YouSaid · the spoken record

Bill Carr

lines on the record: 105
first: 2023-11-02
most recent: 2023-11-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We're always looking for feedback. You can post a review on Amazon for our book. That's probably like the best way. You can fill out the contact us form or send us an email telling us what you found most useful in the book or what you actually found that is missing. What would you like to learn more about if we were to say write another book or write more? What would you like us to tell you about?”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess so. But it used to be that you maybe in the days of the slower internet that I would tell you to go at non-peak hours, but this isn't really an issue anymore.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I sorry, I have no secret insights. There's not like something like if you go on Monday mornings at this time, the prices are lower or something, the stock is better. No, I know of no such thing.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It took me a while. I always wanted to go fast first and not go slow first. So I'd say a lot of my personal development and growth. And that's a big thing that I learned from Jeff at Amazon.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, one that I end up coming to a lot professionally and somewhat personally is this one called Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. This is a, I believe the origins of this one are actually from the Marine Corps for the Scout Snipers. So not trying to promote that particular craft. But the point of it is that actually, and we did this a lot at Amazon, it really oftentimes really to go fast, you actually need to kind of go slow. And most people confuse speed with velocity and the difference between the two is that speed, velocity has both speed and a vector to it, meaning you're some specific destination. And so I see a lot of people who are going very, very fast, but the destination isn't very clear. They haven't really sort of thought that out well. So slow as smooth, smooth is fast.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's actually quite basic. It's, you know, tell me about your most significant professional accomplishment. And I have to always clarify this by this. I mean not some award you won or some promotion you got. I mean something you built or some product, some process, some organization you built, something like that. And I could basically then once they get into that example ask a lot of probing and follow up questions like it fill an entire hour interview just sticking with this one example to really understand how they using the star method, which is to try to understand everything from the situation to the result and everything they did in between who they influenced, how they had influenced, what decisions they had to make, what roadblocks they encountered. If I just pull on that one string, I can learn a whole lot about a candidate.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This one I did not buy on Amazon, and this one, as most of you may not understand this one, but I'm an avid cyclist and I got myself a new set of wheels for my road bike this year. Actually, my roadbike and my gravel bike. It's the ZIP 303 Firecrest, the latest model. And boy, these are just fantastic wheels. They're light. They're sturdy. They absorb all the bumps well. I can use them on a road bike. I can use them on a gravel bike. Awesome wheels”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had not actually heard of it either. You can basically go on to Prime Video and you can find this show and you can kind of subscribe to MGM Plus through that.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's supposed to come out next month, but I used to know this have to know the answer to this question, but I don't anymore. But I anxiously await the next one. I thought that last one was awesome. I even liked the original Dune movie, so I'm probably unusual that way. And I just watched, along with my wife, we just enjoyed watching the TV series, A Spy Among Friends, which was on MGM Plus.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, my favorite recent movie is the latest Dune movie, and I can't wait for the new one to come out. When is that coming out?”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'd say in the management world, not surprisingly, you'll hear good to great. I'd say Drucker on management or Drucker the effective executive. And then the other one I'd say that's a little bit different is I'd recommend the Steve Jobs biography. I never worked at Apple, but sort of looking at that arc, a lot of the way those things worked was not that different from what I experienced at Amazon. So it's sort of a good window into what it's like to be inside some company tech company that goes through product innovation and big growth. On a personal basis, recent books would be Seven Eves by Neil Stevenson is a favorite and gentleman Moscow.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Simple way is you can just send an email. I'm Bill at WorkingBackwards.com, and Colin is calling at workingbacks.com. You can also just check out our website, www.workingbackwards.com. We have some information there. We have a contact us form. Those would be the best ways.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Solutions that could be found in these processes. And then we sort of prioritize those and come up with a plan to work within the organization to help them implement those. And what's also sort of different is that we're very hands-on working at all levels of the company. And we will, as we do it, we will be there in the meetings with the teams to help coach them and teach them along so that we make sure that it actually gets implemented properly into spec and they get the outcome they want.