Time as Competitive Advantage

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Bill Carr, former VP of Digital Media at Amazon, shares the simple, powerful mechanisms Amazon invented for slowing down, getting things right, then scaling at speed.

 

Episode Notes

Bill Carr - entrepreneur, executive coach, author, and former Vice President of Digital Media at Amazon - discusses practical, proven methodologies that Amazon invented to bring products and business to market successfully (including the Narrative-based approach to communication, the PR/FAQ document to guide product development, and the Bar Raiser program for hiring). In this conversation, Bill shares insights and perspectives gleaned from both successes and failures during his 15 years at Amazon. He talks about his reasons for writing Working Backwards (with co-author and former Amazon executive Colin Bryar), the creation of the digital media business at Amazon, the role that Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos played as the “Chief Slowdown Officer,” Amazon’s use of time as a competitive advantage, the way the company puts into practice its 14 Leadership Principles, and the exemplar organizations Amazon itself looks to in order to improve its own processes and operations. Bill punctuates the narrative with candid and honest stories of his own intrapreneurial experiences as a leader who played key roles in developing Amazon Music, Prime Video, and Amazon Studios.

How do you make decisions as an executive? What does it really mean to start with the customer and work backwards? What can you learn about the applicability to your organization of Amazon’s successes across so many different categories of GDP? How do you design products and services to ensure success?

Guest Bio

Bill Carr joined Amazon in 1999, where he spent more than 15 years. As Vice President of Digital Media, Bill launched and managed the company's global digital music and video businesses, including Amazon Music, Prime Video, and Amazon Studios. After Amazon, Bill was an Executive In Residence with Maveron, LLC, an early-stage, consumer-only venture capital firm. Bill later served as the Chief Operating Officer of OfferUp, the largest mobile marketplace for local buyers and sellers in the U.S. Today Bill is co-founder of Working Backwards LLC where he coaches executives at both large and early-stage companies on how to implement the management practices developed at Amazon.

Building Blocks

Think about what kind of mechanism your organization could employ to slow down now to move fast later. Maybe it is the written narrative or the PR/FAQ. Maybe there's a piece around how you evaluate talent, which Bill hit on today in which he talks about in his book. But maybe those things inspire you to think of something different that you want to go build. It could be a tool or a process or a way to help your teams get more of a competitive advantage out of their time, like we talked about with Bill today.

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+ Episode Transcript

Bill Carr [00:00:05] How do we do it in a way that the customers are going to love, because there were plenty of times when we would have significant conflict with, for example, our studio partners about the rules and restrictions they wanted to put in place for how people could buy this or consume it. And if they bought a movie, would they actually get to keep it? And we had to fight a lot of battles on behalf of the customer. And who knows how the story would have turned out if we hadn't fought some of those battles? Yeah, it was really that that focus and that intersection of the consumer, media and technology, which was a really fun space to play in.

Jesse Purewal [00:00:49] From Qualtrics Industries, this is Breakthrough Builders, a series of conversations with people whose passions, perspectives, instincts and ideas fuel some of the world's most amazing product brands and experiences. I'm Jesse Purewal. On the show today, I talked to Bill Carr, formerly the Vice President of Digital Media at Amazon. He's the guy behind the products and business, as we know today, as Prime Video, Amazon Studios and Amazon Music. He's also the coauthor of the just released book Working Backwards: Insights, Stories and Secrets from Inside Amazon. On the show today, Bill talks about the book, shares his view on how Amazon manages to keep innovating like a startup, reflects on what it's like to work directly with Jeff Bezos, and tells the story of how he learned to go slow in order to go fast as he and his team stood up what would become one of the most successful digital media businesses on the planet.

Jesse Purewal [00:01:54] I am here with Bill Carr. Bill, thanks for joining me on the show, Jesse. Thanks for having me on the show. I loved reading my advance copy, Bill, of Working Backwards. I want to thank you for letting me get my hands on it. I know you and your co-author Colin Bryar decided back in twenty eighteen to write this book. Tell me, Bill, when and where within Amazon the two of you first met.

