Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

Amazon.com has been wildly successful over the past few decades. Many companies have come and gone in an attempt to compete with it. The company barely survived for the first part of its existence, preferring to plow money back into the company over generating profits. This allowed it to expand into many areas. Amazon has released a large number of "duds" (such as the Firephone.) The website is also unlikely to win any design awards. Yet, the company is wildly successful. Working Backwards looks at some of the key leadership principles at Amazon and attempts to show how others can use them.

The Amazon principles and practices are not for everyone. They are not even consistently carried out at Amazon. When I worked there, I heard many of the terms mentioned, but did not see them followed with much frequency. This may be a feature rather than a bug. It felt that each group in Amazon was its own organization. Even though there were many shared resources, each team had a very distinct culture and way of functioning.

Some of the Amazon differences included the use of "6 pagers" rather than powerpoints for presentation. (Alas, I only remember one meeting with an actual document.) I think this is a good idea, but it does add a lot more work for the presenter.

The general development process at Amazon fairly closely resembles modern Agile development. Keep the teams small, yet ensure they have all abilities needed to get something done. Iterate. Be willing to fail quickly. Review what happened, document responses to problems so processes can be improved. Hiring includes a "bar raiser" who's goal is to provide a third party to ensure that the bar for employment continues to grow higher.

The PR/FAQ process is still very much an Amazon thing. A project is pitched by presenting the "press releases" that will appear when the project rolls out. Development then looks backwards from this.

Some of the biggest challenges facing Amazon is being tied to internal tools and processes. On the software development side, Amazon had created many needed tools because they didn't exist. Since then, other, much better tools have been developed externally. However, Amazon is still saddle with tight dependencies on their homegrown innovation. Business processes may also be subject to the same liability. Amazon was very innovative. Today, it is a huge corporation that may find it much more difficult to innovate at scale.