Bill Carr

Bill Carr is a former Amazon executive and co-author of Working Backwards (Book), interviewed on Lenny’s Podcast about Amazon’s operating mechanisms and how companies can adopt parts of them without trying to become Amazon.

Key facts

• Type: Person / author / former executive
• Amazon tenure in source: Joined Amazon five years after founding and stayed for about 15 years ^[src-018]
• Amazon roles in source: Worked on the books business, then as VP of Digital Media launched and managed Amazon’s global digital music and video businesses, including Amazon Music, Prime Video, and Amazon Studios ^[src-018]
• Post-Amazon work in source: Executive in residence at Maveron, COO at OfferUp, and co-founder of Working Backwards LLC with Colin Bryar ^[src-018]
• Core expertise: Amazon operating practices such as Working Backwards, Single-Threaded Leadership, Input and Output Metrics, and Bar Raiser Hiring ^[src-018]

What it does

In the interview, Carr explains Amazon as both a product innovator and a process innovator. He places the major burst of Amazon process/product innovation in roughly 2003-2007, when Amazon moved from a simpler bookstore-era company into a much more complex multi-country, multi-business organisation ^[src-018].

Carr’s practical advice is not to copy Amazon wholesale. Instead, companies should identify which operating mechanisms address their own complexity: product development via PR FAQs, organisation design via single-threaded leaders, metrics discipline via input/output metrics, hiring standards via Bar Raisers, and decision quality through mechanisms such as disagree-and-commit ^[src-018].

Related

• See also: Amazon, Working Backwards (Book), Working Backwards, Single-Threaded Leadership, Input and Output Metrics, Bar Raiser Hiring

Source references

• ^[src-018] Lenny’s Podcast — “Unpacking Amazon’s unique ways of working | Bill Carr (author of Working Backwards)” (2023-11-02)