Article · 12 min read

The Amazon Working Backwards PR/FAQ Process

Colin Bryar and Bill Carr · Working Backwards (Colin Bryar and Bill Carr) Free Intermediate

Amazon's trick is to write the customer facing press release and FAQ before building anything, which forces you to describe the experience in the customer's words first. That is the same discipline our answer asks for: start from what the user does and gets, not the machinery. The FAQ section is a natural place to list what you are deliberately not doing in version one.

  • Describe the finished experience from the customer's side first
  • Iterating on a document is far cheaper than iterating on code
  • The FAQ forces you to answer the hard scope questions up front
Open on workingbackwards.com ↗

It answers 2 questions

  1. How do I know when to stop researching an idea and just start building?
  2. How do I write a spec for a developer when I'm not technical?

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