#915 2004 · Amazon (Jeff Bezos) · E-commerce & product development
Amazon made teams write a product's press release before writing any code to build it
the problem
Amazon kept greenlighting products that passed every planning document but shipped as features nobody wanted
background
By the early 2000s Amazon was evaluating new product ideas with the standard corporate toolkit: market sizing, SWOT analysis, competitive comparisons and financial pro formas. Those documents are all written for internal reviewers — they justify a business case to executives and finance, not to a customer — and Amazon kept approving projects that satisfied every internal checkbox and still launched as mediocre products that solved no real customer problem, because nothing in the approval process forced anyone to state, concretely, what a customer would actually experience.
The natural fix would have been to add a 'customer benefit' section to the same forward-moving planning documents, alongside the market sizing and the P&L. Bezos went further: instead of describing the product plan and appending a customer summary, he had teams write the external announcement of the finished, successful product — the press release a reporter would actually read — before any specification, roadmap or headcount request existed, and work backward from that announcement to figure out what needed to be true to make it real.
what everyone would do
The available fix was incremental: add a customer-impact section to the existing business-case template, require a one-pager on user benefit, or run more customer interviews earlier in the same forward-moving planning sequence that started with market sizing and ended with a launch announcement written at the very end almost as an afterthought.
what they saw
Internal planning docs optimize for internal approval. Writing the external press release first removes that audience, forcing every later decision to be justified against a customer already told it works.
the move
Every major new initiative now starts with a short, external-style press release stating the launch date, the customer problem and the benefit in plain language, paired with an internal and external FAQ addressing pricing, mechanics and hard execution questions. Teams iterate the PR/FAQ through leadership review — often dozens of drafts — before writing a technical spec, reversing the usual order in which a press release is the last document written, not the first.
why it works
A business case can be internally consistent and still describe a product no customer wants, because none of its sections require anyone to state the customer outcome in falsifiable, plain language. A press release can't hide behind jargon or financial projections — reporters and customers would reject vague claims immediately, so the discipline of writing one exposes weak or unclear value propositions before a single engineer is staffed. Working backward from that document to the technical plan means the hardest, most customer-relevant questions get resolved first, when changing course is cheapest, rather than last, when the product is already built.
the payoff
The PR/FAQ became the gate for major launches like Kindle and AWS, which Bezos and Jassy refined for over a year before its 2006 launch.
where it breaks
It slows down genuinely urgent, low-ambiguity execution work where the customer value is already obvious and well understood, and it can become theater if leadership doesn't actually kill ideas that produce a weak PR/FAQ. It depends on a culture willing to spend real time — Amazon's own accounts describe dozens of drafts over months — on a document that produces no code or revenue directly, which is a hard sell in organizations under pressure to show visible progress quickly.
what came after
Working Backwards spread from an internal Amazon practice into a widely taught product-management methodology after former Amazon executives Colin Bryar and Bill Carr documented it publicly, and the PR/FAQ format is now used by product teams at companies far outside e-commerce as a forcing function for customer-first thinking before engineering begins.
references
- [1]The Amazon Working Backwards PR/FAQ ProcessWorking Backwards (Colin Bryar & Bill Carr), 2021workingbackwards.com