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

A well-instrumented two-pizza team had another powerful benefit. They were better at course correcting—detecting and fixing mistakes as they arose.

What was originally known as a two-pizza team leader (2PTL) evolved into what is now known as a single-threaded leader (STL). The STL extends the basic model of separable teams to deliver their key benefits at any scale the project demands. Today, despite their initial success, few people at Amazon still talk about two-pizza teams.

The Features and Benefits of the PR/FAQ The primary point of the process is to shift from an internal/company perspective to a customer perspective. Customers are pitched new products constantly. Why will this new product be compelling enough for customers to take action and buy it? A common question asked by executives when reviewing the product f

Furthermore, outsourcing in this context offers a classic example of short-term decisions with devastating long-term implications. Practically every day, Amazon could tweak its offering to make things a little better. And so practically every day, the distance between itself and its competitors widened. Outsourcing turned out to be the more expensi

Now, this may be one of those moments when you’re thinking, “But we don’t have a Jeff.” The good news is that you don’t need a Jeff to make this type of decision. You only need to ruthlessly stick to the simple-to-understand (but sometimes hard-to-follow) principles and process that insist on customer obsession, encourage thinking long term, value

When we have invented, our long-term, patient approach—driven by customer need—has been fundamentally different from the more conventional “skills-forward” approach to invention, in which a company looks for new business opportunities that neatly fit with its existing skills and competencies. While this approach can be rewarding, there is a fundame

In a talk at the 2018 Air, Space and Cyber Conference, Jeff described Amazon this way: “Our culture is four things: customer obsession instead of competitor obsession; willingness to think long term, with a longer investment horizon than most of our peers; eagerness to invent, which of course goes hand in hand with failure; and then, finally, takin

The right input metrics get the entire organization focused on the things that matter most. Finding exactly the right one is an iterative process that needs to happen with every input metric.

Tufte identified in one sentence the problem we’d been experiencing: “As analysis becomes more causal, multivariate, comparative, evidence based, and resolution-intense,” he writes, “the more damaging the bullet list becomes.”