The book’s name comes from Amazon’s product development process, which involves working backwards from the desired customer experience to decide what to build.īryar worked at Amazon for 12 years as an executive, including two where he was Bezos’s technical advisor, effectively his chief of staff. ( You can read all of our book briefings here.) It offers advice on how you might adopt them at your own workplace (assuming, for example, you and your colleagues are game to spend long stretches reading in each other’s company.) This week two Amazon alums, Colin Bryar and Bill Carr, published a book called Working Backwards that walks in detail through how the company arrived at such singular practices. During that time, executives quietly read six-page narrative memos presenting the matter to be discussed. Perhaps most famous of them is the fact that important meetings at Amazon begin with 20 minutes of silence. Much of the coverage of Jeff Bezos’s recent announcement that he plans to cede the CEO role at Amazon noted the retailer’s idiosyncratic corporate practices.

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Working backwards book amazon