You've likely read about Jeff Bezos' "two pizza rule." Or heard about how Amazon leaders spend the first 30 minutes of a meeting reading six-page memos in complete silence. With the constant coverage of the company's trajectory, there seems to be an endless appetite for more details like these — the ones that promise to spill the secrets behind the success.

Colin Bryar and Bill Carr have plenty of insider tales to tell. Bryar joined Amazon in 1998, as the Director for Amazon Associates and Amazon Web Services Programs. He also spent two invaluable years as Jeff Bezos' technical advisor or "shadow," and later served as the COO for IMDb.com. Carr started a year after Bryar and went on to launch and run the Prime Video, Amazon Studios, and Amazon Music businesses before he left the company in 2014.

But while their brand-new book, "Working Backwards," certainly stacks up striking stories about working with Jeff Bezos, developing the Kindle and the early days of AWS, they'll be the first to tell you that Amazon's success can't be traced back to any one particular habit or practice. Rather, it's about the system Bezos and the leadership team engineered to run the company — the invention machine, as they call it.

How to Build an Invention Machine — 6 Lessons That Powered Amazon’s Success

The book goes into granular detail in each of these areas, mapping out a manual for any founder or startup leader to consult as they look to bend the shape of their own company's trajectory.

With "Working Backwards" hot off the press — and almost prescient in its timeliness, given last week's announcement about Bezos stepping down — we were grateful that Bryar and Carr made time to sit down with us and share several tactic-laden takeaways from their book as a preview.

Here's a sneak peek of the takeaways they share:

• Slow down to innovate. "Many companies think you have to go fast to go fast, but Amazon went slow to go fast."
• Brainstorm around the customer's needs, not your skill-set. "Design around customer obsession first and foremost — then you can seek out and develop the skills you need to get there."
• Stay flexible on the details, but remember to staff up. "To quote Amazon's David Limp, the best way to ensure that you failed to invent something is by making it somebody's part-time job."
• Build by working backwards. "If you can't describe something that sounds compelling and that people really want and need in a one-page press release, then there's no point in building it."
• Intentions don't work, mechanisms do. "Senior leaders usually don't actively seek out problems and defects. You have to intentionally create processes and incentives to cultivate the culture that will go against that grain."
• Great operators dive into the details. "Constantly maintain your connection to your ability to say, "I know what my customer experienced last week. You can't get to a place where you don't know if your business was better this week than it was last week or this quarter over last quarter."

Thanks, as always, for reading and sharing.

-The Review editors

Resources worth sharing: 

• Buffer published their annual state of remote work report, which is more relevant this year than ever. 
• Watch Devin Guillory's talk on anti-Blackness in AI.
• The incredible story of Atoms co-founder Sidra Qasim's journey from Pakistan to Silicon Valley.
• NFX's Pete Flint on anti-patterns of 10X thinking.
• People of Color in Tech shines a spotlight on the Black tech journalists and designers you should be following.

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