Bill Carr [00:02:13] Colin and I actually met outside of Amazon first. Believe it or not, both of us met our respective wives at Amazon, my wife Lynne and his wife Sarah, and they were good friends and so it was really through them that we first connected. Later we reconnected more frequently when he took on the role of "Jeff's shadow" or Chief of Staff when I started working on digital media, I spent a lot of time meeting with Jeff and Colin would attend every one of those meetings.

Jesse Purewal [00:02:42] And why did you feel, you and Colin, that you in particular, the two of you were particularly suited to write a book like this?

Bill Carr [00:02:49] Because of the timing of when we took on these specific roles, and if you look at Amazon's spectacular and history-making success, they went through this transformation from simply an e-commerce company to a company with a diversified portfolio of products and businesses between 2003 and 2006. And those businesses which formed the basis of Amazon's growth and success today are Amazon Prime subscription service, Amazon Web Services, Fulfillment by Amazon, the device business, everything from Kindle, Fire TV, Echo and Alexa to the digital media business; amazon Music, Amazon Video. Colin and I had front row seats to this evolution of these businesses because Colin had stepped into this role of Jeff's technical advisor, Chief of Staff in 2003. And in that role, he then spent two years literally shadowing Jeff to every meeting that he went to. And at the same time, I joined I changed roles and became the second person on the ground, the second leader of the then fledgling digital media business in early 2004, which resulted in then many years of working closely with Jeff and the leaders of the company. During this time, when these new businesses were formed, a whole set of scalable, repeatable processes that allowed the company to manage and develop such a diversified set of businesses, and this set of processes is what we call in our book, the Amazon Invention Machine. So we had a front row seat to how this invention machine was created. And so we felt that we were as well-positioned as anyone to be able to describe and document that and make these set of processes sort of well understood and available to anyone who'd want to implement them.

Jesse Purewal [00:04:47] And when you talk about the processes that are indispensable to that innovation machine, I, I think a lot of people maybe conceptually get that, but your book makes clear and what I think a study of your career and Colins story as well makes clear is that it actually really is about the discipline and the process and the rigor of the methods that you put under the foundations of all of those decisions that you that you made. So maybe just talk at a high level about that idea.

Bill Carr [00:05:17] It's actually useful to start the conversation by illustrating kind of the timeline of how things work. So Andy Jassy, who's the current CEO and and was the founder effectively of the Amazon Web Services team, he began that role in 2003 and started to form the Amazon Web Services team. What is notable is that the first Amazon Web Services that you know and love today did not actually launch and rollout until three years later, 2006. Today, with the way people think about lean and agile, couldn't they stand up a software team and start launching things within a matter of months? And yes, the answer is they could have done that. But instead, what they did is they went through a very methodical process of thinking about the needs of the target customer. In this case, it was, frankly, any other tech company like Amazon, everything from a startup to a large company that had the same task of having to manage a data center and a fleet of servers and the amount of overhead and time that it took. So what that team did and worked out along the way with Jeff is they started using something called the working backwards PR/FAQ you process in a customer working backwards approach. You start by what does the customer need and then figure out what skills you may need to develop and capabilities and technologies you need to develop to actually serve the customers. This process, which we describe in the book. You actually first write a press release. And then answer a series of frequently asked questions, both ones that would apply to customers in the press and a set of internal FAQs that would describe things like the fixed headcount required to build the new product, the pro forma or any other technical hurdles and questions. And what was really going on behind the scenes was that the team was antsy and itchy, itching to get their first services built and launch them. But instead, Jeff Bezos was deliberately slowing that team down, which sounds counterintuitive. He was slowing them down, though, to really think through the details of what products would they really need to build that would really meet the customer's needs.

Bill Carr [00:07:35] And this process took months, more than a year in some cases, to really sort out what they wanted to build. And through the process of figuring that out, Jeff and the leadership team at Amazon developed the specific process to formalize how a team slows themself down, thinks through all the product details in advance from the perspective of the customer before they start writing code.

