metrics: manage your inputs, not your outputs
Weekly business review 
Define, measure, analyze, improve, control
Flywheel for growth
Look for patterns in metrics weekly
Include anecdotes and exception reports
Alarms for metrics
Consistency in formatting
Focus on variances and exceptions not status quo
Keep strategy discussions separate from ops
Make transitions in meeting presenters easy
Add various zooms of data to same chart
Dual view of trailing 6 and 12 months
Add YoY growth rates to spot trends
Output metrics show results, input metrics provide guidance
Voice of the customer for anecdotes
Corporate employees being customer service agents for a few days
Andon cord for anyone to stop process due to quality problem

Part 2 invention machine at work

7 kindle
Focus on differentiation and uniqueness

8 prime

9 prime video

10 aws