Working Backwards

Bryar and Carr were Amazon executives for a combined twenty-seven years, and Bryar served as Bezos' technical adviser, a role in which he shadowed him for two years. The book documents Amazon's operating mechanisms rather than its history. The leadership principles are covered as operating instruments rather than as values, with specific accounts of how they are used in hiring, in performance evaluation and in decisions. The bar raiser process for hiring assigns a trained interviewer from outside the hiring team with authority to veto, which removes the hiring manager's incentive to fill the role quickly.

The single-threaded leader concept holds that a significant initiative requires one person whose only job is that initiative, and the separable teams structure gives each team its own resources and interfaces so that dependencies do not accumulate. The narrative process replaced presentations with six-page documents read in silence at the start of the meeting, which the authors argue forces complete reasoning that slides permit people to conceal.

Working backwards means writing the press release and the frequently asked questions for a product before building it, which forces the team to state what the customer benefit is and to confront the difficult questions before any resources are committed. The metrics material covers input metrics that a team can control rather than output metrics that follow, and the weekly business review structure.

The book is written by former executives and is favourable throughout. It says almost nothing about labour conditions or about the failures. The mechanisms are described concretely enough to implement, which is what distinguishes it from most accounts of the company.