I was an executive at Amazon for 15 years, and I was fortunate to work alongside many other execs. The work of the best executives can be described in 7 words: “They make good plans and execute them.”
It sounds so simple, but only the best actually do it. There are a number of common mistakes and pitfalls that get in the way for everyone else.
First, making a good plan means being right about what the organization should and should not do with their time and resources.
At Amazon, I learned that everyone has ideas about what to work on and what to build. To quote Jeff Bezos, “Ideas are cheap. I had ten in the shower this morning.”
The hard part of making the plan is carefully inspecting ideas in detail and determining which ones have the greatest value. Equally important to deciding what to do is deciding what NOT to do.
Making these decisions well is actually more important than being able to build well. They are both important, but if you get the decision wrong, it doesn’t matter how well you build the wrong thing.
Flawless execution of a bad plan is a waste of precious resources. This is where many businesses fail–they build a great product that no one wants.
Just like anything at Amazon, we didn’t want the process of making a great plan to rely on good intentions. So, we created tools and processes to help us make better choices. The combination of the Working Backwards PR/FAQ process and the annual operating planning (AOP) process forced us to do two things:
First, it made us ruthlessly prioritize. Out of the 100 good ideas floating around, we focused on identifying the 20 most worth executing–the ones with the biggest potential impact.
Second, it made us staff those ideas properly. We made sure each initiative had enough resources to truly succeed, and we coordinated across teams so that all dependencies were addressed before work began.
Great executives are great at selecting the best new initiatives and assigning resources to build them. They are also great at saying ‘no’ to anything that isn’t in their plan. They keep their teams focused on building the most important things extraordinarily well.
Simple, right?
