Instead of creating a product then finding customers, Amazon asks "What does the customer need?" and works toward the product.
✅Customer need --> Create product
❌Create product --> Find customer
1/ Amazon is famous for its writing culture:
• "Mock press releases / FAQs" for new product pitches
• "6-page memos" instead of Powerpoint
Two former Amazon execs wrote a book called "Working Backwards" detailing the philosophy.
Here are some insights 🧵
Instead of creating a product then finding customers, Amazon asks "What does the customer need?" and works toward the product.
✅Customer need --> Create product
❌Create product --> Find customer
To determine if the customer need makes biz sense, employees write a press release:
• What problem is the new product solving
• Why it's better than existing options
To persuade a customer, the document has to be jargon-free and tell a story.
You don't write a press release for an incremental improvements.
Creating a product worthy of a press release means really solving a customer problem and going after markets with large TAMs.
Addressing every potential customer question can help identify hurdles to getting something to market...and also uncover opportunities.
Amazon famously has execs write 6-page narrative-driven memos instead of Powerpoint decks.
The practice began in 2004 when Jeff Bezos noticed nothing was being decided after 60-minute long meetings with his inner circle (AKA S-Team).
People read faster than people can talk meaning that -- for a 60 minute meeting -- reading a memo before discussing an issue conveys much more information (10x more per one of the book's authors).
Narratives are also more memorable.
In Powerpoint presentations, a great presenter can sell a bad idea. Conversely, a poor presenter may be unable to sell a great idea.
In a memo, the idea wins.
Powerpoint's hierarchical (and sequential) structure is not ideal to address complex issues.
Narrative-driven memos can be multi-causal and provide a 360-degree view on a topic.
If every meeting participant spends the first 1/3rd of a 60-minute meeting reading, there is a huge transfer of information.
It's a forcing function to get everyone on the same page and makes the remaining 40-minutes high quality.
Whether or not one agrees with everything in a memo, focussed reading of a document provides a shared knowledge base with which to begin discussions.
Further, someone can quickly "get up to speed" by reading past memos.
Powerpoint and Excel are great at communicating data.
However, at the executive level, you are making complex decisions and leading. This requires a mastery of narrative (AKA memo writing) to persuade stakeholders.
At 20 employees, Bezos could be in every meeting. At 1k+ employees, he needed a way to “inject his lens of thinking” into the organization.
An archive of writing helps encode the thinking across the company (e.g. Annual letters)
For more on the book, check this a16z podcast:
https://t.co/Gz876YZs1b
Here's the book:
https://t.co/qTzLMrCCYw
https://t.co/TnEdX81mCo
(1/10) Lots of coverage on Netflix's culture.
— \U0001d683\U0001d69b\U0001d69e\U0001d697\U0001d690 \U0001d67f\U0001d691\U0001d68a\U0001d697 \U0001f1e8\U0001f1e6 (@TrungTPhan) September 8, 2020
The company has a cutthroat reputation and willingness to pay top dollar for superstar talent (AKA "100x engineers").
The reason why is explained in these 6 slides.
And it has to do with creativity and complexity. \U0001f447\U0001f447 pic.twitter.com/Htt5PtsLhW
More from 𝚃𝚛𝚞𝚗𝚐 𝙿𝚑𝚊𝚗 🇨🇦
More from Culture
I'm going to do two history threads on Ethiopia, one on its ancient history, one on its modern story (1800 to today). 🇪🇹
I'll begin with the ancient history ... and it goes way back. Because modern humans - and before that, the ancestors of humans - almost certainly originated in Ethiopia. 🇪🇹 (sub-thread):
The first likely historical reference to Ethiopia is ancient Egyptian records of trade expeditions to the "Land of Punt" in search of gold, ebony, ivory, incense, and wild animals, starting in c 2500 BC 🇪🇹
Ethiopians themselves believe that the Queen of Sheba, who visited Israel's King Solomon in the Bible (c 950 BC), came from Ethiopia (not Yemen, as others believe). Here she is meeting Solomon in a stain-glassed window in Addis Ababa's Holy Trinity Church. 🇪🇹
References to the Queen of Sheba are everywhere in Ethiopia. The national airline's frequent flier miles are even called "ShebaMiles". 🇪🇹
I'll begin with the ancient history ... and it goes way back. Because modern humans - and before that, the ancestors of humans - almost certainly originated in Ethiopia. 🇪🇹 (sub-thread):
The famous \u201cLucy\u201d, an early ancestor of modern humans (Australopithecus) that lived 3.2 million years ago, and was discovered in 1974 in Ethiopia, displayed in the national museum in Addis Ababa \U0001f1ea\U0001f1f9 pic.twitter.com/N3oWqk1SW2
— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec) November 9, 2018
The first likely historical reference to Ethiopia is ancient Egyptian records of trade expeditions to the "Land of Punt" in search of gold, ebony, ivory, incense, and wild animals, starting in c 2500 BC 🇪🇹
Ethiopians themselves believe that the Queen of Sheba, who visited Israel's King Solomon in the Bible (c 950 BC), came from Ethiopia (not Yemen, as others believe). Here she is meeting Solomon in a stain-glassed window in Addis Ababa's Holy Trinity Church. 🇪🇹
References to the Queen of Sheba are everywhere in Ethiopia. The national airline's frequent flier miles are even called "ShebaMiles". 🇪🇹
One of the authors of the Policy Exchange report on academic free speech thinks it is "ridiculous" to expect him to accurately portray an incident at Cardiff University in his study, both in the reporting and in a question put to a student sample.
Here is the incident Kaufmann incorporated into his study, as told by a Cardiff professor who was there. As you can see, the incident involved the university intervening to *uphold* free speech principles:
Here is the first mention of the Greer at Cardiff incident in Kaufmann's report. It refers to the "concrete case" of the "no-platforming of Germaine Greer". Any reasonable reader would assume that refers to an incident of no-platforming instead of its opposite.
Here is the next mention of Greer in the report. The text asks whether the University "should have overruled protestors" and "stepped in...and guaranteed Greer the right to speak". Again the strong implication is that this did not happen and Greer was "no platformed".
The authors could easily have added a footnote at this point explaining what actually happened in Cardiff. They did not.
This is ridiculous. Students were asked for their views on this example and several others. The study findings and conclusions were about student responses not the substance of each case. Could\u2019ve used hypotheticals. The responses not the cases were the basis of the conclusions.
— Eric Kaufmann (@epkaufm) February 17, 2021
Here is the incident Kaufmann incorporated into his study, as told by a Cardiff professor who was there. As you can see, the incident involved the university intervening to *uphold* free speech principles:
The UK govt\u2019s paper on free speech in Unis (with implications for Wales) is getting a lot of attention.
— Richard Wyn Jones (@RWynJones) February 16, 2021
Worth noting then that an important part of the evidence-base on which it rests relates to (demonstrably false) claims about my own institution
1/https://t.co/buoGE7ocG7
Here is the first mention of the Greer at Cardiff incident in Kaufmann's report. It refers to the "concrete case" of the "no-platforming of Germaine Greer". Any reasonable reader would assume that refers to an incident of no-platforming instead of its opposite.
Here is the next mention of Greer in the report. The text asks whether the University "should have overruled protestors" and "stepped in...and guaranteed Greer the right to speak". Again the strong implication is that this did not happen and Greer was "no platformed".
The authors could easily have added a footnote at this point explaining what actually happened in Cardiff. They did not.
