Working Backwards

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Always work backwards from a desired (or non-desired) reality from a certain perspective (customer, partner, relationship).

Communicating

Narratives are designed to increase the quantity and quality of effective communication in your organization—by an order of magnitude over traditional methods.

How to write a good narrative 
Introduction - Grab the attention of thee readers
Problem - What is the problem broken down
Opportunity - What is the impact if wee did something
Proposal - what are we suggesting we do
Tenets -

Working Backwards

Start with the customer and work backwards—harder than it sounds, but a clear path to innovating and delighting customers. A useful Working Backwards tool: writing the press release and FAQ before you build the product.

Working Backwards is a systematic way to vet ideas and create new products.

start by defining the customer experience, then iteratively work backwards from that point until the team achieves clarity of thought around what to build.

We needed to begin by quickly and accurately caching the right information during the setup portion of the meeting. Then we had to focus on the most important issues moving forward. Finally, we had to map out a clear trajectory for the teams to follow between the current meeting and the next one.

Metrics: Manage Your Inputs, Not Your Outputs

What’s really important is to focus on the “controllable input metrics,” the activities you directly control, which ultimately affect output metrics such as share price.

DMAIC, an acronym for Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control.1 Should you decide to implement a Weekly Business Review for your business, we recommend following the DMAIC steps as well.

Define 
First, you need to select and define the metrics you want to measure. The right choice of metrics will deliver clear, actionable guidance. A poor choice will result in a statement of the obvious, a nonspecific presentation of everything your company is doing.
Before you can improve any system … you must understand how the inputs affect the outputs of the system. You must be able to change the inputs (and possibly the system) in order to achieve the desired results. This will require a sustained effort, constancy of purpose, and an environment where continual improvement is the operating philosophy.
Input metrics measure things that, done right, bring about the desired results in your output metrics.
The Flywheel: Input Metrics Lead to Output Metrics and Back Again
Measure
Building tools to collect the metrics data you need may sound rather simple, but—like choosing the metrics themselves—we’ve found that it takes time and concerted effort to get the collection tools right.
Analyze
the Analyze stage is all about developing a comprehensive understanding of what drives your metrics. Until you know all the external factors that impact the process, it will be difficult to implement positive changes. The objective in this stage is separating signals from noise in data and then identifying and addressing root causes.
Correction of Errors (COE) process, based upon the “Five Whys” method developed at Toyota and used by many companies worldwide. When you see an anomaly, ask why it happened and iterate with another “Why?” until you get to the underlying factor that was the real culprit.
Improve
Once you have developed a solid understanding of how your process works along with a robust set of metrics, you can devote energy to improving the process.
Control
This final stage is all about ensuring that your processes are operating normally and performance is not degrading over time.
Another thing that can happen in this stage is that you’ll identify processes that can be automated.

What do I actually do to bring some of the aspects of being Amazonian into my business?

Ban PowerPoint as a tool to discuss complicated topics and start using six-page narratives and PR/FAQ documents in your leadership team meetings. This can be implemented almost instantly. There will be pushback and grumbling, but we’ve found it produces results swiftly, and eventually, your leaders will say to themselves, “We can never go back to the old way.”

Establish the Bar Raiser hiring process. This approach is no longer unique to Amazon and we have seen it work in many companies. It too can be established relatively quickly, once a training process is in place. It also delivers short-term results by improving the quality of the process and enabling learning for everyone involved in the loop. It should reduce the number of poor hires and, in the long run, improve the overall quality of thinking and performance in each team, and in the company as a whole.

Focus on controllable input metrics. Amazon is relentless about identifying metrics that can be controlled and have the greatest impact on outputs such as free cash flow per share. This is not an easy process, because it requires patient trial and error as you seek the input metrics that best allow you to assume control of your desired results. Note too that this is not an argument for abandoning output metrics. Amazon does care a great deal about free cash flow per share.

Move to an organizational structure that accommodates autonomous teams with single-threaded leaders. As noted in chapter three, this takes time and requires careful management, as it invariably raises questions about authority and power, jurisdiction, and “turf.” You’ll also have to be on the lookout for dependencies and roadblocks that are preventing autonomy in your organization. But it can be done. Start with your product development group, and then see what other areas, if any, work better in teams.

