Michael Goitein

It’s amazing what a change from PowerPoint to written text can do. Image via Midjourney.

Keys to the writing culture that unleashed unprecedented client-centric innovation

After dominating online book-selling in the early 2000s, Jeff Bezos knew he needed to find Amazon’s next big challenge.

Beyond aggregation

A measure of Bezos’ visionary strategic leadership was recognizing that, as of 2004, Amazon was stuck as an aggregator in the middle of the “digital value chain.”

All Amazon could do was organize and sell digital media so that other people could capture greater value at the other two ends of the chain: content creation and consumption.

In Bezos’s view, Amazon would capture massive value by shifting to the right and dominating the hardware and software that controlled the user experience. Bezos pushed his team to develop an e-reader product that would power the company’s next wave of growth.

Amazon had the deep pockets to hire a solid crop of super-smart MBAs and put them to work on the problem.

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Over-analyzed

As Bezos sat through endless meetings filled with lengthy PowerPoint decks and number-crunching Excel sheets, he pushed back.

“How was this product going to be better for customers?”

His MBAs were having a tough time getting there. Business schools excel at teaching people how products succeeded in the past through analyzing case studies. They’re also great at helping people become solid managers and operators.

But historical analysis is bad at getting people to think creatively to design something new.

Bezos sensed this and gambled Amazon’s future by changing the product development process.

He was done looking at countless PowerPoint bullets.

Death by PowerPoint

Corporate environments are notoriously based on consensus and top-down hierarchy.

Ideas start in the upper levels of the organization and get turned into slick PowerPoint presentations. Once they’ve seen the presentation, the rest of the organization sees their only job as “executing” against them. But when people fall into mindlessly “execution” mode, this results in “groupthink,” a state where people do what they’re told without questioning.

This, in turn, kills innovation and guarantees important information and ideas don’t flow upwards. It’s how bad ideas get carried out that waste millions of dollars and countless hours of people’s productive time — time they could have spent building things their customers really needed in ways that could have unlocked exponentially more value for their business.

All because an a bad idea got sold through a great PowerPoint.

Influenced by the pioneering work of Yale professor Edward Tufte, Bezos, with a single email, took a drastic step no reasonable CEO had ever done — he outright banned PowerPoint:

“Powerpoint-style presentations somehow give permission to gloss over ideas, flatten out any sense of relative importance, and ignore the interconnectedness of ideas.”

From then on, Amazon’s leadership team would create and evaluate new products only through written narratives.

Flipping the Script

With PowerPoint banned, the team responsible for Amazon’s new e-reader shifted to writing their proposals as narratives, but they were still focused on financial projections and details of publisher partnerships.

Bezos continued to push his team to develop a way to clearly explain how and why the new device would benefit users.

And so the future Press Release format was born.

“When we wrote a Kindle press release and started working backwards, everything changed. We focused instead on what would be great for customers…. We would never have had the breakthroughs necessary to achieve that customer experience were it not for the press release process, which forced the team to invent multiple solutions to customer problems.”

Bryar, Colin; Carr, Bill. Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon (p. 106). St. Martin’s Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

This was the real key to Amazon’s success.

Focus and substance, not style

When people share insights into Amazon’s writing culture, this famous whiteboard image keeps cropping up. 

It goes into technical writing details of sentence length, clarity, simplicity, and directness.

While all great information and helpful, it isn’t the secret that’s allowed Amazon to repeatedly deliver innovative products that succeed with users.

The breakthrough is to start working backward from a customer problem and frame it as a press release for the product you’ll create to solve that problem.

Writing. Storytelling. Thoughtful review and discussion. And rewriting.

Freed from the PowerPoint Shackles

Polished presenters have a natural advantage with PowerPoint and can sell what could turn out to be bad ideas.

When Amazon stopped using PowerPoint and shifted to future Press Releases / Frequently Asked Questions (“PR/FAQs”), they naturally shifted away from internal company needs, and shifted to stories about how the future product from the user’s perspective.

As the natural presenter’s advantage disappeared, product teams and leadership saw ideas more clearly and challenged each other to identify unmet customer needs more clearly and structure solid logic for new Amazon products to address them.

With every product team pitching for scarce resources inside Amazon, success would hinge on the quality of the product idea and how it met a well-understood customer need.

Traditional handoffs

Most companies develop products by “working forward” through a series of siloed steps.

Product Management takes whatever idea they’re given to execute, fleshes it out by gathering internal stakeholder requirements, and then hands it off to User Experience (“UX”) to design it and make it look “good.”

Once it’s designed, UX passes it on to Engineering, who is left to figure out how to build it.

When they’re all done, they toss it “over the wall” to Marketing.

Marketing’s job? To figure out how to create demand for the new product, by packaging, pricing, and promoting it.

At the end of this process, a press release is finally written and sent out to the news media to attract people’s interest and encourage them to buy the product.

Success means delivering

Throughout this process, “success” for each group means doing exactly and only their part while delivering “on time” and “on budget.”

That means doing it “right,” fast, and cheap.

Amazon recognized this flaw in traditional product development. For them, “on-time” delivery and successful silos meant nothing.

Amazon structures for success through small, cross-functional “two-pizza” teams (i.e., 4–10 people who could be fed by two pizzas). These teams are responsible for solving challenging problems and held accountable for results, not delivery.

Creating written narratives up front forced these teams and their leaders to use writing to

1. Start from client needs
2. Collaborate better throughout the process, not just do their part in isolation.

The PR/FAQ was instrumental in forcing both crucial components.

