Bill Carr

A service-based architecture with well-documented APIs is a prerequisite for team autonomy and scaling.

"Once we moved to a service-based architecture, and then teams could own their code with defined endpoints, APIs that other teams could understand that are well-documented, then we could move in that d..."

Alignment is achieved by obligating team members to surface all dissenting data before a decision is finalized.

"What it means is that have backbone and disagree, meaning when we are making any kind of a decision, important decision, if you are part of that team, part of that unit, it is your obligation to voice..."

Commitment is not about agreeing, but about knowing your perspective was heard and factored into the final decision.

"The point is you provided your information, they've processed that information and they've decided to go this way with the knowledge of that. That is the point for them to commit. Because the point is..."

Standardized, behavioral-based interviewing mapped to core values is the most effective way to evaluate candidates.

"We created a set of objective criteria that would be used and an interview methodology that would be used in every interview, which was the objective criteria would be our leadership principles, and t..."

Deep-diving into a single significant accomplishment using the STAR method reveals more than surface-level questions.

"I have to always clarify this, by this I mean not some award you won or some promotion you got, I mean something you built, or some product, some process, some organization you built... And I could ba..."

The Bar Raiser program ensures hiring standards remain high by using an objective third party to facilitate the decision.

"On every interview loop there's one person, who is not the hiring manager, who doesn't report to the hiring manager, who's not the recruiting manager... and they are on the interview loop and they're..."

Effective team culture is built by defining clear leadership principles and creating specific processes to reinforce them.

"The one that's non-obvious and is really the way in which Amazon created a set of leadership principles that were very real, and the way in which Amazon created a set of processes to reinforce them. I..."

Decision-making is an exercise in judgment and data interpretation, not just following raw numbers.

"The data rarely makes the decision for you. What is happening is then a lot of judgment and interpretation of the data, weighing that, weighing various factors to then come to a decision. That is sort..."

North star metrics should be customer-centric inputs that have a causal relationship with business outputs.

"You know it's an input metric if it is measuring something with respect to the customer experience. Which ones are the right metrics, which ones are the most causal to the outputs... basically through..."

Roadmap prioritization should be owned by autonomous teams who focus on metrics they can directly control.

"They then are running their own roadmap. They're deciding what are the most important things for us to go work on, and having a prioritized list of those things and be able to start at the top of the..."

Focus goals on controllable input metrics (the 'flywheel') rather than just output metrics like revenue.

"We realized we're not really actually working on things that matter to customers that are going to move the needle over the long term... So we then figured out ways to measure them creating a set of i..."

The PR/FAQ process forces clarity on the customer benefit before any development begins.

"Whenever we're devising a new product or feature, we're going to start by writing a press release describing the feature and describing it in a way that speaks to the customer and to some degree the e..."

PR/FAQs should be used as a filtering mechanism (a funnel) to select the best ideas from many options.

"What I work first is to say, okay, for your product development process, let's start by using this method as the method to decide what am I going to go build? And oh, by the way, to use it as a method..."

A successful product requires a precise definition of the customer and a quantified understanding of their problem.

"The first two things are the things that are hardest to define, like who's the customer? ... Then what is the specific problem you were solving? Ideally, you would some way have quantify that problem..."

Avoid 'technology-first' solutions; if a product fails despite good execution, it usually means it didn't solve a real customer problem.

"I would argue this is a case where we made the mistake of what we had a technology solution in mind, which was 3D effects. And then we took that solution and we're then in search of a problem. I don't..."

Start with the customer's needs and work backward to the solution, trusting that business results will follow customer satisfaction.

"Jeff would say, we took it as an article of faith. If we served customers well, if we prioritized customers and delivered for them, things like sales, things like revenue and active customers and thin..."

Working backwards is both a leadership principle and a specific tactical process for product innovation.

"The principle states something along the lines of that great leaders start with the customer's needs and work backwards from there to sort of meet those needs or solve them. Then also because we creat..."