Working Backwards

The book is mostly a biography of the company itself with not a lot of universally applicable insights.

The most important ones are really general like:

• Customer orientation and thriving for excellence
• Writing Public Relations text and FAQ first before actually building anything for a new product (therefore the title of the book)

An interesting look behind the curtain of the business principles that took Amazon to the top. Enjoyable to live in a space where work is genuinely productive and smart, especially if that isn't typically true for your company.

Admittedly, the pacing and enjoyability of the chapters is a bit up-and-down, and the authors are quick to blow past the effects of Jeff's 'genius business impulses' - it genuinely seemed miserable to be an employee there half the time.

There's actionable lessons for any company, and an enjoyable read here for tech workers. Amazon should probably revisit the purity of their earlier years given the tank in quality their site has experienced over the past few years.

It is an insightful and engaging book that provides a behind-the-scenes look into the business strategies and corporate culture that have driven Amazon's extraordinary success.

I found many of the points in this book to be quite valuable. The authors, both former Amazon executives, delve into the company's unique principles, such as their focus on customer obsession, long-term thinking, and data-driven decision-making. The book explores the idea of working backwards from the customer's perspective, which has been a key factor in Amazon's ability to innovate and disrupt various industries.

While I quite enjoyed “Working Backwards,” there were moments when the book felt a bit too much like a promotional piece for Amazon. Despite this, the valuable insights and lessons shared by the authors make it a worthwhile read for anyone interested in understanding the driving forces behind one of the world's most successful companies.

Main suggestions:
- Replace PowerPoint presentations with six-page narratives and PR/FAQ documents for discussing complex topics in leadership meetings.
- Implement the Bar Raiser hiring process, which improves the quality of hires and overall team performance.
- Focus on controllable input metrics, requiring patient trial and error to identify those with the greatest impact on desired results.
- Adopt an organizational structure with autonomous teams and single-threaded leaders, starting with your product development group.
- Revise the compensation structure for leaders to encourage long-term commitment and decision-making.
- Clearly articulate the core elements of your company's culture and integrate them into every process and discussion.
- Develop a set of leadership principles with input from multiple contributors and incorporate them into every process.
- Create a visual representation of your company's growth drivers, evaluating actions based on their impact on the flywheel.

Take homes:

- Constrained input metrics
- PR/FAQ, start from the end
- Tenets to help guide decision making

I'm using these concepts in production right now.

Fantastic read! The processes developed within Amazon and described in the book give great insight into how to - slowly but surely - drive innovation within a larger corporation. Besides that, the case studies later in the book, like the one on AWS, are page-turners. Pretty cool, how they were willing to bet big (and completely out of their comfort zone) to keep developing value for their customers.