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Complex now. I've got multiple product lines. It's well over 100 million in annual run rate, growing fast, complex. So most of our clients are either large, well past Series C private companies or they're public companies. And in most cases, a C-level leader or the CEO themselves has read our book and recognizes that they have a lot of the same problems that we had at Amazon. looks at these as useful solutions and wants us to help us help them implement them. So we tend to usually first actually go in and do an assessment of how they do things today because to help people move from one place to another, we have to understand where they are. And then we come up with a prioritized list along with that, the CEO and C-level leaders of like, what are the things that would be most useful? What are the symptoms and problems you're having and what are the sort of the root causes?”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, great. Yeah, Colin and I, one of the reasons we wrote this book was to pass on what we learned to the next generation of business leaders sort of at scale with a book, but also because we had a passion to work with companies directly one-to-one. And so we are advisors, consultants, call what you will, but non-traditional, like we don't have a team of people working for us. Each of us just work directly with the companies who engage us. And generally speaking, what we do is we are the right kind of company for us to work with, first of all, has to achieve a certain scale. Companies that are sort of in the product market fit phase, like they need to focus on getting product market fit, they probably don't really need to focus much on how they put in scalable, durable processes. Like, sure, some of these could definitely be helpful to you even if you're in that phase, but really these are designed for like my company's kind of.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Buy in all the way up to the CEO because if you're really going to change the way you do product development or if you're really going to change the way you do hiring, that probably requires buy-in of the CEO. And so I would seek to get that probably before I would move too fast. Some of these things, though, can be piloted in your own little group. Like you're one little product development group. You want to decide you want to start writing PRFAQs. probably can decide to do that. But again, try to check with your leadership. The other thing I would just tell you is that for any of these processes, these in our book or any book, implementing a new process is not easy. And if you kind of go into it lightly and kind of dip your toes into it and sort of try it out, it's probably not going to work for you because it'll be hard at first and it requires some level of commitment to actually work through that hard part and say like, no, I'm really committed to doing this. And it will take.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, good question. And the first thing I'd say is one thing to be careful of is a lot of times when I'm talking to a company about this, these processes they say, well, does this mean we need to turn into Amazon? And the first thing I tell them is, well, first of all, I couldn't turn you into Amazon if I wanted to because you have your own culture. And secondly, no, that's not the idea is for you to try to become Amazon. The purpose is to sort of look at these processes and best practices they have and consider adopting parts or all of them into your organization to improve the same company of a certain scale has these same processes. So this is just a different way to do them. So you should have scalable repeatable processes for each one of these. Pick one, here's one choice of ways to do these things. The other piece of advice I give is that a lot of these changes are relatively profound. They really require”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is a huge time suck. And it sometimes could be up to 10 hours of my week spent actually as a barraiser. The selection process is, you know, you start with as a company I would recommend if you wanted to do this, you pick a department to pilot it with. Pick people who are A, care a lot about your hiring process, B, appear to be good interviewers. And C, seem to have high standards. It's also a great role for people who are earlier in their career by giving them this additional sort of leadership opportunity. It's a great way to grow and develop leaders, by the way, because this added responsibility is a great way for them to start testing out leadership. And you have to train them properly and you have to have dedication to the process. But I generally would try to pilot it within one group at first.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so this often gets confused. The decision maker is the hiring manager. The whole interview loop and the borrows are actually just there to help the hiring manager make the right decision. Now, oftentimes the hiring manager could feel like this is actually a bureaucratic process and a group of people that I have to sell and they're just in my way between me and hiring this person, which is kind of a natural feeling to have. But one of the feedback I would always give managers who are new to this is like, no, no, no, that's not the way to think about it. Think about these people are helping you because the amount of time you're going to put into the hiring process may seem like a lot, but if you hire the wrong person, boy, that amount of time you're going to have to deal with managing that person, that's going to be a lot more, the impact on the team, impact on you. So making a great decision here is important. They're here to help you. So yes, the final decision was with the hiring manager. Technically speaking, the Barrazer could block them from a decision to hire someone, but they would well done. They would help the hiring manager see the reasons not to hire the person.