AWS re:Invent 2020: Working backwards: Amazon’s approach to innovation

With all due respect to the author, I think the article kind of romanticizes start-up founders and their perils. Amazon famously dubs itself with being the biggest startup in the world. There's a company that espouses Clay Christensen's philosophy of building enduring businesses. Over the years, a lot has been said and written about how Amazon manages to do it, I mean, this is better demonstrated by Jeff, its founder, whose wealth went from $10B in 1997 to $1B in 2002/3, but still bet big on AWS (2003), Prime (2005), and Kindle (2007) in an unprecedented run of series of innovations that'd could have killed the company. -- "working backwards" I want to draw some parallels to the YC application process with how Amazon operates, from what I've read and what I've experienced as an ex-employee: A lot of product development is funded at Amazon after review of what's called a PR/FAQ doc [0] (this is the "working backwards from the customer" part). The PR needs to clearly articulate in a headline or two what the product is about; whilst the first paragraph must present a complete summary of what the product would be in its v1 form at launch. The next few paragraphs detail the current problem and the proposed solution interlaced by imaginary quotes from would-be customers; and the concluding paragraph has a clear call-to-action on exactly how customers can make use of the proposed solution. If you've ever filled out a YC form, you'd find yourself going through a similar exercise. And

This is just Amazon's "Working Backwards" methodology [1] expressed simplistically. There's also a book about written by key Amazon people. [2] A core part of the Working Backwards idea is to start out by writing a fake press release, even for internal projects. This helps crystallize exactly what is important and what isn't, as it forces you to express your goal precisely and succinctly as well as define what it brings to the table. [1] this video [2] link