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What it argues
Working Backwards is an insider account of how Amazon built its management system, written by two former Amazon executives who worked directly with Jeff Bezos over many years. Colin Bryar served as Bezos's chief of staff (his "shadow") from 2003 to 2005 before leading Amazon Kindle. Bill Carr ran digital music and video and oversaw the launch of Prime Video. Together, they spent decades inside the company's most consequential product and organizational decisions, and the book is an attempt to make Amazon's methods legible rather than mythological.
The book is organized around a handful of practices that Bryar and Carr argue are genuinely distinctive about Amazon and responsible for its unusual track record: the Leadership Principles (fourteen beliefs that function as a shared operating system), the ban on PowerPoint presentations in favor of six-page narrative memos, the "working backwards" product development process (starting with a press release and FAQ for a product that doesn't exist yet), and the concept of "two-pizza teams" designed to preserve speed and ownership as organizations scale.
What it gets right
- 1.
Amazon's Leadership Principles function as a shared operating system rather than decorative values. They're used in hiring, reviews, and everyday debates, and they have real behavioral consequences.
- 2.
The six-page narrative memo replaced PowerPoint presentations at Amazon's senior levels. Writing forces clarity in a way that bullet points don't — a memo can't hide thin thinking behind confident slides.
- 3.
Working backwards means starting with the customer experience, not the technology or business model. The process begins with a press release and FAQ describing the finished product, then works backwards to what it would take to build it.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Colin Bryar spent more than twelve years at Amazon, including two years as Jeff Bezos's chief of staff and several years as vice president leading Amazon Kindle devices. Bill Carr spent more than fifteen years at Amazon, where he led digital music and video businesses and oversaw the early development of what became Prime Video. Both left Amazon in the mid-2010s and have since worked as advisors, investors, and consultants to technology companies. Working Backwards, published in 2021, is their joint account of Amazon's operating methods drawn from their combined decades of experience at the company.
