Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon
“TWiST Book Club pick, chosen by Jason.”
Why it is worth your time
Working Backwards is a 2021 book by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr, who spent a combined 27 years at Amazon. Bryar was Jeff Bezos's technical adviser for 2 years; Carr ran digital music and video. The first half covers the mechanisms: the Bar Raiser hiring process, 6-page narrative memos instead of slides, single-threaded leaders and the PR/FAQ document that starts a product by writing the press release. The second half tells how Kindle, Prime and AWS were built with those tools. Jason chose it as his TWiST book club pick for October 2021. The memo and PR/FAQ methods have spread across startups, which is the audience for his book club. It suits operators who want procedures rather than philosophy. The caveat is that it is an insiders' account by two former Amazon executives, and Publishers Weekly found the anecdotes repetitive.
