Working Backwards
Colin Bryar & Bill Carr · 2021
Working Backwards (2021) is a book by Colin Bryar & Bill Carr on Leadership & management. Two longtime Amazon executives reverse-engineer the company's culture into concrete, transferable practices: the Leadership Principles, Bar Raiser hiring, six-page narratives, PR/FAQs, input metrics, and single-threaded ownership.
Two insiders who spent a combined 27 years at Amazon reveal that its success is not luck or genius but a set of repeatable mechanisms any company can copy.
Two of the ideas you’ll keep
The Clif summary of Working Backwards pulls out 7 insights. Here are the first two.
- Good intentions don't work, mechanisms do. Telling people to care about quality changes nothing; a mechanism is a complete, repeatable process that bakes the desired behavior into how work actually gets done, so it survives busy quarters and turnover.
- Working Backwards means starting from the customer, not the technology. Before writing a line of code, teams draft a mock press release plus an FAQ (the PR/FAQ) describing the finished product's benefits, then iterate on the document until the idea is worth building.
The other 5 — and the full 12-minute summary — are in the app.
What’s inside: 9 chapters
The whole summary runs about 12 minutes, read or listened to.
- Being Amazonian: Culture as a Machine, Not a Mood
- The Bar Raiser: Making Hiring a System
- Organizing to Invent: Two-Pizza Teams and Single-Threaded Leadership
- Narratives, Not PowerPoint: The Six-Page Memo
- Working Backwards: The PR/FAQ
- Metrics That Matter: Input Metrics and the WBR
- Invention in Action: Building the Kindle
- Prime and the Flywheel
- AWS and Prime Video: The System Beyond Retail
Finish Working Backwards tonight.
Read or listen to the full summary in about 12 minutes, then keep the ideas with a minute of review a day. Start with the 2-minute quiz — no card required.
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