Most business books about Amazon are written by outsiders guessing at the culture. Working Backwards is written by two executives who spent a combined 27 years inside it — including two years with one of them as Jeff Bezos’s chief of staff. What they reveal isn’t slogans or leadership platitudes. It’s mechanisms: the specific, repeatable processes Amazon used to make good decisions at scale.
The book’s thesis is that Amazon’s success wasn’t the genius of any single leader but the rigorous execution of a set of well-defined practices — and that those practices can be learned. Working Backwards is that rare thing in the genre: less memoir, more manual.
Book Summary
The core of Working Backwards is a set of mechanisms Amazon developed to replace heroics with process. The most famous is the six-page narrative memo: no PowerPoint at Amazon. Proposals must be written as complete narratives — background, the idea, the plan — because writing forces clarity that slides let you dodge. Meetings begin with everyone silently reading the memo, so discussion starts from shared understanding instead of whoever talks best.
The title mechanism is “working backwards”: before building anything, the team writes the press release announcing the finished product, along with a FAQ anticipating customer and internal questions. If you can’t write a compelling press release, you don’t have a compelling product — and the exercise forces teams to define the customer experience first and the technology second.
The book walks through the rest of the operating system: the fourteen Leadership Principles used as actual hiring and promotion criteria rather than wall art; the “bar raiser” program, where a trained interviewer from outside the hiring team holds veto power to ensure every hire raises the average; the discipline of managing input metrics (things you can control) rather than obsessing over output metrics (results you can’t); single-threaded owners and two-pizza teams — small, autonomous groups with clear end-to-end ownership; and the cultural norm of “disagree and commit,” where debate is fierce but commitment, once decided, is total.
These mechanisms are illustrated with inside stories from the launches of Kindle, Prime, AWS, and Prime Video — including the authors’ own in-the-room recollections of what “being Amazonian” felt like during the company’s period of most intense innovation.
Buy Working Backwards on Amazon
Who are Colin Bryar and Bill Carr?
Colin Bryar joined Amazon in 1998 — four years after its founding — and spent twelve years there as the company grew from a domestic bookseller into a global powerhouse. For two of those years he was Bezos’s chief of staff, known internally as “the shadow,” attending every meeting and traveling everywhere with Bezos. After Amazon, he served as COO of the Singapore e-commerce company RedMart, which was later sold to Alibaba.
Bill Carr joined Amazon in 1999 and stayed for more than fifteen years. As Vice President of Digital Media, he launched and ran the company’s global digital music and video businesses — including Amazon Music, Prime Video, and Amazon Studios. After Amazon he was an executive in residence at the venture firm Maveron and COO of OfferUp. Together they founded Working Backwards LLC, where they coach executives on implementing Amazon’s management practices. Working Backwards, published by St. Martin’s Press in 2021, is their first book.
Lessons From Working Backwards
Writing is thinking. The six-page memo exists because narratives expose fuzzy thinking that slide decks conceal. If an idea can’t survive being written down clearly, it isn’t ready. Any team can adopt this on Monday: ban the deck, require the narrative.
Start from the customer and work backwards. The PR/FAQ forces the question most product development skips: what will the customer actually experience, and why will they care? Writing the press release first is a forcing function for customer obsession — it kills projects that sound exciting internally but offer nothing externally.
Hire with a bar raiser. Every hire should raise the team’s average, and the only way to enforce that is an independent interviewer with real veto power who isn’t desperate to fill the role. Most companies’ hiring bars drift downward under pressure; the bar raiser is the mechanism that stops the drift.
Manage inputs, not outputs. You can’t directly control revenue or growth, but you can control the activities that produce them. Amazon’s discipline was identifying the controllable input metrics and managing those relentlessly. Outputs are scoreboards; inputs are levers.
Small teams with single-threaded owners. The two-pizza team — small enough to be fed with two pizzas — with one person clearly owning the outcome end to end. No diffusion of responsibility, no coordination tax. When something fails, you know exactly whose it was.
Build mechanisms, not pep talks. The book’s deepest lesson: culture isn’t what you say, it’s what your processes produce by default. Good intentions don’t scale; mechanisms do. Every practice in Working Backwards is a machine for producing the right behavior without relying on heroic individuals.
Disagree and commit. Argue as hard as you want before the decision — then commit completely once it’s made. The alternative most companies live with is worse: quiet disagreement that becomes slow-motion sabotage.
Buy Working Backwards on Amazon
Criticisms of the Book
Amazon’s mechanisms were forged at Amazon’s scale and in Amazon’s culture. Transplanting six-page memos and bar raisers into a twenty-person startup can easily become cargo-culting — the rituals without the underlying standards that make them work. The book acknowledges that mechanisms must be adapted, but the adaptation guidance is thinner than the description of the mechanisms themselves.
Working Backwards is also, at moments, hagiographic. The mechanisms get credit for the wins; the failures get less airtime, and the human cost of Amazon’s intensity — the burnout, the stack-ranking-adjacent pressure the Leadership Principles can create in performance reviews — is largely absent. These are real practices with real trade-offs, and the book’s enthusiasm occasionally outruns its even-handedness.
Finally, the time cost is real. Writing a proper six-page narrative, running a real bar-raiser loop, maintaining input-metric discipline — these demand hours that small teams may not have. The mechanisms pay for themselves at scale; below a certain size, they’re overhead.
Who is This Book For?
Working Backwards is for founders, managers, and operators — anyone who builds teams or sets how work gets done. If you can change a meeting format, a hiring process, or a planning ritual, you can use this book immediately.
It’s less useful if you’re an individual contributor with no influence over process, and it’s not an investing book — though investors evaluating management teams will recognize which companies run on mechanisms and which run on charisma. That distinction is worth more than most management interviews reveal.
Final Thoughts
What distinguishes Working Backwards from the shelf of Amazon books is its specificity. This isn’t “be customer-obsessed” as a poster — it’s the actual documents, the actual meeting format, the actual hiring veto. Whether or not you adopt a single practice, the mental model transfers: stop asking how to get people to care, and start asking what mechanism would produce the behavior by default. That’s the Amazon insight worth stealing.
