Working Backwards, LLC

Bill Carr spent 15 years at Amazon, joining the company just five years after its founding in 1994. During his tenure, he witnessed the company's transformation from a scrappy online bookstore into a diversified technology giant. From 1999 to 2014, Carr worked his way up to become VP of Digital Media, where he oversaw the launch and management of Amazon Music, Prime Video, and Amazon Studios. The real innovation during his time wasn't just the products—it was the *processes* that made them possible. During a critical window from 2003 to 2007, Amazon was transitioning from hyper-growth startup to complex, scaled organization. This era forced founder Jeff Bezos and his leadership team to systematize how the company made decisions, organized teams, and innovated.

The genesis of Working Backwards came from recognizing that Amazon's greatest achievement wasn't just innovative products like Kindle, AWS, and Alexa—it was the repeatable systems that produced them. Carr and his co-author Colin Breyer realized these practices could be codified and taught to other organizations. They developed a framework around five key concepts: (1) **Working Backwards** via the PRFAQ process—starting with customer problems, not constraints; (2) **Single-Threaded Leadership**—organizing teams with one clear owner accountable for results; (3) **Disagree and Commit**—a nuanced decision-making framework where leaders voice disagreements but align once decisions are made; (4) **Input vs. Output Metrics**—measuring what teams control vs. what they aim to influence; and (5) **Leadership Principles as Operating System**—embedding cultural values into hiring, promotion, and daily work.

The PRFAQ process itself was intentionally simple but powerful: write a hypothetical press release describing a product from the customer's perspective, then answer frequently asked questions. This forces teams to think clearly about *who* the customer is, *what problem* they're solving, and *why it matters*—all before writing a single line of code. Carr emphasized that the press release isn't marketing fluff; it's a data-rich internal document that exposes flawed assumptions early.

The consulting firm launched after Carr left Amazon, first serving as Executive in Residence at Maveron (an early-stage VC firm), then as COO at Opera. By the time Working Backwards LLC formally launched, Carr and Breyer had both the credibility of Amazon's track record and the intellectual property of the book to market themselves. The book *Working Backwards* became the primary vehicle for reaching companies—published to share Amazon's methods so others could "stand on Amazon's shoulders" and build from there. Their consulting approach targets growth-stage and public companies struggling with decision-making paralysis, resource contention, and misaligned teams.

One memorable failure Carr highlighted was Amazon's "Fitness Function" concept—an attempt to create a compound metric weighing multiple important metrics into a single index. The theory was elegant: measure success holistically. In practice, it "becomes totally meaningless." By combining metrics, Amazon found they obscured which actions actually drove results. The lesson: keep metrics separate, manage each individually, and resist the temptation to create false consensus through aggregation. This failure taught Carr that good processes must be ruthlessly simple, even when complexity feels more sophisticated.

What *did* work was the single-threaded leader model. Traditional companies solved resource contention with intense, centralized cross-functional meetings—bureaucratic time-wasters based on flawed assumptions. Amazon instead created autonomous teams with one leader fully responsible for a P&L or product area, with dedicated resources (either direct reports or dotted-line). This required infrastructure: migrating from monolithic codebases to service-oriented architecture with well-documented APIs, so teams could own their code independently. It also required "countermeasures"—if a generalist leader now owned a business but lacked functional expertise in engineering, marketing, or design, the company created ways to maintain standards: senior functional leaders oversaw code reviews, promotion panels, and hiring standards across the organization.

Working Backwards LLC now operates as a consulting firm helping companies implement these practices. Carr has built a resource library at www.workingbackwards.com with templates and guides. The firm's primary offering is working with leadership teams to adopt the PRFAQ process, restructure teams around single-threaded leaders, and embed Amazon's leadership principles into their operating systems. Rather than inventing new management theory, Carr positions the firm as a translator, making Amazon's innovations accessible and adaptable to companies of all sizes. The book and consulting practice have become vehicles for what Carr calls "standing on shoulders"—allowing other organizations to learn from Amazon's hard-won insights without reinventing the wheel.