Jesse Purewal [00:08:02] Once you've read your book, it makes total sense in terms of the trade off between near-term versus long term focus and probability of success being higher or lower. But talk about what it's like to experience the slowdown as maybe colleagues on other teams around technology are putting products into market or they're shipping stuff and you're not. Like, what does that feel like? And how are you kind of working at the two speeds of the slowdown, but still iterating quickly through the processes like traffic you that you need to do to get the work done.

Bill Carr [00:08:40] So the same time that the AWS team is going through this process, you going slow to go fast, I was going through the same thing with the digital media business. We formed that business at the very beginning of 2004 and then 2007, the first major service, Kindle and e-book business was launched. So it was a similar delay of many years, two to three years to actually produce services on the other side. And I can tell you, having never gone through it before, I found it incredibly frustrating and challenging because the natural instinct that you have as a business leader or what most companies would do in these situations, in the case of digital media, there were a lot of things happening. The iPod and iTunes were gaining strength, Napster was being heavily used. The writing was on the wall that the media business was converting to a digital world. Many startups in many companies and large, well-funded companies flooding into this space. And meanwhile, we were still at the drawing board working on what we would do. It was very hard to fight against those basic instincts of I want to be out there in the marketplace and start competing, start selling and start growing my customer base.

Bill Carr [00:09:54] So it would really take me honestly, it wasn't until I went through that process and frankly had a mix of successes and failures through this process over a decade of being a leader in the digital media team where I ended up ultimately launching and running for a decade, Amazon's music business and movie and TV show business services that are now known as Amazon Music, Prime Video and Amazon Studios. But for the first, I don't know, five to six years of that time, I found that challenging and frustrating. And so it's really only in hindsight or in my later years that I could appreciate the value of having slowed down to go fast.

Jesse Purewal [00:10:32] And Bill, as you talk, I'm struck by the use of maybe the idea of an "intra-preneur" and Amazon that it often feels in startup culture like the failure is celebrated when it leads to eventual success, but that in more traditional companies, there's sort of a well, you don't want your amplitude to go too high or too low. You kind of want to just stay the course. At Amazon, I have an impression that actually it looks more like the entrepreneurial space. Did you experience it in that way that you had your portfolio of maybe less and more successful experiences, that the two sort of worked in tandem with one another.

Bill Carr [00:11:11] To start with, one of the notable things about Amazon is that, yes, it is compared to other large companies. It is on a scale of one to 10 for large companies versus resistant to innovation versus embracing innovation and testing. It's in the sort of the 9 to 10 range. I've heard many people say who've come in to Amazon from other companies like, wow, this is the most innovative company I've ever worked for. I can't believe at this scale the company is still so focused on innovation. And the other notable thing I'll say is that what one of the the geniuses of Jeff Bezos is to appreciate the fact that not every new product and feature you launch is going to work and that by blaming the people who worked on that project and demoting them or firing them is massively counterproductive because in doing so, you send the message to everyone else, which is you shouldn't take any risk. The second reason why that's not a good idea is that, in fact, I would argue that the success of my organization was born out of one of the most abject failures of my career, which was the initial launch of the Amazon video service, which was branded Amazon Unbox. I made all kinds of mistakes. I rushed the product out the door to try to meet press and competitive pressures from Apple. We had not thought through the details of the product well enough, didn't do a good enough job of testing that product. So after it launched and it was not doing very well, I certainly had a very unpleasant meeting with Jeff where he had a lot of unpleasant things to say to me about this product, but he didn't fire me. I continued to to lead that business as well as the music business and would do so for many years thereafter. And he didn't say this to me in this meeting, but he would say to many people who made a mistake, I'm not going to fire you now, I just made a two million dollar investment in you. Your job now is to learn from that investment and to make it pay off later. In my case that learning that investment paid off handily, I wasn't taking any risks, then I wasn't doing my job.

Jesse Purewal [00:13:08] And reflecting on the time that you spent with Jeff during your career, the years of your career at Amazon, how would you ultimately describe or distill the essence of what it's like to work alongside him?

