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

Properly evaluating your business and striving to improve each week requires a willingness to openly discuss failures, learn from them, and always look for inventions that will delight customers even more.

“We have an unshakeable conviction that the long-term interests of shareowners are perfectly aligned with the interests of customers.”2 In other words, while it’s true that shareholder value stems from growth in profit, Amazon believes that long-term growth is best produced by putting the customer first.

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

When the retail, operations, and finance teams began to construct the initial Amazon WBR, they turned to a well-known Six Sigma process improvement method called DMAIC, an acronym for Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control.1 Should you decide to implement a Weekly Business Review for your business, we recommend following the DMAIC steps as well. Th

When Amazon teams come across a surprise or a perplexing problem with the data, they are relentless until they discover the root cause. Perhaps the most widely used technique at Amazon for these situations is the Correction of Errors (COE) process, based upon the “Five Whys” method developed at Toyota and used by many companies worldwide.

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.”

Input metrics measure things that, done right, bring about the desired results in your output metrics.

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.

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