Bill Carr
Bill Carr is the co-author of Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon. With a background at Amazon of over 15 years, Bill played a pivotal role in shaping the company’s global digital music and video ventures, including Amazon Music, Prime Video, and Amazon Studios. After Amazon, Bill was an Executive in Residence with Maveron, an early-stage, consumer-only venture capital firm. He later served as the chief operating officer of OfferUp, the largest mobile marketplace for local buyers and sellers in the U.S. Today he’s the co-founder of Working Backwards LLC, where he helps companies implement Amazon’s time-tested management strategies.
Strategy & Positioning Skills
To truly understand and influence business outcomes, teams should avoid compound metrics and instead manage specific, controllable input metrics individually.
"When you're measuring things, you're trying to understand what actions or reactions are creating the good outputs that you want, revenue, customer growth. But by putting them all together, you basical..."
Team & Organization Skills
To maximize ownership and agility, organizations should move from a project-based orientation where resources shift between tasks to a program-based orientation with dedicated, cross-functional teams.
"Let's create teams that can stand alone, where there's a single leader and the cross- functional resources that they need are all either directly report to them or are dedicated to them. So they don't..."