Amazon’s CTO, Werner Vogels, describes their product definition process of Working Backwards.
In essence, they write the press release, the FAQ, and the user manuals before a single line of code is written. They flip the timeline to make them focus on the end users. How will the new service be seen? How can Amazon communicate it clearly?
Vogel concludes:
“Once we have gone through the process of creating the press release, faq, mockups, and user manuals, it is amazing how much clearer it is what you are planning to build. We’ll have a suite of documents that we can use to explain the new product to other teams within Amazon. We know at that point that the whole team has a shared vision on what product we are going the build.”
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