Bill Carr [00:13:20] There's nothing else like it. I had the benefit of of interacting with a lot of other leaders at other companies in the media space, in the hardware space, through my work. But I never encountered anyone like Jeff. So the things that were so remarkable about him is his ability to look at a problem. No one had figured out e-commerce before. We we're figuring out digital media. There was no roadmap to figure out how digital media would work. You and your team would have been wrestling with these problems for weeks and days. And Jeff would look at it in a one hour meeting and he could get right to the heart of the matter in no time and would have insights that you would say you sort of slap yourself on the head and say, why didn't I think of that? He thinks at a scale that normal human beings can't understand. He thinks about time very, very differently. So for those that don't know about The Clock of the Long Now, the 10,000 year clock project that Jeff is helping to fund this project where they're building a clock in central Texas that will actually run for ten thousand years, which is meant to help people think about time very differently. Jeff thinks about time very differently all the time.

Bill Carr [00:14:29] And you realize that you're literally looking he's looking through a completely different lens than you and the other people around you are his ability to be a contrarian and and think so differently. So, so many of the approaches you would come up with, the problems and processes were so counter to traditional ways of thinking or MBA ways of thinking or conventional methods. It would happen over and over and over again. And his ability to do this was incredible. So, I mean, it was the highlight of my career to to get to spend a lot of time interacting with and working with Jeff. And I don't know how it ever replace that.

Jesse Purewal [00:15:10] How does one in a business think about the notion of time as a competitive advantage? I mean, I think we were conditioned to think of velocity only as increasing and pressure only increasing that if you if you if you don't if you're second derivative isn't positive, you're doing something wrong. And actually what you're talking about is is quite a different model. And I just wonder a lot of what makes Amazon able to move fast and do well at scale must be the ability to create a competitive advantage out of time itself. How would you think about that?

Bill Carr [00:15:46] As a simple example of this as I would review people's documents and business plans at Amazon, a typical mistake that people who are new to the process of writing a business document instead of a PowerPoint was that they would hand me a 20 or 15 page document and in that document would reflect all the different things they'd done and all the different thinking they've done. And I would point out to them that there's no points for how much time and effort you put into something, of course, that is valued. What is valuable is what I need is a crisp six page document that actually reflects your deep understanding of the business and the problems and well thought out solutions to those problems. Another way to think about that is, again, hanging with this concept of one of Amazon's notable processes, that meetings are conducted, conducted with narrative documents. So literally, when you walk into an Amazon meeting the first 20 minutes, there's no discussion. People are literally heads down reading, all reading the same document. And then after that, after the reading is done, then the 40 minutes that follow afterwards are even more productive because now everyone has gotten to the same place, basis of information in that first 20 minutes rather than a PowerPoint presentation, it's slowly dribbled out in a roundabout and meandering way, which with interruptions and being sidetracked and saying, oh, well, I'll get to that four slides from now and then maybe you squeeze in 10 to 15 minutes to have an actual conversation about it at the end. So when you think about how Amazon uses a one hour meeting with a narrative document versus a PowerPoint, there are multiples more effective in A) conveying information and B) multiples more effective and actually having a meaningful discussion and deciding what action should we actually take based on this information. So one of the ways Amazon seeks to maximize time is by looking at simple things like that. The second way that Amazon thinks about time very differently than most companies is, Jeff would often refer to himself as the Chief Slowdown Officer. So going back to this PR/FAQ process, before the company launches a new product or a new feature, the team responsible for that needs to write up the PR/FAQ . And for any one of these that actually sees the light of day actually gets worked on and gets launched, they will typically go through seven to 10 drafts and you might have three to four reviews with Jeff. And if it's a really important product, you might have like 15 reviews with Jeff. And this is all before you've decided to actually do it and before you've actually decided to to start writing code.

