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

“Yeah, and it's also, I would say, an example where this is a process to prevent the other process, which is the product development process from becoming the thing, right? Where you just get locked in on what are we doing in this sprint? What are we trying to get done and like focused on shipping stuff? What I recommend is you try to break into two different processes. One is the process of deciding what you should go build. And that's what the PRFAQ is designed for. And then once you've decided that, then yes, by all means, use all that good thinking. And now how can I ship it efficiently and effectively with few to no bugs?”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bigger potential impact. So you want that you want to create this corpus of ideas that are well thought out and select the best ones.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Leads me down the concept of what you're really trying to create is a product funnel, not a product tunnel. And with a funnel, meaning lots of things at the top, fewer things at the bottom, the tunnel means that everything that comes in is also going to come out the other side. And the problem with that method is it means you have no considerable, you're not actually having a method of like consideration and comparing it against other things that you might build or how you deploy what are, frankly, most companies, your most precious resources, which is your engineering team, you should be looking at various choices. You should think of yourself honestly as like a venture capitalist. They don't fund every company that they meet with. They actually fund a very, very low percentage of them. And at Amazon, we had lots and lots of PRFQs that were a great idea, but we didn't ship them because we had other ones that were just a better idea, which had, you know,”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the same token, you may then have written one you think this is a pretty good idea, and you show up here or your manager, and they give you feedback that makes you want to then ball it up and throw into the trash can. So part of this concentric circle thing is not just that everyone you write lives on and gets all the way to the CEO. There are no stats on this, but let's just say in some virtual imaginary world where, yes, all these things, you're a product manager and you've got a director of product manager report to who reports to some senior vice president division who reports to a CEO. Well, if you truly run this out and you write 100 PRFAQs in a year, maybe 20 of those make it their way to the CEO, right? The point is not every single one of them is destined to go that far. They're, you know, the numbers get narrower. And this sort 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
“Yes and no. So, first of all, there are some things where you may write it and you, the author, will, if we were in the old world, would like take the piece of paper, crumple it up, and throw it in the trash can, which is in your own, you've realized now that I put this down on paper and read it, this is not actually that good of an idea, I'm going to try something else.”
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 we have a website related to the book, which is www.workingbackwards.com. And there's a resources section within there. And you'll find a template.”
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 you try to write it in that way, but the one thing is you don't want to use hyperbole. And it would be like very factual, like with numbers, like data rich document too. So again, not like a real press release. A lot of like internal confidential data would be like in this press release. Got it. So it's a tool Has a very specific use to 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
“Or so complex that we're going to launch it in a year from now. So there are some other directional cues within it. Like I said, with everything, these are tools that people can use. I'm sure that companies will find other ways to improve upon these tools. But if you don't use those parts of them correctly, you're kind of missing out on what's the main benefit you're getting out of this.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Three money paragraphs in this first of all, yeah, it's not meant to be a real press release. So don't use the language you would use if you were sending an actual press release. This is like an internal document. Okay, so that's the first thing. The second thing is, the heart of it really is that like first paragraphs, it's a short description. That second paragraph that's the problem statement and that third paragraph that's the solution statement. If you wanted to like ditch the rest of it and the artifacts of the press release, you could. I think there are other benefits to it, like the headline is this headline like long and drawn out and like I can't even tell what the heck this thing is from this reading this headline. That's generally a bad if you used a tweet that wouldn't work very well. The date is also a meaningful thing when you write the press release. The date is meant to be a hypothetical timing on which you're envisioning launching this thing, which tells the reader something, are you thinking that this is something that's so simple and easy we're going to launch it next month?”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good question. So, the first thing is it's not a real press release, okay? We could change the nature of it. And if instead we wanted to call it the customer problem solution statement, right? We could just change it to that because there really are, you know,”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Writing these things. And then you start to share them with a small group and get feedback and improve it, a wider group, get feedback and improve it. And onward and onward until, you know, depending on the size and scale of your company, you get up to the CEO as a way to strengthen and improve and really codify this idea and determine whether it's a great idea or not. So I help them understand like how does that work? How do you do this iterative process? And then once you've done that, then what do I do with these PRFAQs? Like once I've got them, how do I then think about that with respect to my roadmap?”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Problem you were solving. And ideally, you would some way have like quantified that problem or there's some data or customer insights that have led you to understand that problem, to know that it is a meaningful and big problem, ideally a problem that people would, you know, pay money if you could solve that problem for it because you can just look at the economics of that problem and if instead they use your solution, this would be beneficial to them. I work to have them first implement this PRFAQ process is the first step. And then the next step really is to go from there to say, okay, writing PRFAQs is one thing. Well, how do I actually use them? How do you actually develop them? Because there's this iterative nature to writing PRFAQs where it's sort of a concentric circle review. Like you start off small like with one author and with low fidelity.”
