Nov 2, 2023 · 1h 33m · lennys-podcast
Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards)
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this interview, former Amazon executive Bill Carr breaks down the key operational mechanisms behind Amazon's explosive growth, including the PR/FAQ working backwards process, single-threaded leadership, controllable input metrics, and the Bar Raiser hiring framework. He provides actionable insights for modern product leaders on how to systematically translate customer obsession into durable organizational execution and scalable innovation.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Lenny holds 18.5% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Lenny as informed peer 4.5 Guest teaching 6.5 Guest disagreement 0.9 Lenny pushing back 0.4
speaking balance: gold is Lenny, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 39:07 Rejecting revenue-driven backwards planning
Carr flatly rejects Lenny's inquiry regarding working backwards from revenue or financial targets, asserting that the mechanism strictly applies to customer needs.
Hardest push from Lenny ▶ 45:09 Challenging the relevance of press releasesLenny challenges the modern relevance of press releases, questioning whether contemporary startups should replace them with social media posts or TikTok videos.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 28:10 Masterclass on disagree and commit mechanicsCarr provides a comprehensive breakdown of the 'Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit' principle, clarifying the exact moment when disagreement must stop once reasoning has been factored.
Lenny holds their own ▶ 1:03:15 Supplying the missing Six Sigma DMAIC stageWhen Carr gets stuck trying to remember what the 'A' stands for in Six Sigma DMAIC, Lenny jumps in with the exact term 'Analyze'.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Lenny as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Lenny pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon's Golden Era of Process Innovation | 5 | 5 | 1 | 0 | Lenny establishes domain knowledge by synthesizing Amazon's core operating principles, which Carr validates and expands with historical context on process innovation between 2003 and 2007. | |
| Failed Experiments and the Hazard of Compound Metrics | 6 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Lenny relates his own product experience with compound metrics to Carr's fitness function story before asking for a precise breakdown of single-threaded leadership. | |
| Autonomy, S-Team Alignment, and General Management Models | 4 | 6 | 2 | 1 | Carr gently reframes Lenny's assumption about solo visionaries versus cross-functional program ownership and explains how single-threaded teams interface with S-Team reviews. | |
| Countermeasures for Preserving Functional Excellence | 3 | 7 | 0 | 0 | Carr gives a masterclass on functional countermeasures, detailing how non-technical leaders like himself managed engineering organizations without sacrificing code standards. | |
| Unpacking 'Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit' | 4 | 8 | 2 | 1 | Carr deconstructs common corporate misuse of 'Disagree and Commit', emphasizing the obligation to surface new data and Drucker-style decision clarity. | |
| Managing High-Conviction Leaders and Sound Judgment | 4 | 7 | 1 | 0 | Carr explains how 'Leaders Are Right a Lot' relies on sound qualitative judgment and recognizing underlying thinking vectors rather than relying purely on malleable data sets. | |
| The Philosophy of Customer-Centric Working Backwards | 4 | 7 | 2 | 1 | Carr rejects working backwards from revenue or internal constraints, clarifying that working backwards is solely centered on unconstrained customer problem statements. | |
| Sponsor Break: Wix Studio | 4 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Lenny delivers an ad read for Wix Studio before probing into whether modern teams should replace traditional press releases with social formats, prompting Carr to defend the PRFAQ structure. | |
| The Concentric Review Loop and Building a Product Funnel | 5 | 6 | 1 | 0 | Carr illustrates the concentric review loop, drawing an analogy to venture capital funnels to explain why most PRFAQs should be discarded before reaching executive review. | |
| Bridging the 'Thinking to Doing' Gap in Strategy | 5 | 6 | 0 | 0 | Lenny cites Harvard Business Review's thinking-to-doing gap, and Carr explains how early documentation uncovers fatal flaws before resource allocation. | |
| Input Versus Output Metrics and the Flywheel Effect | 6 | 7 | 1 | 0 | Lenny shares Airbnb's adoption of Amazon-style input metrics, while Carr details how Good to Great inspired Amazon to discard quarterly revenue fire drills in favor of controllable inputs. | |
| Instrumenting Input Metrics via Customer Journey Mapping | 6 | 6 | 0 | 1 | Carr walks through journey mapping using Airbnb as a live scenario and connects input metric discovery to Six Sigma DMAIC methodologies, with Lenny assisting when Carr blanks on an acronym letter. | |
| Diagnosing Product Failures: Lessons from the Fire Phone | 4 | 7 | 1 | 0 | Carr diagnoses the failure of the Amazon Fire Phone as a case of starting with technology solutions like 3D displays rather than solving a real customer problem. | |
| Structuring Incentives and Leadership Cover for Innovation | 4 | 8 | 0 | 0 | Carr outlines how Amazon's compensation structure, devoid of performance bonuses and tied purely to long-term equity, enabled executive leadership to insulate high-risk bets. | |
| The Bar Raiser Program: Mitigating Urgency Bias in Hiring | 4 | 8 | 1 | 1 | Carr explains the structural mechanics of the Bar Raiser program, clarifying the separation between hiring manager ownership and bar raiser process stewardship. | |
| Implementing Working Backwards and Consulting Services | 3 | 6 | 1 | 0 | Carr cautions against attempting to blindly replicate Amazon's culture, recommending disciplined, executive-backed pilots for growth-stage companies. | |
| Lightning Round: Books, Media, Gear, and Operating Mottos | 5 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Lenny conducts the lightning round covering books, cycling gear, and operating mottos, cross-referencing Peter Senge when Carr quotes military maxims on pacing. |
Statements from this episode (29)
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: 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…”
Rachitsky: There is always one primary lever that impacts goals most
“And then it turns out there's always one thing that actually impacts the bigger goal most. So you just end up working on that thing anyway.”
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: 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: 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: Amazon required S-team plan alignment before granting team autonomy
“There's, there was an intense review process at Amazon where either, you know,
At some level, whether it be the vice president, senior vice president, or all the way up to the Jeff level and his direct reports called the S team, this plan would be reviewed and…”
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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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 measured its key selection input metric incorrectly for years
“We tell a story in the book about one of our most important input metrics, which was how much selection do we have? And we were actually not measuring that right for several years. We had to refine that measurement.”
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 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…”