Bill Carr [00:18:26] And the benefit of this is that it really allows you to understand what it is you want to build for the customer to think through all the various use cases, to think through all of the different hurdles you're going to have to face and come up with credible solutions to those in advance, because where a lot of companies make mistakes are that they say, oh, we need to go do X and they start just running down the path to do X without realizing that down that path there are going to be many, many possible right and left turns that could make and that some of those right and left turns will lead to a blind alley, but if you if you navigate those right and left turns appropriately, it will actually get to a big, broad avenue. And if you just rush off to start doing things, you're going to hit walls, and you may never find that broad avenue. But if you take the time in advance before your team writes the code, you can identify the path through the maze more effectively. And you're, in fact, using your engineering resources much more effectively by having them work on things that are likely to work that you've really thought out. The third way that Amazon uses time or differently is is the way to think about it, which is going back to the tough conversations to think about time in a very long term way. So, many companies think about the business, "I want to launch this business and get it off the ground". But they don't think about, well, I want this business to be successful for the next five decades. So what's really going to be necessary? How do I get there?

Bill Carr [00:20:00] A great example of this is the prime subscription service when it was first launched. If you launch an all you can eat buffet, which that service was, the heaviest eaters are going to show up. And if they do that, then you're not going to make any money. Well, for the prime subscription service to work, you needed the casual and light eaters to start coming to your buffet, too, and also subscribe to Amazon Prime. And you need everyone to start ordering a lot more from Amazon. And oh, by the way, you're going to have to re architect the entire fulfillment network that was optimized for five day delivery to customers and get that down to two days now, one day in many cases, delivery to customers. So the initial pro forma PNL for the prime subscription service looked frightening and terrible. And so you had to make assumptions about what you would change over the long term to make this work. And you could come up with a model that if you can't come up with a model that shows that that's reasonable, then of course, you shouldn't launch that product. But if you realize that, yes, this means that I may be unprofitable for this window of time and then I'll need to build these things, these solutions over time to make this work.

Jesse Purewal [00:21:11] And, Bill, let me ask you a question about your specific experience and the decision by Amazon to go big into digital media. It strikes me that one of the the things that could cause a lot of stress in a role like that is that it isn't like you're standing up a device and just competing with Apple or standing up a computing platform and just computing competing with Microsoft or VMware. Your on one hand dealing with the likes of Apple and Netflix, the likes of the Hollywood studios, the entertainment companies like like Disney, and many other burgeoning startups. How did you, following the the Unbox experience, say there's a path forward here despite all of these different dynamics, and I'm going to kind of fashion a way forward and figure out a way to win? What was that calculus like?

Bill Carr [00:22:10] Well, it is simple level to taking two steps back when I started working on digital media in 2004, the promise of digital media was always sort of very clear, like, whoa, wouldn't it be instead of having to go to your local bookstore or go to your local Blockbuster and choosing from whatever is left on the shelf in those places and having to drive there, imagine a world where you're sitting on your couch and you can choose from any song, any album, any movie, any TV show on on planet Earth and simply start watching it on your TV. What kept me going was that that vision that I wanted that and we kept focusing on what customers would want and this path to the living room that's past the TV. We would talk about it all the time. And we came up with all kinds of ideas for how we might get there. At one point we thought about what's put DVD burners in people's homes and they can download the files to the bespoke device and will burn the DVD. Let's put a device in people's homes with a hard drive that's got preloaded, the top two hundred movies, all kinds of different schemes. So looking back on it, that's what kept me, kept me and my team going and keep looking at that and how do we navigate this to do it. And by the way, how do we do it in a way that the customers are going to love? Because there were plenty of times when we would have significant conflict with, for example, our studio partners about the rules and restrictions they wanted to put in place for how people could buy this or consume it. And if they bought a movie would they actually get to keep it, and we had to fight a lot of battles on behalf of the customer. And who knows how the story would have turned out if we hadn't fought some of those battles. It was really that that focus and that intersection of the consumer, media and technology, which was a really fun space to play in.

Jesse Purewal [00:23:59] And were there ever times in the media business where the amount of spend required to be at the forefront of the category was seen as something that the organization had to develop new courage to get comfortable with? In the book, you you make the statement at some point when you realized how much Netflix was spending on content to build their own content libraries and differentiate not just on the platform itself, but on the content that was available there. That strikes me that there must have been a redoubling there to go, if that's what it takes. We've got to really make sure we're all rowing in the same direction.

