Working Backwards

1. What is the book about as a whole?

This is a practical book about the work culture at Amazon. It gives a first-hand experience of the priorities and organizational decisions.

2. What is being said in detail, and how?

Amazon is widely successful and manages to innovate beyond online shopping - even after achieving grand scale. That's impressive and rare and people are curious about how it is done. The authors share their experiences from working on many of successful projects at Amazon and working closely with Jeff Bezos.

1. Commitment to the customer Decisions in the company are always made in the interest of the customer. That is the long-term winning strategy.

2. Hiring

• bar raiser: a group of internal "bar raisers" has the final say on each hire. They are involved in the final discussion before a decision on a candidate. Bad decisions usually stem from hiring managers under pressure - and having a person with no vested interest in the hire can mitigate that.
• extensive interviews: typically ~5 rounds, with different people who each get an impression of the candidate.

3. Employee Motivation A person working at Amazon gets vested stock and a capped salary - so their interest lies in the long-term success of the company.

4. Independent teams The initial experiment of the famous 2-pizza team. The idea is that a team should not be large - and should function independently of other teams. Integration happens through the use of APIs and documentation instead of direct communication as the latter doesn't scale.

5. Single-threaded leaders A project can be successful only if someone is fully committed to it. Good leaders are always in demand - but keeping them focused is key to success.

6. 6-pagers Powerpoint is not a good medium for data and decision making. Amazon uses a 6-pager system - meaning that information is instead presented in written format and read at the start of each meeting. Everyone can see the data for themselves and isn't influenced by the presenter's speaking abilities.

7. Press Release/FAQ A product starts from "PR" - meaning that the first step is to draft a press release - what's the product, who's the target customer, what problem it solves. And FAQ detailing questions for management - the cost, dependencies, number of employees required. This forces engineers and product managers to think ahead and focus on the problems that make sense.

8. Focus on the right input metrics Amazon has a weekly business metric review - and they focus on the metrics they can control directly.

9. Examples The book gives examples of the above practices being implemented - in Kindle, Amazon Prime, Fire Phone, AWS

3. Is the book true, in whole or part?

The difficult question is - how much of that advice generalizes beyond Amazon?

I like the thinking about incentives - for example stock options for employees and bar raisers who have the final say on a candidate even though they will never work with them directly after the decision. Incentivizing the right behavior sounds like a great idea and those are great examples.

I think that some of the advice is quite obvious - like focusing on the right metrics and having single-threaded leaders.

I wholeheartedly agree on the pitfalls of powerpoint and this is something Steve Jobs talked about too. I'm sure that having a widely accepted alternative (such as the 6-pager) is an improvement - though it's probably case-specific.

I like the "working backwards" principle - starting from the end product and moving backward. However, there is always a tradeoff - how much time should you focus on the end vision which will most certainly change as something unanticipated arises? I don't think that there is an obvious answer.

I wish there were more examples of how the teams were independent - I felt like the integration between teams is very difficult to get correct and the book just kind of brushed over it.

4. What of it?

I think that the advice is great, though it's not really groundbreaking. I didn't learn a lot of new concepts - mostly it reinforced existing experience and frustrations.. I'm not really in a position to make any of those decisions - however, if I ever find myself in a position where I can make some of those decisions, I would revisit the book.