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That would be used and an interview methodology that would be used in every interview, which was the vector criteria would be our leadership principles and the methodology would be behavioral based interviewing. So this foreraiser was basically would be a subject matter expert on how this process worked. They'd conduct the debrief to make sure that we were actually adhering to the process, that people were sticking to the objective criteria rather than saying, I don't think we should hire this person because I don't know, they don't seem to want to work here enough. Maybe that's a valid reason, but it's actually not part of our objective criteria. And so the barraiser was there to act as a balance also on the urgency bias that every hiring manager has, which is like, I got to fill these roles. But rather than filling them with the next warm body they find, make sure they fill them with people who actually meet our standards, fit our culture and meet our”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“appropriate. And the concept was that on every interview loop, there's one person who is not the hiring manager who doesn't report to the hiring manager, who's not the recruiting manager, a line, they're in the business. They're a software development manager or they're a marketing manager, and they are on the interview loop and they're a barraiser, which means when we get to the debrief meeting, they will run that meeting, not the hiring manager, not the recruiter. They will run the meeting. And it also means that they technically have veto power over the hiring manager, which, by the way, a good barraiser never uses or I never saw a barraiser use. I was a barraiser in my 15 years at Amazon, I never used it, never saw it used. And then finally, which actually was not true in 1999, but later became true, was once we established our leadership principles, we created a set of objective criteria.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If Microsoft had some methodology or criteria, they probably would just apply that. Well, is that methodology or criteria relevant to our company because every company has a different culture? And I'm here to tell you that if someone's been a super successful vice president at Microsoft does not mean they can be a super successful at Amazon or at Google or Facebook, sometimes they can, but these companies are very different. They all do work very differently the way leadership happens and decisions are made are very different. So how do we fix this problem other than letting it run rampant and basically hire a bunch of people who are, we don't know if they fit our culture and we don't know if they fit our high standards we have for what we expect of engineering leaders or engineers. So they created this barrazer process, which by the way they borrowed from Microsoft, which had a process called as”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What information are they using to make these hires? And what information they were using is obviously they were just using their own personal judgment. And their personal judgment combined with whatever criteria they used at prior companies that they worked for. So let's say they.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the bar raiser hiring process is a process, is actually one of the first ones that was established in the book. It was pretty early in the company's history back in 1999. And we created it for a simple reason. To quote one senior leader at Amazon, we had new people hiring new people, hiring new people. We were in our hyper-growth phase, okay? The company was only, what three, four years old, and we were growing like a weed at that point. This started off actually in our tech org and what our senior leaders in tech realized is, my gosh, we hire some new engineering leader. And then the next thing is that their job is to go hire like, you know, the senior managers and they'll go hire like managers. And all these people have been here for, you know, like a week. So we don't really even know our company yet. They don't know our culture yet. They don't know our standards yet.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A team that's trying to go build something new. They need speed, but some approval here, approval there, it's going to get in their way. And one of the ways we solved that two ways one was when we went to go build digital media in AWS, we put like two of our smartest leaders in the company on those things, Steve Kessel and Andy Jassy. And number two, they were meeting with Jeff regularly. Jeff was deeply engaged with them, reviewing like, what are we going to go build part of the decision to decide where we're going to go build. And so he could then also, between their seniority and, of course, him being the CEO, they could run interference on these sorts of things too. So even if you want to have innovation, even if you really, you know, you really do crave it, you're willing to take the risk. If you don't set up the organization in the right way, like you're just not going to get it.