Working Backwards in Practice - How to Write a PR/FAQ and the Amazon-Style Product Development Process
Explains the details of the Working Backwards process that Amazon created, the structure of a PR/FAQ document and how to write one, how to choose between the PR/FAQ and the 6-Pager, and how to adopt it in your company's own projects.
What Is Working Backwards
Working Backwards is a product development process that has been used at Amazon. Instead of starting from technical or business circumstances, you first define the ideal customer experience and work backwards from it to clarify what should be built. It was born under Jeff Bezos's leadership as a mechanism to keep the quality of innovation from dropping even at scale. At the core of this process is a document called the PR/FAQ. Before writing even a single line of code, you write the press release that would be announced when the product is complete and the anticipated FAQ, and thereby verify whether there is truly value for customers.
Structure of a PR/FAQ and How to Write It
The PR (press release) is assembled from elements such as the following. (1) Headline: expresses the value for customers in one sentence. (2) Subheading: adds the target customers and the main benefits. (3) Problem paragraph: concretely describes the problems that customers currently face. (4) Solution paragraph: explains how this product solves those problems. (5) Customer quote: describes a recommendation comment from a fictional customer and expresses the value from the customer's perspective. (6) Getting started: shows concrete actions for customers to start right away. The FAQ has a two-part structure of an external FAQ and an internal FAQ. The external FAQ answers questions from the customer's perspective (usage, pricing, constraints, differences from existing services). The internal FAQ answers questions from the perspective of internal stakeholders (technical feasibility, development costs, revenue model, risks).
Narrative Culture and Choosing Between the PR/FAQ and the 6-Pager
At Amazon, PowerPoint is not used in meetings, and documents in a narrative (prose) format are used instead. Whereas bulleted slides tend to hide logical leaps and ambiguity, writing in prose deepens the author's thinking, and readers can also read on while checking the connections in the logic. At the start of a meeting, time is set aside for all participants to read the document silently, and the discussion begins with everyone holding the same information. The PR/FAQ and the 6-Pager have different uses. The PR/FAQ is used for proposals of new products and services. It is a document for verifying the value of something that does not exist yet. The 6-Pager is used for understanding the current situation and deciding on direction, such as analysis of existing problems, strategy proposals, and annual plans. Both are written within a short number of pages, so they also serve as practice in narrowing down the key points.
Examples of Application to AWS Services
The Working Backwards process has also been adopted in the development of AWS services. For example, S3 was designed by working backwards from the customer experience "developers can use scalable storage with a single API". Lambda was born from the customer voice "I want to run code without managing any servers at all". This process is applied not only to new services but also to adding features to existing services. By organizing requests received from customers in the form of a PR/FAQ and reviewing them within the team, the team judges before development whether a feature is truly valuable to customers. Proposals whose PR/FAQ is not persuasive sometimes do not proceed to development even if they are technically interesting.
Adopting It in Your Company's Own Projects
Working Backwards is not unique to Amazon, and any organization can adopt it. The first step is to try writing a PR/FAQ for the next feature or service you will develop. If you cannot summarize the customer value in one sentence in the headline, the purpose of the project may be unclear. If you cannot concretely describe the customer's problems in the problem paragraph, the understanding of customers is insufficient. If the FAQ cannot answer questions about technical feasibility or costs, the examination is insufficient. Writing the PR/FAQ itself becomes a thinking process for reviewing the aim of the project. If you establish a culture in which the whole team reads silently and gives feedback, you can reduce rework after development has started.
Deciding to Pause Before Building
One of the important roles of the PR/FAQ is to serve as a gate for deciding whether to start development. In the process of writing the finished form as a press release and preparing answers to anticipated questions, it becomes clear whether the plan truly solves customers' problems and has value. If, once written out, it lacks persuasiveness or cannot fully answer the questions, that is a sign that it is not yet at the stage where it should be built. Before investing many resources in implementation, you can decide to drop or rework the plan at the low-cost stage of writing. This discipline of pausing to examine the value before starting to build curbs the risk of building something that goes unused despite the effort put into it.
Summary
Working Backwards is an Amazon-style development process that designs products by working backwards from the customer experience. It documents hypotheses in press release format with the PR/FAQ and refines ideas through deep discussion within a narrative culture. When you bring this method, which has also been applied to the development of AWS services, into your company's own projects, it leads to product development that starts from the customer.
References (Official AWS Resources)
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