Carr: Cost Cutting Only Benefits Customers If Savings Lower Prices
Bill Carr · Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards) · Nov 2, 2023 · at 39:35
Former Amazon executive Bill Carr discusses how Amazon evaluated cost structure within its working backwards product framework on Lenny's Podcast.
0:00 / 0:18exact quote · 18.2s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 some other benefits.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Bill Carr
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…”