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 method to, as the method, to decide what I am going to go build. And oh, by the way, to use it as a method to sort between a lot of different choices of what you might build. In summary, the way that process works is that you're in the PR, you're going to describe very carefully and clearly like who's the customer, what's their problem, and what's the solution that you're planning to build. That sounds really simple and easy. It's actually very hard to do that well, to crisply and clearly define those. The first two things are the things that are hardest to define, like who's the customer, like anyone says, like all restaurants are my customer. Okay, well, that's a mistake. No, I mean, like which kinds of restaurants are your customers in? What kinds of cities, in what kinds of formats, et cetera, et cetera? And then what is the specific?”
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 first shift is to take this. So that's just a concept, right? Working backwards. Well, how do I turn that concept into a scalable, repeatable process? And that's exactly where Jeff's mind went. And eventually, without getting to the origin story, we came up with this process called the PRFAQ process. So what it means is that whenever we're devising a new product or feature, we're going to start by writing a press release describing the feature and describing it in a way that speaks to the customer and to some degree the external press and world, where the idea is in my description of this, it better jump off the page of something like, wow, I really, you know, as a customer, I will really need this. And so what I work first is to say, okay, for your product development process, let's start by, you know, using”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cost structure was actually a part of working backwards from the customer that if we had a low cost structure, we could afford to give customers lower prices. Therefore, let's figure out how to have a low cost structure. Because in itself, driving out cost, doing things more efficiently doesn't inherently benefit customers because you could just choose to take more profit. It only does if you decide that in doing so, I'm going to lower my prices to customers or provide some other benefit. So, no, we used it in this method of like, I'm starting from the customer. And then very specifically, we used it in this method of, you know, new products and features that I'm going to go build on behalf of customers.”
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, the working backwards part is strictly about the customer's needs. We don't want to work backwards from revenue. I guess there is, we don't really, we didn't really use this term for sort of other things like cost structure.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we're making a decision, thinking about a problem, we're going to start with what's best for the customer and then come backward from there. And then in that coming backward process, we're going to have to figure out, well, to do that, gee, I'm going to have to solve this engineering problem or I'm going to have to figure out how to make this thing cost less or make this thing faster or solve some one or more problems. And that's the backwards that informs like what's the work you have to do to then create this new solution for customers.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do I increase revenue? I need to increase active customers. How do I increase active customers for customer-oriented behavior? We tend to start with those things, which may often lead you in the wrong direction. Whereas we had, as Jeff had said, we took it as an article of faith. If we served customers well, if we prioritized customers and delivered for them, we took it as an article of faith that then things like sales, things like revenue and active customers and things like the share price and free cash flow would follow. And so, this is important because there's no, I still can't give you objective proof that that is true. I don't know who could. And so it was saying, this is an article of faith that if we do that, we think those other things will work out. So therefore.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're guiding star or the point from which you're going to start is what are the customers' problems or what are the customers needs and then figure out, okay, well, what would be the solution to that? What are potential solutions to that? And to do those things, to starting with without the constraints of my financial constraints, my resource constraints, my legal constraints, my engineering constraints, whatever all those constraints may be, because the problem is what most of us do is we start with those constraints and work forward from there, or we start with things like I got to increase revenue.