Building Products The Amazon Way

Products That Count is one of my favorite meet ups in San Francisco, where over 300 product managers and designers meet every month at the Yelp headquarters in SOMA to talk “product”. SC Moatti, author of Mobilized and my friend was kind enough to invite me to share my perspectives on building products the Amazon way. I shared my perspectives on Amazon’s customer-centric approach by using a real life example of AutoRip.

If you’re inclined, here’s the video recording of the talk.

In the purest terms, Amazon’s approach of building products is customer-centric and data-centric. Instead of bolting customers on an idea for a product, we start with the customers and work backwards. Product managers at Amazon use a mechanism referred to as “Working Backwards”. It entails writing a customer-centric narrative to describe the vision for a product. This narrative is written in the form of a (mock) press release and is supplemented by frequently asked questions. Working Backwards drives clarity of thought through explicit customer focus. It has helped me push myself and my teams to think bigger than what is technically and operationally feasible in the short term.

This approach was shared broadly in 2006 by Werner Vogels. It has been discussed at length on Quora by my friend Ian McAllister.

Start with the customers and work backwards!