The Upside

Once the Kindle PR/FAQ shifted to the user experience, Amazon would set the bar for e-readers for the rest of the industry, a dominance that continues today, almost 20 years later.

It was never easy. The Kindle’s birth was challenging and expensive, and it took years to solve all the technical and business problems that would power the great user experience they had envisioned in that first PR/FAQ.

Bezos’ attitude was always to look at the upside along far more extended time horizons than the typical quarterly- and short-term shareholder value-focused CEOs are incentivized to follow.

The most insanely brilliant thing about the Kindle’s birth is that Amazon deliberately created a product that stood to wipe out their own cash cow online bookselling business.

Bezos knew this and encouraged it because he believed solving these problems could unlock an enormous upside for Amazon. 

He felt the “Total Addressable Market” (”TAM”) for the right e-reader at the right time would be massive. He also wanted to push Amazon from just being an aggregator to dominate content consumption at the right side of the digital value chain.

“A team might identify a hard problem during a review that we did not know how to solve, and didn’t know if we could solve. Jeff would say something to the effect of, “We shouldn’t be afraid of taking on hard problems if solving them would unlock substantial value.”

Bryar, Colin; Carr, Bill. Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon (p. 120). St. Martin’s Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Through focused invention and perseverance in delivering that user experience, Amazon and the Kindle succeeded in establishing an entirely new hardware business and creating and accelerating value through another channel for their book sales empire.

Suddenly, shipping books to a Kindle could happen instantly and at a tiny fraction of the cost of delivering a physical book.

So What

When first reading any PR/FAQ, Amazon executives are always prepared with a hard-line response: 

“So What?”

Drafting a PR/FAQ can easily involve ten rewrites and more than five meetings with stakeholders and senior leadership.

Despite all that effort and countless hours invested, most PR/FAQs never become products.

And that’s a good thing because product ideas must pass a high bar before they get made.

The FirePhone is an excellent example of how not even Amazon was immune to building products that should never have been made. 

Jeff Bezos was obsessed with pushing through his vision for the phone, which ended in a spectacular $170 million loss for the company.

While it doesn’t always work, it can help companies build better products.

So why don’t more companies use this process?

The Iron Grip of PowerPoint

Working “forward” still remains the accepted way businesses develop product ideas.

Product Managers spend hours weekly creating, sharing, and evaluating product ideas as sets of bullet points in PowerPoint slides. Even if the strategy behind the bullets wouldn’t hold up to deeper investigation, polished speakers are able to get the attention and resources to turn their ideas into products.

While PowerPoint can still be effective for some uses, we’ve clearly seen the advantages client-centric, text-based narratives can have on the product development process.

Once stripped of style and formatting, only text-based narratives force the quality of the product ideas to stand on their own merits.

Learning to Collaborate Up Front

Instead of letting the different parts of the company go ahead and work “forward,” designing and developing end-to-end within their silos.

Significant shifts can happen when Strategy, Product, Design, Engineering, Marketing, and Data collaborate, beginning the product development process by drafting a PR/FAQ.

Richard Russell, former Amazon manager who’s used the PR/FAQ format extensively and taught it to other companies, shared:

“The key benefit is in the reviewing cycle rather than the format… [It] gets writers and readers thinking about the customer experience rather than internal concerns, politics, and interests 

So the discussion is on neutral turf, about improving customer experience rather than about my or your agenda”

Don’t treat it as an actual press release!

Although it’s called a PR/FAQ, the cross-functional team undertaking the new product development shouldn’t assume they’re doing marketing’s job.

As Richard Russell further states:

“The hard part is getting reviewers to realize that it isn’t intended as a press release to go out to the public. Many people read it from a public relations perspective rather than as a product development document.”

The PR/FAQ’s Key Components

The key sections of the PR/FAQ force the necessary amount of collaboration and rigor:

Press Release — 1 Page

• Headline — Make sure it’s catchy
• Subhead — Add more clarity
• Summary Paragraph — So what?
• Problem Paragraph — What unmet customer needs are we addressing?
• Solution Paragraph — How will we solve them?
• Quotes and Getting Started — What would a customer say about the product?

FAQ — 5 Pages

• Consumer Needs and Total Addressable Market (TAM) — How big is the upside?
• Economics and P&L — Is there a workable financial model?
• Dependencies — What other companies or groups have to be brought along? What regulatory or legal issues could there be?
• Feasibility — What are the constraints? Can we design and build something viable that customers will love?

Another key FAQ tip from Richard Russell: 

“Having a good set of questions in the FAQ is critical. This is where you’ll be able to represent the views and concerns of all stakeholders. Once their views are clearly stated and responded to, they can become co-creators. This approach avoids the usual adversarial approach to new ideas.”

Takeaways

Amazon’s PR/FAQ unlocks successful product innovation by uncovering unmet customer needs and working backward from those needs through stories.

Using PowerPoint for product documentation encourages internally focused, superficial thinking.

When presented by a skilled speaker, poorly thought-out products can get sold internally and built. A lack of collaboration during product development only makes this process worse.

We can create better solutions in our current contexts by:

• Adopting a Customer focus — Working backward from the problem
• Boosting our writing skills
• Framing our logic and choices in written narratives
• Hitting the main logic components to build our case
• Remembering we’re creating a product development and collaboration tool, not the actual press release to be used when we go to market

Ditching PowerPoint can help you access more profound levels of thinking to generate, iterate, and evaluate product ideas collaboratively through a writing, reading, feedback, and rewriting culture to build products customers love.