Question 1

What are the key takeaways from Bill Carr's episode on Lenny's Podcast?

Accepted Answer

1. Single-threaded leadership creates ownership, speed, and agility - teams that always work on one thing think holistically rather than project-by-project, and can sprint once aligned with leadership. 2. Disagree and commit means providing new information, not just voicing opinions - once you're heard and understood, commit fully by understanding the reasoning, not just going through the motions. 3. Working backwards means starting with customer needs without constraints - take it as an article of faith that if you serve customers well, revenue and growth will follow. 4. Input metrics beat output metrics because they're controllable - focus on improving selection, price, and speed rather than chasing revenue numbers through fire drills. 5. Product development should be a funnel, not a tunnel - like VCs, say no to good ideas because you have better ideas, creating a corpus of well-thought-out options.

Question 2

What does Bill Carr say about working-backwards and single-threaded-leadership?

Accepted Answer

"Amazon was actually equally focused on process innovation. In many cases, we stood on other people's shoulders. That was what all great companies should do. That's why we wrote the book - we would like to allow people to stand on Amazon's shoulders to learn what we learned." - Bill Carr "Jeff Bezos is fundamentally a very scientific and analytical thinker. He said, 'I need to be scientific about this. There needs to be some mechanism for me to manage such a company. So I'm going to experiment, like a scientist would, with different ideas, different hypotheses, implement them and see what works.'" - Bill Carr "The fitness function was not a good idea. This is a compound metric where you try to take several important metrics and munge them into one. The problem is it becomes totally meaningless. When you're measuring things, you're trying to understand what actions create the good outputs. By putting them all together, you obfuscate that." - Bill Carr

Question 3

What are Bill Carr's views on working-backwards, single-threaded-leadership, input-metrics?

Accepted Answer

Bill Carr: "The three things we really wanted were ownership, speed and agility. Let's create teams that can stand alone, where there's a single leader and the cross-functional resources they need are all either directly report to them or are dedicated to them. We moved from a project orientation to a program orientation." Bill Carr: "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, revenue, active customers, share price and free cash flow would follow. So when making a decision, we start with what's best for the customer and come backward from there."

Bill Carr

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

TRANSCRIPT

Bill Carr

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

Bill Carr

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

TRANSCRIPT

Bill Carr

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