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The title of the book comes from two things. One is, you know, one of the leadership principles, which is that customer obsession and the principal states, something along the lines of that great leaders start with customers' needs and work backwards from there to sort of meet those needs or solve them. And then also because we created a process in this window I was talking about earlier, the 2004 to 2007 window, we created this process for new product innovation called the Working Backwards PRFAQ process. And they both refer to the same idea, which is 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
“The right decision, you're probably not going to go very, they're not going to want to follow you very far, and you're probably not going to go very far. So this is something that you develop through experience. And I'd say from having the opportunities to observe and work for others that are good at this”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sound judgment, which generally come, you know, some people maybe are born with this, not a lot of them. Mostly they get it through experience. A lot of experience is actually about being wrong, by the way, about making mistakes. And by having looked at a lot of problems, made decisions, or observed others making decisions, being a student of that, and then using that to understand then how to weight different information when making a decision. So write a lot is that you're good at that and that then it proves and that generally speaking people want to follow someone who ends up by and large like, you know, going in the right direction, right? You're the leader of a team. The team is, you know, petitioning you on multiple sides. And if you keep kind of going off in some direction where most of the team is scratching their head saying, like, I don't think that that was.”
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 going back to this last discussion, one fallacy we should all acknowledge is that when you're making these decisions, you can kind of take and you're trying to use data to make decisions, like you can make the data kind of look however you want to look to sort of try to meet your decision. Looking at some issue, I've got some big data set, I can come up with ways of looking at a data set to support this idea and ways of looking at data set to not support it. So the data doesn't rarely makes the decision for you what is happening is then a lot of judgment and interpretation of the data weighing that weighing various factors to then come to a decision. And that is sort of the right a lot part. The right a lot part comes from having experience, you know, having what we call sort 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
“Agree with, or even just like you may not even agree, but like what is like what is the core of like what that person is thinking is the big benefit or good guy or what is the or thinking vector that they're on that's causing them to want to go in this direction”
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 try to see how I can take that idea, that concept, and then make it into something viable. And it doesn't always work, but it's about then having that understanding of what it is, not just sort of like going through the motion of like stomp, stomp, stomp through it. That's not going to work. And it's also, I've seen people who try that and their career doesn't go very far. You have to have some degree of faith that there's something there and I'm going to try to do the best I can to make that part. How would I productize that idea? How would I make that viable from a business point of view or whatever the different constraints are?”
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 work with Jeff on all kinds of different new ideas. And Jeff doesn't think like a normal person. His level of sort of creativity and the way he thinks, the time scale which he thinks. There's many ways of it the way he thinks that there was no one else Amazon that thought that way. And so there'd be times when even after we've had that discussion I maybe still disagree. But then what I would do is I'd focus on, okay, what is the kernel or the core of like why Jeff thinks that we should do this? And I would focus on that kernel. I got great advice actually from one of my managers one point, Steve Kessel, who said, you have to look for what that is. And then your job is to then take that kernel and try to run with it and expand.”
