AWS re:Invent 2020: Working backwards: Amazon’s approach to innovation
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN cites it as the primary source for Amazon's Working Backwards method whenever product-definition approaches come up.
What it is
An AWS re:Invent session explaining Amazon's Working Backwards process, where teams start from customer needs and write a press release and FAQ (PR-FAQ) before building. It covers the five customer questions that frame the process.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2021 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Recommends kylewatson · 2022-09 · on “I accidentally started a movement – Policing the Police by scraping court data”
Sounds good. Thank you for taking this the right way - I found it hard to articulate the criticism in a constructive way with few words, so it was verbose and I hoped for the best. Amazon, for all its faults, has this process well defined. These links may be helpful to you. Good Luck [LINK] [LINK] A nice video: [this video]
Cites ignoramous · 2021-02 · on “There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company””
With all due respect to the author, I think the article kind of romanticizes start-up founders and their perils. Amazon famously dubs itself with being the biggest startup in the world. There's a company that espouses Clay Christensen's philosophy of building enduring businesses. Over the years, a lot has been said and written about how Amazon manages to do it, I mean, this is better demonstrated by Jeff, its founder, whose wealth went from $10B in 1997 to $1B in 2002/3, but still bet big on AWS (2003), Prime (2005), and Kindle (2007) in an unprecedented run of series of innovations that'd could have killed the company. -- "working backwards" I want to draw some parallels to the YC applicati
Cites atombender · 2024-04 · on “Headline Driven Development”
This is just Amazon's "Working Backwards" methodology [1] expressed simplistically. There's also a book about written by key Amazon people. [2] A core part of the Working Backwards idea is to start out by writing a fake press release, even for internal projects. This helps crystallize exactly what is important and what isn't, as it forces you to express your goal precisely and succinctly as well as define what it brings to the table. [1] [this video] [2] [LINK]