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

Here’s another example of where a single-threaded leader and team helps. I was accountable for the financial performance and overall health of the affiliates business. Our team had virtually all the resources required to launch this feature: we had software engineers and product managers to build the feature; and we had our own customer service rep

First, customer-focused ideas come from all areas within Amazon. Many companies have the “business people” tell the “technical people” what to build. There’s little discussion back and forth, and the teams stay in their own lanes. Amazon is not like this at all. It’s everyone’s job to obsess over customers and think of inventive ways to delight the

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

But Jeff felt that if we tried to manage digital media as a part of the physical media business, it would never be a priority. The bigger business carried the company after all, and it would always get the most attention. Steve told me that getting digital right was highly important to Jeff, and he wanted Steve to focus on nothing else. Steve wante

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

Over our long march to building Amazon’s digital business, we proved a powerful lesson: it takes exceptionally patient and unwavering leadership to persevere through the prolonged process of building a new business and navigating through transformative times in an established industry with entrenched interests.

invention works well where differentiation matters.

Many companies that decide to enter a business area in which they have little internal expertise or capability choose to outsource, as happened in the early days of e-commerce when brick-and-mortar retailers created their first online retail sites. They brought in third-party developers, consultants, and sometimes both. This approach enabled them t