Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working

Bill Carr, co-author of Working Backwards and a former Amazon executive who helped launch its digital media businesses, explains the management and product practices Amazon developed during its scaling years. The conversation covers working backwards from customers, single-threaded leadership, input and output metrics, disagree-and-commit, PR/FAQs, and the Bar Raiser hiring process.

01Key learnings

• Start product decisions from the customer's real problem and work backwards to the required solution, rather than starting from revenue targets or current constraints.
• Avoid compound metrics that blend several numbers into one index; track each important metric individually so you can see which actions actually drive results.
• Organize teams around a single-threaded leader who owns the people, resources and roadmap for a durable area, rather than project-based swarming across competing groups.
• Before moving to single-threaded teams, build the prerequisites: decoupled architecture with clear APIs, and countermeasures like central functional leaders who keep craft standards high.
• Use PR/FAQs as a concise customer problem-and-solution document, then iterate through concentric circles of feedback so good ideas surface and weak ones are dropped early.
• Separate input metrics (customer experience drivers you can control) from output metrics (revenue, free cash flow), and manage the inputs deliberately while tracking outputs.
• Practice disagree-and-commit by surfacing new information, and once your concerns are heard and understood, commit fully rather than going through the motions.
• Use a Bar Raiser from outside the hiring team on interview loops to counter urgency bias and enforce objective, behavior-based criteria, while the hiring manager keeps the final decision.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.