A proven 30-day onboarding process for new leaders
Effective onboarding of new leaders is often overlooked. A structured process is essential during the first 30 days. Here is the exact process I used to onboard new leaders at Amazon and elsewhere. This process was a tool for the new leader, but it was also a tool for me to assess their likelihood of […]
by Bill Carr
How behavioral interviews predict candidate success
Behavioral interviews help predict performance by uncovering how a candidate has acted in real situations rather than relying on their hypothetical responses. This is why Amazon and other top companies rely on this method. They evaluate the candidate in terms of: → What did they do when presented with a new challenge? → How did […]
by Bill Carr
How Amazon’s Bar Raiser program improves hiring quality
I spent 15 years at Amazon and watched the Bar Raiser program go from a quirky internal concept to one of the most powerful tools in the company. It is so effective because it injects skilled experts into a process typically dominated by people who are not good at interviewing and hiring. Most managers are […]
by Bill Carr
Balancing hire slow and fire fast for better team outcomes
“Hire slow, fire fast” is common advice, but in practice, most leaders struggle to follow this advice. Typically, leaders are in a rush to fill open roles, and then they hang on to struggling employees for too long. Whether a manager is backfilling a current position or creating a new one, leaving the position open […]
by Bill Carr
Working backwards from customer problems to drive innovation
At most companies, teams start with constraints like budgets, existing technical capabilities, and their current products and markets. Then they perform a S.W.O.T. analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) asking: “How can we expand our revenue and products given these constraints?” That’s a skills-forward approach — working forwards. At Amazon, we flipped this. We started […]
by Bill Carr
Managing cross-functional dependencies in growing companies
Promising new product initiatives and projects get derailed by unresolved dependencies. The bigger the company, the greater the number of dependencies and the more difficult it becomes to identify and resolve them. Based on my experience, I think there are only two viable solutions to manage the inevitable cross-functional and technical dependencies of an organization. […]
by Bill Carr
Why behavioral questions outperform hypothetical interview queries
During my 15 years at Amazon, I interviewed hundreds of candidates. One shift I had to make was abandoning interview questions that were hypothetical, case or modeling questions, or in any way not behavioral. There are two problems with hypotheticals: 1) They tell you how a candidate will think, but not how they will behave, […]
by Bill Carr
How to retain high performers and build a winning team
The best way to lose a high performer in your company is to: 1. Fail to recognize that they are a high performer 2. Fail to give them increasing responsibility and challenge 3. Make them work for a manager who is not a high performer 4. Fail to compensate them based on their exceptional abilities […]
by Bill Carr
Avoiding sunk cost fallacy to prioritize real customer needs
One of the most common traps in business is prioritizing business needs over customer needs. This often shows up as the sunk cost fallacy or chasing the “shiny new thing.” Here are some examples: I remember consulting for a large consumer electronics company that had invested heavily in developing a “smart” washing machine. The machine […]
by Bill Carr
Working backwards from customer needs to drive innovation
At most companies, teams start with constraints like budgets, existing technical capabilities, and their current products and markets. Then they ask: “How can we expand our revenue and products given these constraints?” That’s a skills-forward approach — working forwards. At Amazon, we flipped this. We started with the customer and their problems, and we envisioned […]
by Bill Carr