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so we tried to focus more on well, what did you actually build and contribute ways you improve selection or lowered prices or whatever that might be? So those two things about the compensation mattered a lot. And then the second thing was having a CEO who was really committed to it. And it wasn't something that they delegated to someone else. Safi Bakal, I think, writes about this in his book, Loonshots, where part of the conditions that are necessary for innovation to occur are that you actually create different structures of decision-making, of approvals, of all kinds of things. If you create some team that's going to go build something new and innovative, because most of the structures inside a big company are kind of designed to crush and impede a small, innovative”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we all had an incentive to do what was right for the company, frankly, over a long term because trying to win off of short-term fluctuations off Wall Street is kind of a losing proposition, which meant that therefore if I am so, I mean, because I had that situation, I moved off of working on our largest P&L and then the book business and music and video business. Now I'm going to go work on digital media. There is zero business there. This might not work. Well, my It didn't my compensation didn't change as a result of that. It didn't change one way or the other. We tended to also have a performance management system that then would change compensation based on evaluating what did you actually deliver kind of more in an input method. We cared about the outputs too, but there are plenty of people that could be in a business that's like up and to the right but has nothing to do with it.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I just spoke with actually a senior executive at a well-known Silicon Valley company about this topic the other day and said, well, what is it? What is it we had structurally at Amazon, especially from a people point of view that would enable or encourage people to take these risks? Because, yes, in a lot of companies, if you go work on the project that fails, like then your career is in the garbage can and or your compensation system like you're going to lose out on that bonus. So there were two things. One was our compensation system. So there were no performance bonuses. So if I was running the book business and I had a killer year from a financial point of view, there was no like extra kicker for me. And if I were in the book business and had a bad year, there was no financial penalty for me either because our compensation was based on the stock price.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Product innovation and really do not want that fear of failure. They do fear failure and they're really focused on sort of their near-term financial goals. It's sort of not their fault. It's kind of the way a public company and Wall Street sort of interact with each other sort of creates this dynamic.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it didn't work. Obviously, that works now on Amazon, but it didn't work then. It didn't work then because we simply didn't have the scale and that Amazon has today. So a lot of times a product idea, a perfectly good idea, you just have the wrong time or the technology isn't there. I mean, Jeff wrote about a product that was a puck that said on your in your kitchen that you would talk to and ask it for things and could shop from it. He wrote about that in 2004. Well, the technology wasn't there to be able to create that little puck, which one day would become Echo. It was sort of a decade away. But we had a lot of things we launched that failed. We were not afraid to take what we considered a well-calculated risk. I think many, many companies are less willing to do so, less committed to”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say it's partially true. I mean, again, it's hard for me to do a compare and contrast with other companies because, but I can tell you, did we have a lot of things that we launched that failed? Yes. Some of them are very public and obvious. I'll give you one that people don't really realize. It's something called, we had a feature in the early 2000s called slots. And what it was was it was basically third parties could bid on different search terms and put like a little ad in there.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not necessarily so I'll tell you partly also why the Fire phone happened was from my point of view, I think that we had had a number of successful products where in some cases there were a lot of people who doubted whether it would work. A lot of people doubted whether the Kindle inside Amazon doubted that the Kindle was going to be a good idea. I remember contentious board meetings on this topic. Even within a company that was considered innovative, you would have a lot of people that would doubt things I can tell you that for years is working on Prime Video. I would tell people about what our ambition was of, you know, watching our TV set and we're going to have our own motion studio. They'll make our own movies and TV shows. And they would laugh at me. That was crazy. So that's not necessarily the sign of whether, you know, the product is right or wrong. And so.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I could get into all kinds of other examples outside of Amazon, too. But nine times out of ten, I think that's where if it wasn't poor execution, if the product was executed correctly, what was wrong with the concept of the product?”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, what was the problem that the fire phone was seeking to solve for customers? I would argue this is a case where we made the mistake of what we had a technology solution in mind, which was 3D effects. Then we took that solution and were then in search of a problem. I don't think it solved any meaningful problems for customers. In Canada, we had to build a version of the music application and the prime video application for this phone. And I couldn't figure out how this 3D part would make it better for the customers to discover, watch, or play back any of these media. Maybe there were games that could have been great solution. I don't know. But I think the simplest place to go when you see a failed product is to ask yourself what problem to solve.