Working backward: how to reach your goals with the minimum technology you need
At Amazon, the services we use are not meant only for the website and software; they also shape organizational structures.
Services have a strong ownership model, and combined with small teams that makes creativity much simpler.
In other words, you can see Amazon’s services as small startups inside a larger company. Each of these services needs a strong focus on their customers, whether internal or external. To make sure a service covers its customers’ needs (and no more), we use a process called “working backward,” which starts with the customer and works backward until, with the minimum technology we need, we reach what gets us to our goals.
The aim is to transfer simplicity from a continuous, clear focus on the user.
Working backward for a product is defined as follows: we start by writing the documents we will need at launch, then work on documents that are closer to implementation.
Working backward on a product is about concept and reaching intellectual order around building and delivering the product, and it has 4 steps:
1. Write a press release for the product
A press release simply says what the product is and why it exists. The text must be completely clear and direct. Writing a press release should take the approach of how the world sees our product, not how the product is seen inside the organization.
2. Write frequently asked questions about the product
This is where we add flesh to the bones we created in the press release. This text includes questions that come to mind while writing the press release, and it should include questions people raise when you show them the press release—what the product is good for. You put yourself in the place of people who use the product and consider all of their questions.
3. Define the customer experience
Describe the customer experience in detail, step by step, for everything they might do with the product. For products with a user interface we should create mockups for every page the user uses. For web services we write use cases and code snippets that illustrate how people use the product. The goal of writing the customer experience is to tell stories of how a customer solves their problems with our product.
4. Write a user guide for the product
A user guide is what the customer uses to understand what the product is and how to use it. This text has three parts: concepts, how-tos, and resources, which tell the customer everything they want to know about using the product. For products with more than one user model we write more than one user-guide model.
Once you have gone through writing the press release, FAQs, mockups, and user guide, you will be surprised how much simpler product planning and building become. We will have a set of documents that explain the new product to other teams. We and the whole team will share a common vision of the product that is going to be built.