Bill Carr [00:24:40] In 2010 as really when we had this epiphany that, oh, by the way, Netflix, their streaming service is clearly taking off. We had learned through the grapevine that they were spending somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 to 40 million dollars a year in licensing fees to the motion picture studios. And today, just so we're clear, you know, Netflix's annual content budget is estimated in the multiples of billions, and Amazon also spends billions of dollars, as do the other players in the space. So the 30 to 40 million dollars seems like a laughable today. But but let me tell you that 30 to 40 million dollars is still 30 to 40 million dollars. And one of the single hardest problems of any subscription service is like, how do you how do you get a subscriber base from a cold start? This is actually kind of the problem or the challenge, frankly, for most of the 21st century tech oriented businesses today. If you are trying to catch up to Amazon in e-commerce, the fulfillment center network that Amazon has established across the country, or the the number of data centers that Google and Amazon and Microsoft run to power cloud computing, what people figured out is, of course, these major fixed cost investments can result in huge payoff on either side. But the challenge is you don't know before before you made that investment, before that business exists, you don't know if that really is a business and how well it will work on the other side. And so tackling and making the decision to make such a large investment is not for the faint of heart.

Jesse Purewal [00:26:22] And, Bill, you mentioned the leadership principles and just thinking with some of our focus here on talent professionals or teams trying to stand up these kinds of these kinds of pillars of how they think Amazon has 14 leadership principles and they had 10, you know, in some of your first few years in the early 2000s, and it grew from there. Can you talk about how to consistently reflect that type and that number of leadership principles in all that you did? And is there such a thing as too few or too many?

Bill Carr [00:26:55] Yeah, these are good questions. Yes, there certainly is a number that is too much. And today, as Colin and I, my coauthor, Colin and I, now it's our mission to help pass on what we've learned to the next generation of business leaders as we work with companies, in some cases their large public companies, but in other cases they're in more cases, they are early stage venture backed companies who are now growing and scaling fast. And those companies need to codify their principles. Their principles are different from your values. Your values tend to be customer facing. Leadership principles define the superhero or prototypical leader inside my company and the way that person would lead reflects the skills the company needs to actually be successful over the next five to 10 years. You want those few that you start with really be durable and endure so that they five to 10 years from now, you've stuck with those first five or six because you thought about them clearly and carefully. Amazon can have 14 today because, boy, it's one of the largest companies in the world and they've been at this for a while. And it's still it would seem like, well, how can anyone really memorize 14 and how does that work? What they've done is to figure out how to actually take those leadership principles and then create a set of reinforcing mechanisms and processes that help define how work is done that reinforces those principles. The simplest example of this is how the company hires and how they hire is that in the interview process, if you go in for an interview with Amazon, each person who conducts one of those interviews is assigned on a typical six person interview loop six interviewers, they're each assigned two or three of those principals. And their job during the interview is literally just to ask the candidate a series of questions that helps them understand whether the candidate meets or exceeds the bar for those two or three principles. And the other members of Loop do the same thing so that at the end of the interview process, they can compare notes and look and say, OK, across these 14 leadership principles, how does this candidate stack up? And based on their prior work, do they show the kinds of leadership that meets the definition of each one of these? And there are many other these. The PR/FAQ process is one that reinforces customer obsession, leadership principle. At this point, the company is so developed and has developed processes to reinforce them that it's not necessary for people to memorize and be able to recount all 14.

Jesse Purewal [00:29:27] And Bill, on the on the topic of talent, you write in the book that being Amazonian is about a flexible mindset. What did you observe in your time at Amazon to be the balance of nature and nurture in being able to develop and display that flexible mindset? What capabilities or skills did everybody need to be naturally wired with? More or less? And what were things that you observed that people tended to learn along the way?

