Measuring customer experience through meaningful input metrics
Companies can convince themselves that they’re “customer-centric” by talking about it and giving motivational speeches. But they fail because they don’t back their words with action and mechanisms. It is just wishful thinking. Being customer-centric means defining, measuring, and analyzing metrics that reflect the customer experience. This means measuring the speed, cost, and quality of […]
by Bill Carr
Empowering teams with the Andon Cord for customer quality
At Amazon, we implemented an “Andon Cord” system that allows any customer support member to disable the buy button on an item that results in a poor customer experience. This was inspired by Toyota’s Quality Management practices. It worked like this: Toyota has a physical cord on the production line that any worker could pull […]
by Bill Carr
Why writing a press release before product development matters
When working with clients on how to implement Amazon principles, their most common question about the PR/FAQ process is “But why a Press Release before the product is built?” Here’s why Amazon does this. Amazon writes a press release before building the product because it forces clarity. It forces you to define the customer’s problem, […]
by Bill Carr
How Jeff Bezos’ email habit drove customer obsession
Jeff Bezos spent significant time reading customer emails. If he read about an issue with your product, he would forward you the email with a simple “?”. I received at least one of these every week during my 10 years as VP of Amazon Music and Prime Video. There are two amazing things about this […]
by Bill Carr
The origin and impact of Amazon’s working backwards PR FAQ
Amazon is famous for the Working Backwards PR/FAQ process, but where did this process come from? In the early 2000s, Steve Kessel and I were building Amazon’s digital media business. We’d present plans to Jeff Bezos, using our MBA toolset, which includes spreadsheets with pro forma P&Ls, market size projections, SWOT analysis, etc… Jeff would […]
by Bill Carr
How focused innovation drives success at Amazon
In Amazon’s early days, Jeff Bezos had an endless stream of ideas. Executive Jeff Wilke told Bezos: “Jeff, you have enough ideas to destroy Amazon.” This was a turning point—Bezos realized that too many ideas can create chaos, slow execution, scatter attention, and drain resources. He shifted to disciplined timing of innovation, only launching new […]
by Bill Carr
How Bezos and Wilke managed their time for maximum impact
“Effective Executives know where their time goes. They work systematically at managing the little of their time that can be brought under their control. The supply of time is totally inelastic. There is no price for it, nor is there a marginal utility curve for it. Moreover, time is totally perishable and cannot be stored. […]
by Bill Carr
How Amazon’s debrief process ensures hiring the best
One of the most important parts of Amazon’s hiring process happens after the interviews are over. It is called the debrief, but it isn’t just a recap of “How it went.” It’s a data synthesis meeting that determines if the candidate raises the bar. Debriefs are ideally scheduled for the same day or the day […]
by Bill Carr
Overcoming hiring biases with Amazon’s Bar Raiser process
Bias is bad. As a leader, you should be looking to eliminate it from any decisions. In every hiring process, three deadly biases can thwart organizations from making the right hiring decisions: the urgency bias, the confirmation bias, and the personal bias. 200,000 years of programming, which helped us survive in small hunter-gatherer tribes (e.g., […]
by Bill Carr
Why effectiveness matters more than volume in knowledge work
“The knowledge worker does not produce something that is effective by itself. He does not produce a physical product–a ditch, a pair of shoes, a machine part. He produces knowledge, ideas, information. By themselves these “products” are useless. Somebody else, another man of knowledge, has to take them as his input and convert them into […]
by Bill Carr