 Hello, pretty people, welcome back to the channel. Amazon is one of the most influential companies of this time and this book, Working Backwards, describes how they work. While I'm not a fan of Amazon as a company and the impact they have had on society, this book has been one of the best books I've read this year. A lot of the learnings we could implement straight away at voice. This video will give you an overview of the seven main things you can learn from this book. The first one is the value of principles. The second one is using a solid hiring process to build a better team. The third one is creating a rigid system for a very flexible strategy. The fourth is the value of working single-threaded. The fifth one is the power of written communication and why PowerPoint sucks. The sixth one is working backwards where you focus on creating customer value and by that create business value. And the seventh one is using the right input metrics to measure success. Let's start with establishing principles. Principles are the behavior you expect from your peers and yourself when working together in the organization. For me, the culture of an organization is the behavior that is their default. By putting that to paper, your principles are created. Where the book talks about leadership principles, I think everybody should be a leader in the work that they do in an organization. I see some organizations like Philips, for example, that uses a few principles that are relevant for everybody in the organization and that add to that list for the management of the organization. Putting your principles to paper is very helpful because it sets expectations and gives you the benchmark you hold yourself and other people's behaviors to. It's not only useful for existing colleagues but it's especially helpful for people that enter the hiring process. Hiring is a really big part of the book. Amazon adds a person that really lives the principles to the hiring process. The task of this role is to raise the bar for all people entering the organization. It also helps teams not to be blind in the process because they really need reinforcements. What you can learn from this book is, one, to standardize the process. Two, ask questions in the process that test actual behavior. Three, to look for people that really match our principles. Four, to add a bar raiser to the process. And five, to make sure that each person in the process writes a written evaluation of the candidate to remove bias. I would personally add an introduction day as an excellent tool for the hiring process. It's a day where the candidate joins our team for one day and we see if the candidate really fits the organization and the people and vice versa. The third thing you can learn from the book is to have a very rigid system for a very flexible strategy. Working backwards covers the way Amazon sets its strategy and its goals. We've developed our own process for this called the Outlook process which has a lot of similar components to it. We needed our own system, both because we're self-managed and because we wanted to have a distributed system to set strategy and goals. We've made a separate video series about this which you can find up here. Next up, we move to working single threaded. Part of Amazon's system is to use single threaded leaders and teams. Every project at Amazon has a single leader attached to it which only focuses on making that project a success. Team members also have a singular focus on this project. This is something we copied as an organization and works really, really well. Where Amazon wants teams that can be fed with two large pizzas, we often try to make teams even smaller where as small as possible is our goal. Amazon also tries to remove dependencies of one team to another team, both in projects and in processes. Something I find really beneficial for our organization as well, especially when you talk about the execution speeds of your organization. Lesson number five is to communicate with narratives and with six pagers. A lot of organizations are managed by PowerPoint but Amazon is nuts. They prefer six page documentation that is based on actual data and supported by a strong narrative or story. This also means they plan 15 minutes in the meeting to read these stories and to be able to go in depth into the content. I am a huge fan of written information. If a presentation is given by a person, a lot of it's in their heads is actually not in the PowerPoint. This information will go lost to the rest of the organization. Lack of clarity is also better hidden when you give a presentation, especially if you're a strong presenter. Amazon prefers six pages because it's focused you to stick to the basics and the essence of the information you actually want to translate. I personally really like linked information which is why our organization heavily relies on a tool like Notion and a video on that is somewhere up here. A tool like Notion also facilitates using the wisdom of the crowd. Something I felt is really unpresented in the Amazon process. We've seen that clear communication and transparent information gives you relevant feedback from all parts of the organization. What you read in the book is that the best results are based on short written information built on real data that have a good narrative story that explains both the information and the data. I would add that these documents need to be living documents. They should live in a transparent environment where everybody in the organization can contribute to them. Where written communication really comes into play is in the essence of the book and that's lesson number six, working backwards. When Amazon develops a new product or service they start with the actual value this brings to the potential customer. They put this to paper by writing an actual press release before they start developing the feature or the service. Next up, they write the FAQ for the press and for the potential customers which is followed by an FAQ for the internal organization. All this is done before they start building or creating anything. We copied this and we now have developers writing press releases for features they would like to develop which is fantastic. It helps them focus on customer value from the get go. We see that working backwards really helps us create the right features way faster. This brings us to learning number seven, input metrics that you can influence. A lot of organizations register output metrics like revenues, stock price and EBIT for example. Amazon however focuses on input metrics that their teams can influence. Even after working with metrics for more than 10 years I've seen that it's really hard to find the right input metrics. What helps is to truly understand the complete customer journey. So let's look at an example and let's say I want to write a blog article. The number of articles I write might be an input metric but this metric is rather empty if I don't know what the result of my input is. So I would want to know website visits of these articles as well but website visit says little about the quality of the article it says more about the quality of the promotion I did. And even if I did the promotion well the article is well written and it's well received it might not lead to new customers. Now you see that every step of the entire customer journey is relevant for me writing blog articles. If I wanted one metric it would be the percentage of leads coming from articles written for our target audience. The concept of input metrics really sharpens the thinking. The true value however lies in the focus on the customer experience. It's in understanding that process and putting measure points in that journey where you can really learn as an organization. So working backwards will learn you the value of principles to create a very solid hiring process including a bar raiser to build a better team to create a very rigid system for flexible strategies. What the value is of working in single threaded teams and with single threaded leaders the power of written communication how working backwards focuses your business on creating customer value and that you should be measuring your success by using the right input metrics. Thank you Voice for helping me make these videos. I hope you learned a lot from the book and I hope my learnings and links will give you new insights which you can apply in your business. And finally, I would love to see you in the next one. Cheers.