Working Backwards

Working Backwards is a business book by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr about the philosophies and approaches to culture and leadership that guided Amazon to where it is today.

“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, taking professional pride in operational excellence.”

Snapshot

• Ban PowerPoint as a presentation tool, and start using six-page narratives and PR/FAQ documents instead:
  • Narrative
    • A paper handout of at most 6 pages with written prose high in information density, as well as the data/graphics necessary to illustrate arguments
    • Helps audience make decisions based on soundness of arguments rather than presentation ability
    • Transfers more information, more quickly, than PowerPoint slides
    • Take 20min at the start of the meeting for all to read the narrative, then move on to the discussion phase, where the audience asks clarifying questions of the presenter while someone takes notes
  • PR/FAQ
    • Press release/Frequently Asked Questions document that describes the customer experience, from which one can iteratively work backwards until the team is clear on what to build
    • PR should be a few paragraphs up to one page
    • FAQ should be up to five pages
• New hires should raise the bar for their team - personal bias and hiring urgency must be systematically prevented from affecting judgement of a candidate (e.g. by giving veto powers to an authority with no immediate connection to the hiring team)
• Implement andon cords in your systems - ways for frontline employees to signal a quality or processing issue (especially if it is a recurring symptom indicating systematic flaws that would otherwise go unnoticed by those upstairs)
• Focus on controllable input metrics rather than output metrics (e.g. selection quality of products available, rather than company’s stock price)
• Be customer-obsessed rather than competitor-focused - working backwards is all about envisioning the desired customer experience, then reversing the thought process from there to figure out what the constraints and tasks are for making that happen
• Draw out the flywheel diagram for your system - what drives growth, and what feeds back into the system that further drives growth as part of a virtuous circle? Evaluate the effect of all decisions based on this.

Thoughts

I recall three distinctive times when I was surprised by Amazon’s service:

1. Amazon Prime Shipping
This seemed to be happening at a time when buying stuff from anywhere else online was likely to take a week or more. Only after trying out Amazon Prime did I start to understand how some people could develop mail order addiction.

2. Prime Video Refund
Proactive, automated movie refund for rentals with buffering issues. I’d spent a few bucks to rent a movie one time on Prime Video, and it had a couple of buffering issues at the start (which more or less smoothed out later on). After the movie, I got an email as described in the book: “We noticed that you experienced poor video playback while watching the following rental… We’re sorry for the inconvenience and have issued you a refund…” and so on. It seemed pretty incredible at the time - still seems pretty incredible now, actually. I don’t often rent movies, but you can bet that that experience will always bring Prime Video to mind as an option.

3. Amazon Locker Delivery
Soon after the pandemic started, this seemed like the only reliable way to get packages in my area, unless you wanted to shell out a couple hundred for a post office box. The self-service experience is so convenient, it’s hard to believe that most brick-and-mortar stores don’t already have a similar system set up.

Having had all these experiences, I guess I’m not surprised at the rigorous methods employed at Amazon as described by the book. It was clear there had been either monumental effort or uncommon dedication behind these services, or both, and it was interesting to take a peek behind the curtains, to get an idea of how it all developed.

Even this book, despite what I’d normally expect from the business/process improvement genre, was quite devoid of fluff and instead filled with detailed and illustrative examples alongside well-crafted arguments. Whether you agree with its contents or not, it’s certainly a solid read.