Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards)

**Bill Carr** (0:00)
As Jeff would say, we took it as an article of faith.
If we served customers well, if we prioritized customers and delivered for them, things like sales, things like revenue, and active customers, and things like the share price and free cash flow would follow. So therefore, when we're making a decision, thinking about a problem, we're gonna start with what's best for the customer, and then come backward from there. That informs what's the work you have to do to then create this new solution for customers.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:33)
Today, my guest is Bill Carr. Bill is the co-author of the book Working Backwards, which is a synthesis of the biggest lessons that Bill and his co-author learned from their many years at Amazon. Bill joined Amazon just five years after it was founded, stayed there for 15 years where he worked on the books business, and then as VP of digital media, launched and managed the company's global digital music and video businesses, including Amazon Music, Prime Video, and Amazon Studios. After Amazon, Bill was an executive-in-residence at Maveron, an early-stage VC firm, then chief operating officer at OfferUp, and these days, Bill runs a consulting firm called Working Backwards LLC, where he and his co-author Colin Breyer help growth stage and public companies implement the many practices developed at Amazon. In our conversation, we go many levels deep on how to actually implement a number of the practices and ways of working that helped Amazon become the success that it is today, including the process of how to actually work backwards, how to organize your team with a single threaded leader, how to divide up your metrics into input and output metrics, how to practice disagreeing and committing, how to implement the bar razor program in your hiring process, and so much more. Huge thank you to Ethan Evans for making this episode possible and introducing me to Bill. With that, I bring you Bill Carr after a short word from our sponsors.
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Bill, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

**Bill Carr** (4:29)
Thanks Lenny, thanks so much for having me. Pleasure to be here.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:32)
It's my pleasure. So I was reading your book and something that I recognized as I was going through this is just how many new ways of working Amazon contributed to the way tech and business runs. And I made this little list and I'm curious if there's anything I'm forgetting that's obvious. So obviously the idea of working backwards, the idea of one way and two way door decisions, the concept of disagreeing and committing, input and output metrics, using memos versus decks. There's just the idea of two pizza teams.