I had a long day of walking around and waiting a lot, so it was a good chance to listen “Working Backwards” by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr. It was more insightful than I anticipated. Here are my thoughts about it –
- Corporates vs. startups – whenever I read or hear about best practices and success stories of big organizations (Amazon, Netflix, etc.), I wonder what I can adapt and what I can use for a small startup. Two things sparked my mind –
- Hiring for diversity – the book mentioned that they cared for diversity, specifically concerning gender, from the early days of Amazon. They say that one of the groups noticed that they had some bias in their hiring process, specifically in CV screening, and wanted to improve it while not changing the bar. To eliminate biases that arise when reading women’s CVs, they modified the hiring process so that every woman who applied to the position would go through a phone interview.
- Diving into the details – in startups, there are always fires to put away, new requests, and urgent tasks. I can improve on diving into the details, and that can put some of the fires away.
- “Be stubborn on the vision but flexible on the details.” – I love this quote, and I think it is one of the enablers for Amazon’s innovative culture.
- Blackberry inspiration – the authors mention that when designing Kindle, they were inspired by Blackberry, which was innovative for the time being as it was always synced and available. As in the examples in the Jobs to Be Done book – while the inspiration stands in place, the example is a bit outdated. Maybe I should read this next.
- 6 pagers – one of the justifications brought in the book for moving from PowerPoint to six pagers is that it eliminates the differences between a skilled marketing person, a junior developer, and an experienced VP and makes it more equal. I disagree with this argument. It might decrease the dependency on presentation skills, but I still think that there is a gap and experience matters even in writing – choosing the right wording and style and surfacing the relevant doubts, concerns, or benefits of the relevant stakeholders and audience. Writing is also an art, and writing a concise passage is not an easy task.
- WatchNow subscription – when talking about Prime Videos, they mentioned Netflix’s early days when it was called WatchNow, and they offered a subscription to whoever had a DVD subscription. This resonates with jobs to be done advice regarding obstacles to adaptation – offer the customers a way to try the product (freemium, limited trial, etc) before they buy it.
- AWS – as they say, the origin story and other stories about AWS can fill a book independently. I look forward to such a book. Having said that, they talk about the pricing of S3 and whether this should be a subscription or usage-based, what should count for usage – storage size, API calls, etc., and how the pricing was changed once they better understood the usage patterns. This is a great anecdote that even if you walk backward and prepare the PR and Q&A before you develop the product, you will learn new things when users start using it.
- 2 pizza teams legend – there are a few concepts associated with Amazon, such as the “2 pizza teams” which, after reading the book, I find it is highly misunderstood or very freely interpreted. On the other hand, I didn’t hear many companies or many people discussing the “Working Backwards” process, which I find far more interesting, and I wonder why one concept is so popular while another one stays in the shade.
Tom Ron 