Former Amazon VP Bill Carr discusses the history and structural origins of Amazon's Bar Raiser hiring framework.
Insight
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…”
Insight
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…”
Opinion
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…”
Assertion Partly supported
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…”
Insight
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…”
Insight
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…”