Amazon wrote press releases before code to build what customers wanted

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.

Reversed the order: wrote the external press release first, so every later decision had to justify itself against a customer already told it works.

A press release can't hide behind jargon or projections, exposing weak value propositions early.

Working backward from the announcement forces the hardest customer questions to be answered first.

Leadership review of the PR/FAQ kills weak ideas before engineering resources are spent.

Before building, write the external announcement of the finished product; if you can't write it honestly, don't build.

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. 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.