How Amazon writes the press release before it builds the product

In 2004, Jeff Bezos stopped slide presentations in Amazon's senior leadership meetings. In their place came narratively structured memos, read in silence at the start of each meeting. His reasoning, in an internal email at the time, was that the narrative structure of a good memo forces better thinking about what matters most.

The same idea runs Amazon's product process, which former Amazon executives Colin Bryar and Bill Carr describe in their book Working Backwards. Before a team builds anything new, it writes a press release announcing the finished product to customers, plus a list of frequently asked questions. The press release has to name the customer, the problem and the solution, in plain language, on one page.

If the story does not make the reader want the product, the team rewrites it, or the idea goes no further. Bryar and Carr describe how products including the Kindle and Amazon Prime went through this process. Bezos made the practice public in his 2017 letter to shareholders, describing six-page narrative memos in place of slides.