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 it's not just like I'm going to commit. I don't really agree with what we're going to do, but I'm going to get behind this. It's a ideally it's, oh, now I've heard the argument, I've actually now thought about the argument. And hopefully that person has now understood why we're taking that direction. And so their commitment is based on that understanding because then they can reflect that understanding back to their organization too. Because the worst thing to do is to say, yeah, we're committed to this. I don't really agree. And I still think it's wrong, but I'm committed to it. That's not actually commitment. So it's really about, this is really about decision making and understanding the facts or an information that people are going to use to make a decision and then be able to reflect that back.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have already considered that factor. But even though that factor is there, here are these other factors that outweigh that. Now, that is the point at which as long as the disagreeer is hearing back from the leader that they understand their point of view, understand like why they are pushing back and seem to fully understand it and they've taken that into consideration, that is the point for them to commit because the point is you provided your information. They've processed that information and they've decided to go this way with the knowledge of that where people get confused about is they don't maybe understand like when they're supposed to stop disagreeing is one thing. And so hopefully that explanation made people clear like this is when you're supposed to stop. And then the commit part done well means”
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 is sort of no different than that, which is the disagree part is about bringing forth new information, new data, new point of view that would be contrary to the current direction. So that's the disagree part. And you're obligated to do it, as we would describe sort of all the way up the chain if necessary, if it's an important issue. people are not hearing or understanding your point of view. Now, the important point is, first of all, about hearing and understanding your point of view. What often happen, I can tell you someone in a leadership role, someone come to me with a disagreement, and many times I'd appreciate it, by the way, because they'd bring some point of view that was useful. But sometimes they bring the disagreement and cite the reasoning behind it. And I already knew that reasoning. We'd already thought of that reasoning. We'd already thought of that, in which case I would say, I hear your disagreement.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The process of decision making and have read more and more about this. And I think that Peter Drucker probably has the best writing on this topic. But as he would describe it, a decision is good decisions are made by first understanding all the different points of view and pros and cons to the potential issue at hand or the potential direction. And that great leaders, what they do is they solicit these different points of views. They have a team that they work with to debate and discuss things. So another way to think about this, a king and their court. In an ideal world, if you assume that there's no political motivations, the court is there to advise the king and help them think through different problems and provide different and opposing points of view to allow the king to arrive at the right decision.”
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, when I was at Amazon, there were 10 leadership principles, and they've since expanded them. But of those 10, this was always the least well understood when I was at Amazon too, and partly because it is actually the most nuanced and difficult to actually use. So here's what it means. What it means is that have backbone and disagree, meaning when we are in making any kind of a decision, important decision, If you are part of that team, part of that unit, it is your obligation to voice your point of view if you disagree with the approach that's been taken. And the point of that disagreement, by the way, is to provide usually additional information or a new point of view that people have not considered. So I like to geek out a bit on the”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To their day job to build and maintain functional excellence. And there are a lot of examples like this across the company.”
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 are the standard ways across the company that we will interview and screen engineers? What is the promotion process look like? What are the defined steps from getting from an SD1 to an SD2, SD3? How do we document and describe what are the requirements? There were many things like this. And effectively, what it also meant is that anyone who is an engineering vice president or in many cases a director, they would often have something else beyond their day job of some sort of subject matter expertise area where they would also contribute to the company. A good example of this would be that they might sit on a panel for promotion from a certain level to another level in the engineering world. Or they might be available to do code review outside of their organization for another organization. So people had other jobs in addition.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I was one of many of these examples. And there could be reverse examples where instead of me being a business leader, I was purely an engineer. And now I'm managing a team that does marketing and business development. I wouldn't know anything about those things if that had been my background. So what we did in the, I'll stick with the engineering examples, what we came up with various countermeasures. Like one example was that we still had a C-level leader of engineering in Rick Dalzell and most of the core infrastructure and core services still reported into Rick. So it was things like payments or infrastructure search. And Rick still could be a technical leader for the whole company. And he and his team could create things like, what are the standard ways that we're going to do code reviews?”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other thing was these functional countermeasures. So let's just stick with the engineering for an example. So in 2004, 2005-ish, I started managing a single threaded team. Actually, I managed two different ones, one for music and one for video, which are now, you know, Amazon music and prime video. They weren't called that in those days. But I started managing a small team of software engineers at that point. I have never, well, I have written lines of code, but that would be back in high school. And we're talking about like.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“PNL. And sometimes then, if you narrow things down too much in some cases, then the answer is no. In other cases, the answer can be yes very easily. Like a great example, this was in Prime Video, one of the businesses that I managed. We could create a single threaded team who just was working on applications for TV sets like Samsung Sony. We could create another team that's working on game consoles and another team that's working on mobile phones and tablets. And then within each one of those, we could further break it down. We could have one team working on Xbox and another one on PlayStation, another one just on iOS. And those cases, then it's very clear how you can break the teams down and they can have very clear ownership.”
