Bill Carr
Co-Founder, Working Backwards LLC. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
authorexecutivefounderoperator@BillCarr89 ↗LinkedIn ↗workingbackwards.com ↗
Bill Carr is the co-author of Working Backwards, codifying Amazon's management and operational principles. During more than 15 years at Amazon, he served as Vice President of Digital Media, launching Amazon Music, Prime Video, and Amazon Studios.
1shows
1appearances
28statements
5resolved
4supported
0contradicted
80%fully supported
2said about them ↓ Everything Bill Carr said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Carr: Autonomous cross-functional team structures trade off functional excellence
“There's no free lunch in org structures. Any org structure, you're trading off one thing for another thing. In this case, you're trading off potentially functional excellence. So in other words, if you no longer have every single engineer, or every single mark…”
Carr: Prioritizing Customers Over Revenue Is an Unprovable Article of Faith
“We had, 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, we took it as an article of faith that then things like sales, Things like revenue and active customers and things li…”
Carr: Fire Phone failed because 3D effects solved no meaningful customer problem
“I would argue this is a case where we made the mistake of what we had a technology solution in mind, which was three D effects. And then, and we took that solution and we're then in search of a problem. I don't think it's solved any meaningful problems for cus…”
Carr: Amazon developed nearly all core products and processes between 2003-2007
“This period of both product and process innovation actually occurred in this one narrow window of 2003 to 2007. During that window of time, all the products I just mentioned and all of the processes except for one Were all developed in this one four year perio…”
Carr: Single-threaded leadership requires permanent program ownership over temporary projects
“Fundamentally we've moved from what we called a project orientation to a program orientation. So project orientation means, oh, we're going to do this project to change our search result page and algorithm, and the project is defined in this way, and it's goin…”
Carr: Team members should commit once leaders show they understand the pushback
“Now that is the point at which as long as the disagreeer is hearing back from the leader that they understand their point of view, understand like why they are pushing back and seem to fully understand it. And they've taken that into consideration. That is the…”
Carr: Working with visionary executives requires identifying their core thinking vector
“And so there'd be times when even after we've had that discussion, I maybe still disagree, but then what I would do is I'd focus on, okay, well, what is the kernel or the core of like why Jeff thinks that we should do this? And I would focus on that kernel. I …”
Carr: Only 10 of Amazon's ~500 leadership goals tracked financial metrics
“And I can't remember exactly what year, something around like two South, 2007, 2008. They, you know, looked at that list, which is about 500 items long, by the way, and they counted it up. And of that list, Only 10 of them actually had a financial metric in it…”
Carr: Compound metrics obscure the actions that drive business outcomes
“The problem is it's actually becomes totally meaningless. When you're measuring things, you're trying to understand, like, what actions or reactions are creating, you know, the good outputs that you want revenue, customer growth, but by putting them all togeth…”
Carr: Single-threaded leadership shifts executive focus from roadmap refereeing to resource allocation
“Instead of management, senior management, refereeing every different, every item on a roadmap, they're refereeing Which teams have how many resources, which is kind of more of like a once or twice or three times a year decision versus refereeing everything on …”
Carr: Cross-functional setups dilute ownership across too many partial priorities
“Whereas when you have this highly like cross-functional approach,
And there's not, you know, one clear person who's responsible for this one project that's on this roadmap.
I've seen many a CEO pull their hair out saying like, I don't, I have no ownership and …”
Carr: Amazon senior engineers maintained cross-org duties to preserve functional excellence
“Effectively what it also meant is that anyone who is a, an engineering vice president, or in many cases, a director, they would often have Something else beyond their day job of some sort of subject matter expertise area where they would also contribute to the…”
Carr: Cost Cutting Only Benefits Customers If Savings Lower Prices
“In itself, driving out costs, you know, doing things more efficiently doesn't inherently benefit customers because you could just choose to take more profit. It only does if you decide that I'm in doing so, I'm going to lower my prices to customers or provide …”
Carr: PR/FAQ documents should develop through concentric circle reviews
“There's this iterative nature to writing PRFAQs where it's sort of a concentric circle review. Like you start off small, like with one author and with low fidelity writing these things, and then you start to share them with, you know, small group and get feedb…”
Carr: Internal PR/FAQs must be data-rich without marketing hyperbole
“You don't wanna use like hyperbole and it would be like very factual, like with like, you know, numbers, like data rich document too. So so again, not like a real press release. A lot of like internal confidential data would be like in this press release.”
Bill Carr: Product teams must operate as funnels, not tunnels
“What you're really trying to create is a product funnel, not a product tunnel. And with a funnel, meaning, you know, lots of things at the top, fewer things at the bottom. The tunnel means that everything that comes in is also going to come out the other side.…”
Carr: Undocumented product ideas reduce organizational decisions to politics and top-down mandates
“So one problem is that companies get stuck, I think, where they never actually go do that documentation. And so it's a debate and discussion about concepts that aren't really well fleshed out. And so people's ability to actually evaluate them in any realistic …”
Carr: Ideas outside existing org structures must be shelved or given dedicated owners
“When something came up, some idea that didn't neatly fit within my org structure, I couldn't necessarily delegate it to someone that this, there were only two things I could possibly do, which is just sort of set it aside altogether. Cause otherwise just be a …”
Carr: Jim Collins' 'Good to Great' was Amazon's most influential management book
“I think that this was the single most influential and effective management book for our company, because what it caused Jeff to do, and I won't describe what, you know, most of you probably know what it is. If you don't know what it is, go read the good to gre…”
Carr: A metric is an input if you control it and it impacts customers
“So, you know, you're doing input metrics. If it is do you control it? Meaning can you apply resources to make this thing better or worse? Is it, does it touch customers? It doesn't always have to touch customers, but if it is affecting the customer experience,…”
Carr: Amazon board meetings about launching the Kindle were highly contentious
“A lot of people inside Amazon doubted that the Kindle was going to be a good idea. I remember contentious, you know, board meetings on this topic.”
Carr: Bezos conceptualized the Amazon Echo voice assistant puck in 2004
“Jeff, Jeff wrote about a product, you know, there was a puck that sat on your, on the, in your kitchen that you would talk to and ask it for things and, you know, could shop from it. He wrote about that in 2004. Well, the technology wasn't there to be able to …”
Carr: Amazon tied executive compensation to stock price, not unit performance bonuses
“So there were no performance bonuses. So if I was running the book business and I had a killer year from a financial point of view, there was no like extra kicker for me. And if I ran the book business and it had a bad year, there was no financial penalty for …”
Carr: Amazon shielded early AWS and digital media teams with direct CEO oversight
“One was when we went to go build, you know, digital media and AWS, we put like two of our smartest, you know, leaders in the company on those things, Steve Kessel and Andy Jassy. And number two, they were meeting with Jeff regularly. Jeff was deeply engaged wi…”
The other half of the tape: Bill Carr's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 1 time in 1 episode across the shows. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Lenny Rachitsky 1
Statements about Bill Carr, by other people (1)
Rachitsky: Amazon's six-page narrative is designed to expose flawed ideas early
“The narrative approach at Amazon, one of the benefits of that and the reasons they go there is partly for you to realize this is a bad idea before anyone even needs to give you feedback. And that's why they force you to write six pages in depth about your idea…”
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Lenny's Podcast 1
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Bill's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Co-Founder, Working Backwards LLC | 1 | 28 | 80% 4/5 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |