Why Amazon’s Working Backwards process demands upfront effort
Someone once asked Jeff Bezos, “Is the Working Backwards process optional? It sounds great, but it seems like a lot of work.” His answer was,” Done correctly, it is a huge amount of work. But it saves you even more work later. It isn’t designed to be easy; it’s designed to save huge amounts of […]
by Bill Carr
Jeff Bezos’s what-how-who framework for leadership growth
Jeff Bezos once said that, as Amazon grew, he had to shift his leadership focus from the “what” to the “how” and then to the “who.” Here is what he meant and what you can learn from this to grow your management and leadership skills The “what” in Amazon’s case was defining its strategy, vision, […]
by Bill Carr
Aligning monthly reviews with annual operating plans
Most leaders manage in a short-term, task-based way. Only the best have the discipline to identify a few immutable drivers of value and focus relentlessly on improving them through experiments that span quarters and years. The challenge is that leaders go through the motions of establishing long-term plans in their annual operating plans (AOP), only […]
by Bill Carr
Best practices for feedback and review of PR FAQ documents
Writing the PR/FAQ document is just the beginning of an effective product development process. The next phase is the feedback, meeting, and review phase, where teams collaborate to iteratively improve, explore, and develop each new product or process idea. Here are some best practices for managing this phase. (Amazonians—feel free to add to this list […]
by Bill Carr
How Amazon uses the five whys for operational excellence
When I joined Amazon in 1999, our software and fulfillment network was swamped by the growth in demand. We were barely surviving. We couldn’t be operationally excellent until we dug ourselves out of that hole and built systems and processes to meet the demand. Fast forward two decades, and Amazon is an example of Operational […]
by Bill Carr
How to prepare for Amazon’s bar raiser interviews
I spent 15 years at Amazon. I was a Bar Raiser for 12 of those years and a member of the Bar Raiser Core team (a handful of Execs who oversee the program) for 8 years. I conducted an average of 5 interviews per week across a wide variety of positions at Amazon, ranging from […]
by Bill Carr
Amazon’s customer connection program builds operational insight
When I joined Amazon in 1999, it was growing so fast that every holiday season we faced the same problem: not enough people to pack boxes or answer customer calls. So, year after year, we sent our corporate employees into the trenches. I spent one Christmas working the night shift at our fulfillment center in […]
by Bill Carr
How to craft effective FAQs in the Amazon PR FAQ process
In the mid-2000s, Amazon developed the Working Backwards PR FAQ method for new product innovation. While many focus on the PR (Press Release) aspect of this method, the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) isn’t an afterthought. The press release defines the customer, the problem, and the solution. As I frequently tell people new to this process, […]
by Bill Carr
Using customer stories and input metrics to improve experience
At Amazon, one of the most impactful weekly moments was when, in addition to diving deep on our metrics, we also reviewed anecdotes. In each WBR, our customer support team shared an example of a poor customer experience from the prior week. These were technically edge or corner cases, but they were emotionally resonant cases […]
by Bill Carr
Building expertise through deliberate practice and complex decisions
(This is a continuation from my prior post: “Today I read the controversial blog post…”) 4. Clear thinking and decision-making require experience. My final observation is that there are only a handful of truly great thinkers, leaders, and decision makers in the world… maybe 100 of them. That’s because raw intelligence, or book smarts, does […]
by Bill Carr