What I learned from reading Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr.
What I learned from reading Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr.
[3:58] What is best for the customer? Do that: "Amazon believes that long-term growth is best produced by putting the customer first. If you held this conviction, what kind of company would you build?"
[7:05] Jeff skip's the conferences and dinners: "95 percent of the time I spent with Jeff was focused on internal work issues rather than external events like conferences, public speeches, and sports matches."
[9:36] There many ways to solve a problem: We don't claim that being Amazonian is the only way to build a high-performing organization. As Jeff has written, "The world, thankfully, is full of many high-performing, highly distinctive corporate cultures. We never claim that our approach is the right one-just that it's ours." Now it can also be yours.
[11:34] Jeff's one simple rule: "It has to be perfect. He'd remind his team that one bad customer experience would undo the goodwill of hundreds of perfect ones."
[25:08] Don't encourage communication—eliminate it: "Jeff said many times that if we wanted Amazon to be a place where builders can build, we needed to eliminate communication, not encourage it. When you view effective communication across groups as a "defect," the solutions to your problems start to look quite different from traditional ones." (There is nothing conventional about Jeff)
[27:29] Why companies must run experiments: "Time and time again, we learned that consumers would behave in ways we hadn't imagined especially for brand-new features or products."
[30:16] Jeff on the importance of making decisions quickly: "Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you're probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you're good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure."
[30:48] Great anything is rare: "Great Two-Pizza team leaders proved to be rarities. Although we did identify a few such brilliant managers, they turned out to be notoriously difficult to find in sufficient numbers, even at Amazon."
[33:40] Jeff on why writing a memo is better than PowerPoint: "The reason writing a good 4 page memo is harder than "writing" a 20 page powerpoint is because the narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what's more important than what, and how things are related. Powerpoint-style presentations somehow give permission to gloss over ideas, flatten out any sense of relative importance, and ignore the interconnectedness of ideas."
[34:10] Why books have lasted for 5,000 years: "Even though you cannot hear it, with a well-written narrative there is a massive amount of useful information that is being transferred in those 20 minutes."
[34:30] A simple tip from Jeff on how to produce unique insights: "Jeff has an uncanny ability to read a narrative and consistently arrive at insights that no one else did, even though we were all reading the same narrative. After one meeting, I asked him how he was able to do that. He responded with a simple and useful tip that I have not forgotten: he assumes each sentence he reads is wrong until he can prove otherwise. He's challenging the content of the sentence, not the motive of the writer. Jeff, by the way, was usually among the last to finish reading."
[35:12] Why Amazon works backwards: "Working Backwards is a systematic way to vet ideas and create new products. Its key tenet is to start by defining the customer experience, then iteratively work backwards from that point until the team achieves clarity of thought around what to build."
[37:14] Doing a poor job should hurt your professional pride: "To Jeff, a half-baked mock-up was evidence of half-baked thinking. And he was quick to say so, often using strong language to make his point inescapably clear."
[38:44] Jeff came up with the Echo in 2004: "Jeff wrote his own narrative about a device he called the Amazon Puck. It would sit on your countertop and could respond to voice commands like, "Puck. Please order a gallon of milk." Puck would then place the order with Amazon."
[40:00] Working backwards on Kindle: "We were working forward, trying to invent a product that would be good for Amazon, the company, not the customer. When we wrote a Kindle press release and started working backwards, everything changed. We focused instead on what would be great for customers. An excellent screen for a great reading experience. An ordering process that would make buying and downloading books easy. A huge selection of titles. Low prices. We would never have had the breakthroughs necessary to achieve that customer experience were it not for the press release process, which forced the team to invent multiple solutions to customer problems."
[41:45] Design within constraints: "Restricting the length of the document is, to use a term that came up when describing the narratives, a forcing function-we have seen that it develops better thinkers and communicators."
[43:58] Patience. Then bet big: Our approach permits us to work patiently for multiple years to deliver a solution. Once we had a clear vision for how these products could become businesses that would delight customers, we invested big. Patience and carefully managed investment over many years can pay off greatly.
[44:50] Invention works well where differentiation matters: "Invention is not the solution to every problem. For instance, when Amazon started, the company did not create its own computer hardware. On the flip side, when we were planning our e-book business, we decided to get into the hardware game with Kindle. The reason: invention works well where differentiation matters. In the company's early days, the hardware that powered Amazon's data centers was not the point of differentiation with the customer-creating a compelling book-buying online experience was. Whereas with Kindle, others were selling e-books, so there was real value in owning and controlling the creation of an outstanding device for our customers to read them on. Differentiation with customers is often one of the key reasons to invent."
[46:03] Have Steve Jobs level of belief in your products: "Jobs segued into the real purpose of the meeting and announced that Apple had just finished building their first Windows application. He calmly and confidently told us that even though it was Apple's first attempt to build for Windows, he thought it was the best Windows application anyone had ever built."
[47:25] Steve Jobs on the switch to digital: "Jobs said that CDs would go the way of other outdated music formats like the cassette tape, and their importance and portion of overall music sales would drop quickly. His next comment could reasonably be construed as either a matter-of-fact statement, an attempt to elicit an angry retort, or an attempt to goad Jeff into making a bad business decision by acting impulsively. He said, “Amazon has a decent chance of being the last place to buy CDs. The business will be high-margin but small. You'll be able to charge a premium for CDs, since they'll be hard to find." Jeff did not take the bait. But we all knew that being the exclusive seller of antique CDs did not sound like an appealing business model."
[50:40] You can invent or copy: "He would frequently describe the two fundamental approaches that each company must choose between when developing new products and services. We could be a fast follower-that is, make a close copy of successful products that other companies had built-or we could invent a new product on behalf of our customers. He said that either approach is valid, but he wanted Amazon to be a company that invents."
[54:48] Amazon's Kindle strategy was influenced by Apple: "In digital, that meant focusing on applications and devices consumers used to read, watch, or listen to content, as Apple had already done with iTunes and the iPod. We all took note of what Apple had achieved in digital music in a short period of time and sought to apply those learnings to our long-term product vision."
[56:48] Good ideas are rare. When you find one bet heavily: "There was a heated discussion about the surprising ramp-up in expenses across many areas, particularly with Kindle. At some point in the debate, someone asked Jeff point blank: "How much more money are you willing to invest in Kindle?" Jeff calmly turned to our CFO, Tom Szkutak, smiled, shrugged his shoulders, and asked the rhetorical question, "How much money do we have?" That was his way of signaling the strategic importance of Kindle."
[59:10] Get the product to be Howard Hughes quality: "To make his point Jeff described a scene in which Hughes, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, visits one of his aircraft manufacturing facilities to check on the progress of his latest project-the Hughes H-1 Racer, a sleek single-passenger plane designed to set new speed records. Hughes examines the plane closely, running his fingers along the surface of the fuselage. His team watches anxiously. Hughes is not satisfied.
"Not enough," he says. "Not enough. These rivets have to be completely flush. I want no air resistance on the fuselage. She's got to be cleaner. Cleaner! You understand?"
The team leader nods. Back to the drawing board.
Jeff had told Steve that it was his job to be like Howard Hughes. From then on, Steve had to run his fingers over each new Amazon product, checking for anything that might reduce the quality, insisting that his team maintain the highest standards."