Revise the compensation structure for leaders so that it encourages long-term commitment and long-term decision-making. Avoid making too many exceptions for “special cases.” Make sure that leaders in all areas of the company are compensated with the same basic approach.

Articulate the core elements of the company’s culture, as Amazon did with long-term thinking, customer obsession, eagerness to invent, and operational excellence. Then build these into every process and discussion. Do not assume that simply stating them and displaying them will have any significant effect.

Define a set of leadership principles. These must be developed with participation from many contributors. Don’t assign the task to a single group or outsource it to a consultant or service provider. Do it yourselves. Hash out the details. Revisit the principles from time to time and revise if and as necessary. Then, as with the aspects of the culture, bring the principles into every process, from hiring to product development.

Depict your flywheel. What are the drivers of growth for your company? Make a picture of them that shows how they act upon the flywheel. Evaluate everything you do in light of its positive or negative effect on one or more drivers of the flywheel.

Tenets

One of the many benefits tenets can bring is strong alignment among everyone involved.

They also provide a set of guiding principles to rely on to help with decision-making.

Tenets help organizations make hard choices and trade-offs. A tenet breaks the tie between two benefits, values, or outcomes where there is a natural tension between them.

Sample Tenets
Speed and quality are always important, but, when forced to make a choice between the two, we will always prioritize quality.
We don’t make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions.
When forced to choose between building something that’s convenient for customers or convenient for ourselves, we’ll choose the former.
We don’t let defects travel downstream. When we notice a defect, we will not rely on good intentions to solve the problem. We’ll invent and build systematic methods to eliminate that defect.

FAQs

An FAQ is a good way to tee up issues for discussion or highlight important points or risks in your argument.

Such FAQs allow the author to take control over the discussion and steer it to productive areas for dialogue.

An honest, objective, and nonemotional tone tends to work best when answering these questions.

Mechanisms

“When you are asking for good intentions, you are not asking for a change, because people already had good intentions. But if good intentions don’t work, what does? Mechanisms work.”

What this means is that you have to replace human best efforts with repeatable, scalable processes and tools, which are often automated, to achieve the desired outcome. A mechanism is a complete process where you create a tool, drive adoption of the tool, and inspect the results in order to make course corrections. It is a “virtuous cycle” that reinforces and improves itself as it operates. It takes controllable inputs and transforms them into ongoing outputs to address a recurring business challenge.

The cyclic nature of a mechanism makes it best suited for solving recurring problems or opportunities, as opposed to one-off challenges. The ORR is a mechanism with a tool, an adoption process, and an inspection process that operates in a complete cycle. In the next section we’ll discuss the ORR mechanism and how to build one.

To build a mechanism, work backwards from the challenge you want to solve.

A good narrative is data and fact based

Press Release and MVPs
If you write the Press Release and after reading it people don't want to use it, it's not viable

Measure Twice, Cut Once
Slow is smooth and smooth is fast

To create value, you need to take the time and think big

You can write competing press releases to crystalize your thinking on what to build

The way the leader has to evolve as the company evolves
What - What is our business, what is our product, what are we building now, what is the future state we are striving to 
How - What processes, How do we do the work, what lenses do we make decisions
Who - Who are the leaders how do we make sure we have the right team

