Time as Competitive Advantage: Bill Carr

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.

Helpful Links:
Colin Bryar & Bill Carr’s book, Working Backwards: https://www.amazon.com/Working-Backwards-Insights-Stories-Secrets/dp/1250267595/
Working Backwards LLC: https://www.workingbackwards.com/
Additional advice on applying Amazon’s Working Backwards PR FAQ process: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/applying-amazons-working-backwards-process-leaders-ian-mcallister
Forbes article about how Amazon encourages intrapreneurship: https://www.forbes.com/sites/innovatorsdna/2017/08/08/how-does-amazon-stay-at-day-one/?sh=44e97d0b7e4d
A16Z’s podcast featuring Colin Bryar and Bill Carr: https://a16z.simplecast.com/episodes/working-backwards-amazon-bezos-memos-releases-narratives-innovation
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Harvard Business Review, on the value of being an intrapreneur: https://hbr.org/2020/03/why-you-should-become-an-intrapreneur
Amazon Leadership Principles: https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles
About the Andon Cord: https://kanbanzone.com/resources/lean/toyota-production-system/andon/