YouSaid · the spoken record
Bill Carr
- lines on the record
- 105
- first
- 2023-11-02
- most recent
- 2023-11-02
- sittings or episodes
- 1
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- 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
“One narrow window of two thousand three to two thousand seven. During that window of time, all the products I just mentioned and all of the processes except for one were all developed in this one four-year period. And this is the period actually where we were going from hyper.”
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, a lot of people around the world use all those things. And obviously Jeff was a huge driver of those things. But what people don't realize is that Amazon was actually, to some degree, equally focused on process innovation. In many cases, by the way, we stood on other people's shoulders. We cannot take credit for having, for most of these, there were other inspirations or we built on work that others had done, which by the way was what I think all great companies should do. And again, that's also why we wrote the book was because we would like to allow people to stand on Amazon's shoulders to learn what we learned and then take all or part of these things and build from there. But to sort of more directly answer your question, how or why did this happen? So this period of both product and process innovation actually occurred in this one.”
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 actually one of the reasons why Colin and I set out to write our book because everyone knows about Amazon as an innovative product company, at least certainly during the time I was there, which was from 1999 through the end of 2014. The company rolled out all kinds of innovative products, the Kindle, AWS, Alexa, Echo, the Prime subscription itself is 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
“The one that's sort of non obvious and is really the way in which Amazon created a set of leadership principles that were very real and the way in which Amazon created a set of processes to reinforce them. And this is, I think, I certainly haven't encountered anything quite like that. It was very intentional. So that is also a distinctive element of it that we try to point out in our book.”
2023-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 going to start with what's best for the customer and then come backward from there. 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