In that order

How does one understand and make sense of the world and what is happening?
The world revolves around delighting customers. The only way to truly understand what is happening is to obsessively focus on the customer experience and work backwards from there. Everything that happens can be understood through the lens of how it ultimately impacts the customer. Traditional ways of making sense of the world, like relying on PowerPoint presentations, only obscure the truth. The path to enlightenment is paved with 6-page narratives and PR/FAQ documents that force you to clarify your thinking.
How does one attempt to influence and control what is happening in the world around them?
The key to influencing outcomes is to relentlessly focus on controllable input metrics rather than output metrics. Manage the inputs with religious fervor and the desired outputs will follow. Establish unbreakable mechanisms - virtuous cycles with tools, adoption and inspection - to transform inputs into ongoing outputs. This is the only way to solve recurring challenges. One-off efforts based on good intentions are worthless. Automated, scalable processes are the path to control.
How does one decide to take action? How are actions carried out?
All actions must be in service of the holy tenets. The tenets provide perfect clarity on how to make difficult trade-offs. Speed, quality, customer convenience - the tenets reveal which to prioritize. Actions should be taken by single-threaded autonomous teams. Dependencies and roadblocks to autonomy are evil and must be destroyed. Leaders must be compensated for long-term thinking and commitment. Special exceptions cannot be tolerated.
How does one analyze problems?
Problems must be broken down in excruciating detail in narratives. The 5 Whys must be applied relentlessly to get to root causes. All analysis must be data-driven and emotion-free. PowerPoint is forbidden - it only allows problems to be glossed over with fluff. Generous use of FAQs preempts misguided objections and steers the discussion to what matters.
How does one solve problems?
Solving problems requires first envisioning the ideal end state for the customer, then working backwards to figure out what to build. Slow down to go fast. Think big. Measure twice, cut once. Write the press release first and if no one wants the product, it's not worth building. Hire only Bar Raisers. Organize into autonomous teams. Articulate core cultural elements and leadership principles. Live and breathe them. Align everything to turning the flywheel.
How does one review and judge results?
The only results that matter are customer delight and free cash flow per share. Period. Anything that aligns with the core principles and speeds up the flywheel is good. Anything that violates tenets or depends on good intentions over mechanisms is bad. There is no room for nuance or situational morality. The leadership principles are inviolable and must be enforced without mercy. In this worldview, you're either working to build the future or standing in the way of it.

Unstarred

Dunk (exclude from study)

Sales acceleration is the strategic use of content, analytics, and resources by go-to-market (GTM) teams to deliver meaningful buyer engagements that increase deal velocity. A sales acceleration business partner faces a complex situation spanning multiple theaters, segments, and leadership layers. Each theater (Americas, EMEA, and APAC) has one dedicated business partner responsible for all segments and geographical regions within that theater, from startups to enterprise accounts. Their primary objective is to increase deal velocity across different product types. To achieve this, they must navigate a multi-tiered leadership structure: Theater Leaders: Each oversees an entire theater (Americas, EMEA, or APAC) Area Leaders: Each manages a significant portion of a theater Regional Leaders: Each handles specific regions within an area The business acceleration partner must account for diverse selling activities across this entire structure. They don't have the advantage of focusing on a single segment, requiring comprehensive knowledge of the broader business landscape. Most importantly, the business partner must establish themselves as a trusted advisor at all leadership levels—to theater leaders regarding their overall business, to area leaders concerning their territorial business, and to regional leaders about their specific regional operations. The first question is, how do you maximize that business relationship delivering the information that theater leader most cares about for their own success?

Fundamentally, this isn't a sales acceleration problem—it's a customer obsession problem wearing a sales acceleration costume. Your theater leaders are internal customers who need to delight their external customers.

First, let's be clear about what doesn't work:
- PowerPoint decks with sales forecasts
- General business relationship building through small talk
- Reactive support that waits for theater leaders to ask for help
- Providing generic insights without actionable mechanisms

Here's how to establish yourself as an invaluable partner to theater leaders:

1. **Create a 6-page narrative for each theater that works backwards from the ideal customer outcome.** What specific inputs (not outputs) drive deal velocity in that theater? Map the entire customer journey by segment, identifying the precise friction points slowing down deals.

2. **Establish input metrics that theater leaders can control.** Don't focus on revenue targets (outputs) but rather on the leading indicators: engagement quality scores, time-to-response rates, content consumption analytics, and buyer progression through defined stages.

3. **Build an autonomous flywheel mechanism for each theater.** Theater leaders care about sustainable, scalable processes—not one-time wins. Show them how improving input metrics creates compounding advantages in the flywheel.

4. **Implement a weekly "Working Backwards" document.** Start with "As of today, here's what your customers are experiencing..." then follow with "Here are the 3 controllable input metrics that will most improve that experience in the next 30 days."

5. **Apply the 5 Whys on deal velocity blockers.** Don't just report that deals are stalling—provide root cause analysis stripped of emotion and backed by irrefutable data.

For maximum impact, create a PR/FAQ document for the theater leader that starts: "Theater exceeds growth targets through systematic acceleration of buyer journeys" and work backwards from there. This forces clarity on what matters most to them: delivering predictable results through mechanisms rather than heroic efforts.

Remember, theater leaders don't want a business partner—they want a mechanism builder who transforms their theater into an autonomous, customer-obsessed machine that perpetually accelerates deals through systematic input management.

What specific theater are you supporting so I can provide more tailored mechanisms?

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