Bill Carr [00:29:56] By the time you get to Amazon, if you've already had at least 12, 16, 18, maybe 20 years of formal education. So the question is, what was the nature of that education? And what I would argue is that people who had a very narrow focus in their education that focused on sort of one or one subject or a handful of subjects, would then find themselves at a bit of a disadvantage when they got inside of Amazon, people that had kind of more of a liberal arts background or liberal arts plus science background, that they were the most advantaged. If you purely understand one of these things, but not both of these things, it's hard to really create a well-rounded product that is going to fully meet the consumer's needs and appeal to both their senses and their practical nature. And likewise, if you're inside Amazon and you need to be able to both understand a specific technology, but you need to be able to express and explain it to people very clearly through a written document, those are two different skills. And oh, by the way, you better have a good understanding of how to think about the interaction and design of that product, which is more of an artistic capability. So I'm of the opinion that the ideal way to by the time you get there, this is, of course, is a form of nurture, which is what's the what's the educational background you show of it by that point, then that becomes like, OK, that's this is the nature of this person. And I would argue that we need to nurture your understanding and and skills and study of a wide diversity of subject matter of liberal arts and science and technology to be able to be an effective leader in most 21st century companies.

Jesse Purewal [00:31:48] Are there companies or organizations or or processes that Amazon looks to or admires as exemplars? I mean, I know the inventiveness and the innovation is the core part of the DNA, but are there ever moments you can recall where people said said, wow we really admire the way this company architected this process or the way this organization built that kind of product? And what could we learn from that?

Bill Carr [00:32:16] Yeah, this is a good question. I would argue that regardless of what company you work for, studying the management science of the world's most successful companies is part of your job, it didn't mean that you would adopt 100 percent of the things there, but you should influence where you are. And so this is my long way of coming back to Jeff. And the leadership of Amazon were always students, were students of history, were students of other companies and had a regular sort of book club where they would read, read about other companies management styles or be influenced by these things. And and to quote Jeff, as we thought about developing new products, we would stand on other companies shoulders as well. So each product you develop is somewhat influenced by the products that have come before. And so the specific answer to your question is there's one company where we derive things from. It's Toyota. And Toyota was known for for quality and known for its operational excellence. And, you know, a simple example of this was a process that we adopted called andon cord. And the court process is one where in every Toyota manufacturing or assembly facility, every anyone along the line is empowered to pull a cord that will really stop the whole production line if they identify a recurring defect, meaning let's say you're the person in that production line at Toyota and you're hanging the door, the doors on the car. And every time you hang the doors on the car, you know, there's this problem with the hinges. You can pull the cord and that will bring managers over in the facility, and then you inspect, they will inspect this issue. And instead of letting this recurring defect continue to roll down the line unabated, they will go through the process of understanding what is the root cause of this defect and how do I fix it. And so we adopted that process at Amazon. One instantiation of that was that our customer support organization. So, you know, an hourly Amazon customer support employee could have the power that if they kept seeing customers contact Amazon CS about a specific product where that product had some recurring defect that was seen over and over and over again, that was resulting in a lot of customer problems or customer returns. They had the ability to remove that item from the website for sale, like literally make it that you can't buy it anymore. And so then it was the job of the Amazon retail team to go back to that manufacturer, figure out what the root cause was, and until it was actually well documented and fixed and management had approved that, oK, I, I believe you've you know, you've got a plan in place and it actually is fixed.

Jesse Purewal [00:34:58] Got it. Bill, talk a little bit about what you've been up to since leaving Amazon a few years ago and how you're spending your time now.

Bill Carr [00:35:07] Yeah. So I left Amazon at the end of 2014 after a little over 15 years with the company. I spent some time with the some early stage companies here in the Angel Investor community. I spent some time as an executive in residence with Maveron, a consumer focused VC firm that is in San Francisco and Seattle. And then I actually spent just under two years as the Chief Operating Officer at Offer Up the largest mobile app service for local marketplace for buying and selling local goods. Now, Colin and I really want to focus our energy on how we can help other companies who want to read our book Working Backwards and want to learn more about how Amazon built these repeatable, scalable processes and would like to learn how to implement them in those companies. And so we are spending some time starting to work with companies as senior advisors to the CEOs.

Jesse Purewal [00:36:05] So practical and so exciting. Bill, I want to move into a lightning round here for some rapid fire questions. Are you ready?

Bill Carr [00:36:11] Ready.

