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

On the whole, this is a strong framework. One can find few faults with a framework that encourages executives to think strategically, anticipate challenges and develop products and services with the customer’s experience in mind, rather than business-side concerns. Besides the eponymous framework, this book also features many interesting insights into Amazon’s culture and leadership practices, which played a role in making Amazon a household name.

For all its strengths, Amazon’s ‘Working Backwards’ approach is still, at its core, product-centric. The focus of the framework is not on creating a genuine customer experience or on developing customer relationships, but rather on ensuring that the product-design process is optimized so that new products sell better.

Working Backwards is an insider’s breakdown of Amazon’s approach to culture, leadership, and best practices from two long-time Amazon executives―with lessons and techniques you can apply to your own company, and career, right now.

In Working Backwards, two long-serving Amazon executives reveal the principles and practices that have driven the success of one of the most extraordinary companies the world has ever known. With twenty-seven years of Amazon experience between them―much of it during the period of unmatched innovation that created products and services including Kindle, Amazon Prime, Amazon Studios, and Amazon Web Services―Bryar and Carr offer unprecedented access to the Amazon way as it was developed and proven to be repeatable, scalable, and adaptable.

With keen analysis and practical steps for applying it at your own company―no matter the size―the authors illuminate how Amazon’s fourteen leadership principles inform decision-making at all levels of the company. With a focus on customer obsession, long-term thinking, eagerness to invent, and operational excellence, Amazon’s ground-level practices ensure these characteristics are translated into action and flow through all aspects of the business.

Working Backwards is both a practical guidebook and the story of how the company grew to become so successful. It is filled with the authors’ in-the-room recollections of what “Being Amazonian” is like and how their time at the company affected their personal and professional lives. They demonstrate that success on Amazon’s scale is not achieved by the genius of any single leader, but rather through commitment to and execution of a set of well-defined, rigorously-executed principles and practices―shared here for the very first time.

Whatever your talent, career or organization might be, find out how you can put Working Backwards to work for you.

The ‘Working Backwards’ approach can, in principle, be adopted by anyone who is seeking to realize a goal in practice. The general principle of envisioning the end result from the perspective of the target audience is a sound one, as is the practice of identifying potential pitfalls before they arise. However, the framework described in this book is fundamentally product-centric. We would advise readers to consult the Senteo methodology to learn how they can adopt a more experience-centric approach.