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. So the one important thing to share is that all these tools that are described in this book that Amazon is using, whether it's using documents and meetings with the PRFAQ processor or input metrics, is that none of these things give you the answer. They are tools to help you make decisions. So sometimes you're going to make the wrong decision. Firephone is a great example that comes up often people ask, well, you know, if you've got this great PRFAQ process, like how did you get Firephone? So I was sort of tangential to the Firephone team and I work on it closely. And different people have different opinions. So I'll just share my opinion, which is that if you think about, again, how does a PRFAQ process work? Well, there's a customer problem.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Analyze. So we just use that process, which is, and by the way, the way we think about it first is like, well, you need to throw a lot of things at the wall. You don't really know which of these things are going to be the most causal. So you know you're doing input metrics if it is, do you control it, meaning can you apply resources to make this thing better or worse? Does it touch customers? It doesn't always have to touch customers, but if it is affecting the customer experience, it's almost certainly is an input. And then which ways you're going to measure that input? You need to try more than one way. Because again, we tell a story in the book about one of our most important input metrics, which was how much selection do we have? And we were actually not measuring that right for several years. We had to refine that measurement.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Improving and looking at what the effect is on your outputs. So again, we didn't really create this concept. This is a concept from Six Sigma, which is using what's demaic, which is I have a process. There's an output of this process, but the inputs are a black box to me. So how do I understand those inputs? Well, DAMAC stands for define Oh boy define measure the A is going to come back to me in a minute, improve and control. I'm going to have to, oh gosh, the A is lost. I've lost it for a second here.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then so then you've reserved. Now you have interactions with a property owner. How do I measure the quality of those? Am I going to, you know, how many messages go back and forth? Is a lot of messages a good thing? Is that a bad thing? At first, you may not know the answer to that question. Same thing. Every step of the way, then there's the actual rental experience. How do I instrument and measure every part of the customer experience? So you know it's an input metric if it is measuring something with respect to the customer experience. Which ones are the right metrics? Which ones are the most causal to the outputs? I couldn't begin to tell you this is actually where you're getting paid for if you work at Airbnbs to figure that out and use basically through an iterative process of measuring, observing.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a good input metric is, first of all, map your end to end customer experience. Like I never worked at Airbnb, but okay, step one is that they clicked on some ad somewhere and showed up in the website or the app. Now you're in the app. Now you're looking at this first screen. Well, the first thing what they're doing is they're browsing and or they're searching. Okay, how are we measuring the speed, quality, and ease of that browsing and searching? Now they've got onto a detail page for an individual property. How are we measuring the speed, ease, and quality of the different actions they may take like reserve? Forgive me if I get any of my terminology wrong. I'm not an Airbnb.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And speed of the customer experience. So yes, the point was, again, it's this other article. So we took it as an article of faith that if we can just improve these inputs, the outputs will take care of themselves. The inputs are the things that drive the outputs, which are revenue, customer activity, free cash flow. And so one of Amazon's, it's not really a secret, but one of Amazon's great strengths was that we would focus on those things.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We would develop our operating plans and review our business each week and set our goals. We were hyper-focused on those inputs and input metrics. As a simple example, there was one tool that Jeff and the leadership team, the S-team used, called S-Team Goals, which are effectively a list of what they would harvest would be like, here are the most important goals for the company that I've harvested from all of our operating plans. And I can't remember exactly what year, something around like 2007, 2008. They looked at that list, which is about 500 items long, by the way. And they counted it up. And of that list, only 10 of them actually had a financial metric in it, like revenue or free cash flow or like gross profit. These other things were generally speaking all, you know, one of those inputs, like I mentioned to you about low prices and selection.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this identification of these things was such a critical moment for the company because then it realized, okay, well, what we need to do is spend our time focusing on like, how do I measure each one of those things and then how do I improve each one of those things? So it shifted our focus away from like this short-term thinking of pushing the revenue number up to this longer-term thinking that if we just improve these things, whether it's there's no day that people will wake up 10 years, 20 years, 30 years from now and say all else equal, I'd rather shop at a store with fewer items than more items or a store with higher prices than low prices or a store where things get to me more slowly versus, you know, more quickly. So if we can just improve these things, this is our path to winning. So those were all inputs, inputs to the customer experience. And so we then figured out