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

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

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

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

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.

invention works well where differentiation matters.

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

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

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.

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.