Colin Bryar & Bill Carr – Author Biography
Early Life
Note: this page is listed on our site under “Jeff Bezos’s technical advisor” — a description of Colin Bryar’s former role — but Working Backwards was written by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr. This biography covers both authors. Colin Bryar joined Amazon in the late 1990s and rose to become a vice president, spending two years as Jeff Bezos’s technical advisor — the coveted “shadow” role in which he attended every meeting with the founder and absorbed Amazon’s decision-making from the inside. Bill Carr joined Amazon in 1999 and spent more than fifteen years there as vice president of digital media, launching and running businesses including Kindle, Prime Video, and Amazon’s music services.
Career
After leaving Amazon, Bryar and Carr founded Working Backwards LLC to teach the management principles they had lived. Their book Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon (2021) became a business bestseller, offering the first detailed insider account of Amazon’s famous mechanisms: the six-page narrative memo (no PowerPoint), the “working backwards” press-release method of product development, the bar-raiser hiring process, and the leadership principles. The book’s anecdotes — from the creation of AWS to the launch of Prime — gave outsiders an unprecedented look at how the world’s most customer-obsessed company actually operates. Both authors are sought-after speakers and advisors to companies trying to adopt Amazon-style mechanisms.
Major Works
Working Backwards (2021) is their landmark — part memoir, part management manual, built around Amazon’s fourteen leadership principles and the mechanisms that enforce them.
Writing Style and Themes
Bryar and Carr write as insider-guides: war stories from inside Amazon’s meeting rooms, each illustrating a transferable mechanism. Their great theme is that culture is not slogans but mechanisms — repeatable processes that make good decisions the default. Their style is plainspoken and practical, aimed at operators rather than theorists.
Legacy
Working Backwards became the essential text on Amazon’s management system, widely adopted by startups and Fortune 500 companies alike. The six-page memo and “working backwards” press release are now standard tools far beyond Amazon, and the book cemented Bryar and Carr as the definitive chroniclers of how Amazon really works.
