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

Edward Tufte sums up the benefits of narratives over PP with his own blunt clarity: “PowerPoint becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of PowerPoint makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

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

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.”

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.

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.

separable, single-threaded team being run by a single-threaded leader like Tom. As Jeff Wilke explains, “Separable means almost as separable organizationally as APIs are for software. Single-threaded means they don’t work on anything else.”8 Such teams have clear, unambiguous ownership of specific features or functionality and can drive innovations

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?”

We focus on variances and don’t waste time on the expected People like talking about their area, especially when they’re delivering as expected, and even more so when they exceed expectations, but WBR time is precious. If things are operating normally, say “Nothing to see here” and move along. The goal of the meeting is to discuss exceptions and wh

One often-overlooked piece of the puzzle is determining how to audit metrics. Unless you have a regular process to independently validate the metric, assume that over time something will cause it to drift and skew the numbers. If the metric is important, find out a way to do a separate measurement or gather customer anecdotes and see if the informa

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