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 mean, obviously there are probably different definitions of what people consider the GM model, but I would consider that meaning this person is a P&L owner. And you can, of course, create mini P&Ls within a P&L. Like, for example, in the book business, we could, and I don't know, most time we didn't do this, but we could have created a PNL owner just for fiction books or just for professional and technical books, which is a very large category with big differences between the others. And then you say, great, then that team, they have their own dedicated team, they're fully responsible for the revenue numbers and other numbers. But you have to be thoughtful about how you do this because one of the three questions you have to ask when you establish one of these teams is, does the team have the resources within their control to effectively manage this part of this department, this product, this.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those discussions, those interchanges, then the teams were free to sprint hard after their plan. They didn't have to worry about whether was am I aligned with my CEO? Am I aligned with my senior vice president? They could know that they were. But yes, this creates then clear, you know, if they're going to deliver it or not, it's up to that owner and that team. Whereas when you have this highly like cross-functional approach and there's not one clear person who's responsible for this one project that's on this roadmap, I've seen many a CEO pull their hair out saying like, I have no ownership and accountability here. How do I have that? They're pushing on a string because they can't because they're different people and leaders are kind of part owning, half owning a long list of things instead of fully owning. Short list of 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
“It's less about that. And I do want to be clear it's one leader and their team who are accountable and responsible. So with respect to what are we going to go build, how are we going to go measure success, all those things? This team and that leader are responsible for documenting that, writing their plan. Now, they don't just get to go off and do that. There was an intense review process at Amazon where either at some level, whether it be the vice president, senior vice president, or all the way up to the Jeff level and his direct report's called yes team, this plan would be reviewed and scrutinized deeply as well. And there'd be a discussion, an interchange, and basically getting alignment between the senior leadership team and each one of these single threaded teams on that plan before the team could go off and run. The beauty of that, though, is that once we had had”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For another thing. In this case, you're trading off potentially functional excellence. So, in other words, if you no longer have every single engineer or every single marketing person or every product person or every BizDev person reporting into a C-level leader of that particular function, and instead they're spread out in small teams across the company reporting into some generalist who is probably not going to have functional expertise in several of the functions that they're leading, you risk the problem of then the people in those teams not gaining functional competency. That's the downside. And we can talk more about this, but we created a lot of countermeasures to still enable us to have functional excellence while creating these single threaded teams.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Decision versus refereeing everything on the product roadmap and then all of the resource contention issues. That's like a daily issue. And so it frees teams up then to actually go and sprint ahead. There's a lot of work you have to do to get ready for this. So for example, in a software environment when we first started and we had kind of a monolithic code base that was not pretty, we weren't ready to do this because you have all those interdependencies. Once we move to a service-based architecture and then, you know, teams could own their code with defined endpoints, APIs that other teams could understand that are well documented, then we could sort of move in that direction. And the other thing is we had to create what I would call countermeasures because there's no free lunch in org structures. Any org structure, you're trading off one 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
“And having a prioritized list of those things and being able to sort of start at the top of the list and work their way down with the pool of resources that they have. Sometimes and most times they may want more resources to be able to tackle more, but they spend less time sort of in resource contention, resource fighting, and instead focus on building what they can build with the resources that they've got. And so the benefit of this is if their success or failures, you know, they're really dependent on themselves now. The only thing they could maybe argue about how they could do better is if they had more resources, which they can petition management for. But this way it also solves a big management problem, which is instead of management senior management refereeing every different, every item on a roadmap, they're refereeing which teams have how many resources, which is kind of more of like a once or twice or three times a year.”