ways to measure them, creating a set of input metrics. And so then what”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Management book for our company because what it caused Jeff to do, and I won't describe what most of you probably know what it is. If you don't know what it is, go read the good to great. It is, in my opinion, has the best important management book you'll ever read because what it did is to help us codify our growth flywheel, meaning what are the inputs that if we improve these things, which in our case was how do we have broad selection, how do we have a great customer experience where great customer experiences in retail, things like how easy was it to find what you wanted to buy, how easy was it to buy it, and how fast did it get to you? Were the prices low? Do we have lots of merchants on our platform? And by the way, could we drive out costs? So we identified these things on our flywheel.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And the reality is we did that. We went through that enough time several quarters. We started to realize, huh, these fire drills don't really work. We didn't really like get meaningful progress against the number with these last minute things we decided to go do. And oh, by the way, they were kind of a big distraction. Probably if they did work at all, they pulled revenue that might have just gotten in the next month or next quarter into this one. So it wasn't really kind of a zero-sum game there. And we realized, you know, we're not really actually working on things that matter to customers that are going to like move the needle over the long term. And this is about the same time when Jeff and the S team were reading the book Good to Great. And I would, you know, you have to ask Jeff what it is, but if you ask me, I think that this was the single most influential and effective.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then we would run around like chickens with our heads cut off and come up with a bunch of ideas that tended to be like promotional in nature, tended to be like price reduction in nature or like we'll send this extra email or Extra ad or whatever”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so the origin of this one really was, again, kind of in our early years at Amazon, 99, 2000, 2001. We would, you know, we're a public company then, we were growing. But then, you know, growth started to like, it wasn't just all like up and to the right and like woohoo. You know, every company is going to hit a wall eventually. And it's not going to be, you know, if you're so lucky to have even been at a company where it's just like going up into the right with no gravity, good for you because most people never experienced that. Most people experience is the reality is that there's a lot of gravity pulling against your revenue numbers. And you've put a plan out there and you wanted to grow 15% or 20% or 75%, whatever it was. And now you look like you're not going to hit that number this quarter. And so what ensues then is they're not going to hit our number. What should we do about that to hit our number? And this often happens with, well, you know, there's like a month or a month and a half left in the quarter.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fit within my org structure. I couldn't necessarily delegate it to someone that this, there were only two things I could possibly do, which is just sort of set it aside altogether, because otherwise it'd just be a real distraction to people. Or I had to decide this was compelling enough idea that we were going to take a resource, could be one person, could be a whole team doesn't, depending on the idea. And I'm going to have to assign that resource to actually go look at this and work at this. Otherwise, it will never happen.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In those situations, what gets done is probably more of a function of politics or will or a culture of completely like top down. I think the other way is where they're debating and discussing things that they just don't have like good methods where then they can take things and then go build them, meaning they probably don't have the right org structure or processes in place to then go take the good idea, assign it to someone who will own it, go look at it. And after they have owned it and gone and look at it, if it works, then they and their team can go actually build it. What I always found is once as I became more senior in the company, my role became bigger and bigger is that when something came up, some idea that didn't neatly”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Several roadblocks or maybe a fatal flaw with this idea. And in fact, no, you shouldn't waste any of your time going and building that thing because it has a fatal flaw. So one problem is that companies get stuck, I think, where they never actually go do that documentation. And so it's a debate and discussion about concepts that aren't really well fleshed out. And so”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a couple ways, and of course, I'm somewhat having to imagine what are the problems in such companies where that's going on. So one such version of this problem is what I'd call the big idea that's not fleshed out problem. So I'm sure that every single person listening to this podcast has either themselves done this or have witnessed others in their company who come up with a concept of like, oh, what we, you know, I think if we built this, boy, that would really, you know, solve things or that would really work well or that would really grow things. And it may sound good to everyone. It may sound good to you, to everyone. And then maybe you start then working on building it. But the reality is that actually once you've spent some time looking at that idea more deeply, you then start to identify.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source