Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

I have heard and used the methods of working backwards for a while but I didn’t take the time to read this book till this year. The main point is that BEFORE you begin an effort, start with the customer benefit and then work backward to determine everything that needs to be done in order to make that customer experience come true.

The idea of aligning the team around the press release has been a useful exercise to get everyone from developers to senior leadership aligned on where an effort is going and why. From that foundation, decisions are focused which smooths the scoping, budgeting, and approval processes.

I have been involved in projects that struggled to conduct an ROI and value assessments after the fact. Client teams add items that the system data does not capture or was not designed to include. Using this methodology the assessments and metrics are clear from the customer benefit which eliminates a lot of scope creep and wasted meeting time.

Some of my notes from the book include

“You can write down your corporate culture, but when you do so, you’re discovering it, uncovering it—not creating it.”

Amazon’s major products and initiatives since 2004 have one very Amazonian thing in common—they were created through a process called Working Backwards.

Its key tenet is to start by defining the customer experience, then iteratively work backwards from that point until the team achieves clarity of thought around what to build.

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?”

Dave Limp, summed up nicely what might happen next: “The best way to fail at inventing something is by making it somebody’s part-time job.”

Speed, or more accurately velocity, which measures both speed and direction, matters in business. With all other things being equal, the organization that moves faster will innovate more, simply because it will be able to conduct a higher number of experiments per unit of time. (the OODA Loop)

Yet many companies find themselves struggling against their own bureaucratic drag, which appears in the form of layer upon layer of permission, ownership, and accountability, all working against fast, decisive forward progress.

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.

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.

Numerical data become more powerful when combined with real-life customer stories. The Dive Deep leadership principle states, “Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details, audit frequently, and are skeptical when metrics and anecdotes differ. No task is beneath them.”

Amazon’s belief that focusing on controllable input metrics instead of output metrics drives meaningful growth. Morale is, in a sense, an output metric, whereas freedom to invent and build is an input metric.

“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. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.”

“The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within,” by Edward Tufte, High-resolution handouts allow viewers to contextualize, compare, narrate, and recast evidence. In contrast, data-thin, forgetful displays tend to make audiences ignorant and passive

Our Tenet: Ideas, Not Presenters, Matter Most A switch to narratives places the team’s ideas and reasoning center stage, leveling the playing field by removing the natural variance in speaking skills and graphic design expertise that today plays too great a role in the success of presentations. The entire team can contribute

The Readers’ Advantage: Information Density and Interconnection of Ideas One useful metric for comparison is what we call the Narrative Information Multiplier (tip of the hat to former Amazon VP Jim Freeman for coining this term). A typical Word document, with text in Arial 11-point font, contains 3,000–4,000 characters per page. For comparison, we analyzed the last 50 S-Team PowerPoint slide presentations and found that they contained an average of just 440 characters per page. This means a written narrative would contain seven to nine times the information density of our typical PowerPoint presentation. If you take into account some of the other PowerPoint limitations discussed above, this multiplier only increases.

FAQ. Strong six-pagers don’t just make their case, they anticipate counterarguments, points of contention, or statements that might be easily misinterpreted.

The fact that most PR/FAQs don’t get approved is a feature, not a bug. Spending time up front to think through all the details of a product, and to determine—without committing precious software development resources—which products not to build, preserves your company’s resources to build products that will yield the highest impact for customers and your business

failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment. 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.”

Andon Cord, which was adapted from the Toyota Production System: factory workers can pull a physical cord to halt the assembly line when they spot a defect. At Amazon, the customer service people have a virtual cord—actually a button—that they can push when a defect is noticed. It instantly prevents Amazon from selling any more of the affected product

Amazon’s Bias for Action leadership principle. It states, “Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk-taking.”

Here is the LINK to the AMAZON Book