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 percent of the time is a customer clicking on one of the top three results in my search page, or how many milliseconds does it take for the page load time in this browser type on this device type, et cetera, et cetera? And they then are running their own roadmap. They are deciding what are the most important things for us to go with.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dotted line, but it could be all straight line. It could be all dotted line, it could be a mix of the two. But fundamentally, we moved from what we called a project orientation to a program orientation. So a project orientation means, oh, we're going to do this project to change our search result page and algorithm and the project is defined in this way and it's going to take six months. The resources will come and swarm on that and then they'll move off to some other thing in some other part of the company. The program-based orientation says let's stick with the search example. There's a team that works on search and they always work on search. And instead of thinking about things on a project by project basis, they think holistically about what they need to do to improve search. They have a set of metrics by which they're looking to drive those metrics, largely ones that they can control, things like”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All our time in these meetings planning, and a lot of the work we were doing, the artifacts we create, the documents, the projections were actually not very useful either. We're kind of bureaucratic time wasters, largely because a lot of the assumptions built into them were deeply flawed. So you're debating numbers in these documents that are based on flawed assumptions, which is a waste of time. What we realized instead was how do we get the three things we really wanted were ownership, speed, and agility. And so we experimented with that and said, let's create teams that can stand alone where there's a single leader and the cross-functional resources that they need are all either directly report to them or are dedicated to them. So they don't necessarily have to be a straight line direct report and Amazon's case for the most part it was.”
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 concept of single threaded leadership was born from this time of complexity at Amazon and where, again, once you get to a certain scale, you get to a point of where there are competing departments, competing interests, and they are competing for some centralized pool of resources for all of you who are working for a tech company. This is the pool of engineering resources. Or today data science and AI resources. There may be other constrained resources often design as a constrained resource. But the point is now all these teams want that pool of resources to go build stuff for them, but they're competing in competition with each other. So most companies solve this by having like an intense centralized, highly collaborative process. We decided to go in the other direction for the reasons I mentioned, which we're just fine.”
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, super nerdy, but we realized after, you know, I don't know how long, several months or a year of doing this that the fitness function was not a good idea. This is what I would describe as a compound metric where you try to take several important metrics and munge them into one. The problem is it actually becomes totally meaningless when you're measuring things, you're trying to understand like what actions or reactions are creating the good outputs that you want, revenue, customer growth. But by putting them all together, you basically obfuscate that. And what really we realized is we need to just break each one of these out individually and manage them each in its own way. So today, I discourage teams and companies from creating any sort of compound metrics.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The dev team, the design team, the product team, they're all in one group. And they'll go operate autonomously, but not completely autonomously because we, the senior leadership team, Jeff and the S team, want to know that they're on the right track. So we're going to create something called a fitness function, which was, let's figure out what are the four or five or six metrics that matter most for your particular area. Let's give a weighting to all of them, and then let's create an index for those, and we'll measure that index up and down. And that's the fitness function.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Although I think he actually started off wanting to get a physics degree, he ended up moving over to computer science. He spent his early days at DE Shaw as a, you know, a quant on Wall Street, very quantitative mind. So he applied this kind of, when he thought about this problem, he said, well, I need to be scientific about this. There needs to be some system or some approach, some mechanism for me to be able to manage such a company. So I'm going to experiment, like a scientist would, with different ideas, different hypotheses, implement them, and see what works. And iteratively improve. So that was kind of the mindset, which we took, which by the way, we applied both to process innovation, but also product innovation.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No longer just a bookstore. We sell a lot of things. We actually branched out beyond just a retail business. We had a third-party marketplace business. We were experimenting in those days with providing a running websites for third-party retailers in those days too. We were developing new things. We were in many countries around the world. So we've become very complex. And what happens at that point is that then you reach this point where the CEO can no longer be in every important meeting, can no longer be involved with hiring every person. And you need a system, a method to run the company effectively. And Jeff Bezos is fundamentally he's a very scientific and analytical thinker, his undergraduate degree was in computer science, I'm pretty sure.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source