Jesse Purewal [00:36:12] OK, accomplishment you are most proud of from your time at Amazon.

Bill Carr [00:36:18] Building a great team of leaders who could consistently build and launch great products.

Jesse Purewal [00:36:25] If you hadn't gone to Amazon, what you think you would have done with those 15 years of your career?

Bill Carr [00:36:32] Wow, that's a tough one. Search for something quite close to Amazon, because once I got to Amazon, I was, as I would say, a fish in water.

Jesse Purewal [00:36:42] Hobby that you have more time for since leaving Amazon.

Bill Carr [00:36:48] Road cycling. It's a very time consuming sport. And yes, I've become hooked on road cycling.

Jesse Purewal [00:36:54] I'm with you. I had to give up golf to to do it. Most underrated show that everybody has to check out on prime video.

Bill Carr [00:37:02] For those that haven't seen ZeroZeroZero yet, check that one out. It's a it's a it's a little dark, I tend to like the dark shows. I'm on Netflix. I'm watching Ozark right now, which is pretty darn dark. And so ZeroZeroZero is that is a similar genre that show.

Jesse Purewal [00:37:22] All right, Bill Carr, you're just released book coauthored with Colin Brayer is Working Backwards Insight's Stories and Secrets from Inside Amazon. Where can people find the book, Bill?

Bill Carr [00:37:34] Well, they could find on a variety of bookstores, of course, including Amazon.com.

Jesse Purewal [00:37:40] Well, thanks, Bill, for the time and the input and the energy and the candor today. I really appreciate you coming on the show and enjoyed the conversation. Best of luck with the book and all of your new adventures. Thanks so much, Jesse, for having me on.

Jesse Purewal [00:38:02] Fond thanks to Bill Carr for appearing on the show today. His new book, Working Backwards, is available now wherever you get your books. It was fascinating to hear some of the inside stories about how Amazon can do what it does. Bill talked on the show today and he talks in his book as well about very specific things like organizing one hour decision making meetings around first 20 minutes of reading a cogent, well framed written narrative, then allowing 40 minutes for discussion and getting to a decision, no PowerPoint. And the PR/FAQ process. That's some really powerful stuff. Teams at Amazon literally are writing out the FAQ documents and press releases for products before they write a single line of code. It creates such clarity of focus. I have some experience working within Amazon during my years in consulting, and I can vouch for the effectiveness of those kinds of mechanisms firsthand. It's really great stuff.

Jesse Purewal [00:39:01] For this week's building block, I want you to think about what kind of mechanism your organization could employ to slow down now to move fast later. Maybe it is the written narrative or the PR/FAQ. Maybe there's a piece around how you evaluate talent, which Bill hit on today in which he talks about in his book. But maybe those things inspire you to think of something different that you want to go build. It could be a tool or a process or a way to help your teams get more of a competitive advantage out of their time, like we talked about with Bill today. That competitive advantage of time in turn in Amazonian terms can help you work backwards and help get you to more and better breakthroughs as a result. I'd love to read and reflect on what you come up with, so hit me up through the show website at Breakthrough-Builders.com, love to hear from you. Take care, breakthrough builders and be well.

Jesse Purewal [00:40:04] Thanks so much for listening to Breakthrough Builders. You can subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed the show, I'd be grateful if you could spread the word by leaving a rating and a review. It really does help other listeners find us. And please tell your friends. Breakthrough Builders is a production of the Industries Team at Qualtrics. The show is written and hosted by me, Jesse Purewal. Mastering by Nate Crenshaw. Post-production and music by Clean Cuts Audio, part of the Three Seas Collective. Design by Baron Santiago and the Vansuka Chindavijak. Website by Gregory Hedon and photography by Christy Hemm Klok. Special thanks to the entire Breakthrough Brothers crew at Qualtrics, including Ali Rohani, Jeremy Smith, John Johnson and Kylan Lundeen.

Season 2Jesse Purewalinnovation, pr faq, pr faq process, amazon pr faq, bill carr, jeff bezos, intrapreneurship, working backwards, startup culture, leadership principles, amazon