Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards)

... as Jeff would say, we took it as an article of faith. If we served customers well, if we prioritized customers and delivered for them, things like sales, things like revenue and active customers, and things like the share price and free cash flow would follow. So therefore, when we're making a decision thinking about a problem, we're gonna start with what's best for the customer and then come backward from there. That te- that informs, like, what's the work you have to do to then create this new solution for customers.

(instrumental music) Today my guest is Bill Carr. Bill is the co-author of the book Working Backwards, which is a synthesis of the biggest lessons that Bill and his co-author learned from their many years at Amazon. Bill joined Amazon just five years after it was founded, stayed there for 15 years where he worked on the books business, and then as VP of digital media, launched and managed the company's global digital music and video businesses including Amazon Music, Prime Video, and Amazon Studios. After Amazon, Bill was an executive in residence at Maveron, an early stage VC firm, then chief operating officer at OfferUp. And these days Bill runs a consulting firm called Working Backwards LLC where he and his co-author Colin Bryar help growth stage and public companies implement the many practices developed at Amazon. In our conversation, we go many levels deep on how to actually implement a number of the practices and ways of working that helped Amazon become the success that it is today, including the process of how to actually work backwards, how to organize your team with a single threaded leader, how to divide up your metrics into input and output metrics, how to practice disagreeing and committing, how to implement the Bar Raiser program in your hiring process, and so much more. Huge thank you to Ethan Evans for making this episode possible and introducing me to Bill. With that, I bring you Bill Carr after a short word from our sponsors. Today's episode is brought to you by AssemblyAI. If you're looking to build AI-powered features in your audio and video products, then you need to know about AssemblyAI, which makes it easy to transcribe and understand speech at scale. What I love about AssemblyAI is you can use their simple API to access the latest AI breakthroughs from top-tier research labs. Product teams at startups and enterprises are using AssemblyAI to automatically transcribe and summarize phone calls and virtual meetings, detect topics in podcasts, pinpoint when sensitive content is spoken, and lots more. All of AssemblyAI's models which are accessed through their API are production ready. So many PMs I know are considering or already building with AI, and AssemblyAI is the fastest way to build with AI for audio use cases. Now is the time to check out AssemblyAI, which makes it easy to bring the highest accuracy transcription plus valuable insights to your customers, just like Spotify, CallRail, and Writer do for theirs. Visit assemblyai.com/lenny to try their API for free and start testing their models with their no-code playground. That's assemblyai.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Coda. You've heard me talk about how Coda is the doc that brings it all together, and how it can help your team run smoother and be more efficient. I know this firsthand, because Coda does that for me. I use Coda every day to wrangle my newsletter content calendar, my interview notes for podcasts, and to coordinate my sponsors. More recently, I actually wrote a whole post on how Coda's product team operates, and within that post they shared a dozen templates that they use internally to run their product team, including managing the roadmap, their OKR process, getting internal feedback, and essentially their whole product development process is done within Coda. If your team's work is spread out across different documents and spreadsheets and a stack of workflow tools, that's why you need Coda. Coda puts data in one centralized location regardless of format, eliminating roadblocks that can slow your team down. Coda allows your team to operate on the same information and collaborate in one place. Take advantage of this special limited time offer just for startups. Sign up today at coda.io/lenny and get $1,000 starter credit on your first statement. That's coda.io/lenny to sign up, and get a startup credit of $1,000. Coda.io/lenny. Bill, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.