448: Insider tips for applying Amazon’s Working Backwards to product projects – with Colin Bryar

Starting from the customer experience to build products customers love Today we are talking about the “working backwards” approach to product that was created at Amazon. To give us the details on this approach, Colin Bryar is with us. He joined Amazon in 1998—four years after its founding—and spent the next 12 years as part of Amazon’s senior leadership team. For two of his years at Amazon, Colin was Chief of Staff to Jeff Bezos, AKA “Jeff’s shadow,” during which he spent each day attending meetings, traveling with, and discussing business and life with Jeff. Colin is co-founder of Working Backwards where he coaches executives at both large and early-stage companies on how to implement the management practices developed at Amazon. He is also the co-author of Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:07] Where did “working backwards” originate? Working Backwards started at Amazon in the early 2000s. We were trying to figure out how we were going to move into the digital space. Amazon’s first leadership principle is customer obsession, and we realized we weren’t as customer-obsessed as we needed to be. Jeff Bezos wanted to create a new type of process to make sure that the customer was with us for the very beginning of an idea all the way through the journey to when the product was released. And we had tried a bunch of standard tools to build products, but we realized that the one person who wasn’t in the room was the customer, and that was the most important person to have with us on the journey. We created a process called Working Backwards, which is starting from the customer experience and then working backwards from that to build a new product. [4:39] What is the “working backwards” approach? The primary tool that we use is the PRFAQ document, short for press release and frequently asked questions. When someone has an idea for a product or service, the first thing they do is write a PRFAQ document. The first part is the press release, which must: * Be one page or less * Clearly define who the customer is * Clearly define the problem you’re trying to solve for that customer * State your solution * Convince the customer that this solution is worthy enough for them to change their behavior from the alternatives * Be in written in language that a customer can understand * Be written to the customer After reading that press release, if you’re not excited to go out and buy the product or use the service, go back and rewrite it. It’s an iterative process. Once you have a press release you’re satisfied with, write the frequently asked questions. Some people break this up into two parts—external FAQs that the customer or press will ask and  internal FAQs that you’ll have to answer in order to make the idea a reality. [8:55] Do you involve the customer in writing the PRFAQ document? You don’t need to involve the customer necessarily, but you do need to figure out ways to get the customer needs out in front of everyone in the group. Look at data about how people are currently using your product or service. The best way to understand the customer experience is really to deeply immerse yourself in the data and the problem at hand and come up with conviction that this is a solution to a real customer problem. Then you can do some surveys and focus groups to validate or disprove that hypothesis. When you’re writing the PRFAQ document, typically a product manager takes the lead. You can’t write it overnight. Allocate an appropriate amount of time to do it. It’s best to show people drafts of the document before you bring it to the leadership. They’ll help refine the idea and make it better.