Apply ‘Working Backwards’ in Product Management
When I was in graduate school for technology management, I had to write a thesis in the format of a business proposal centered on a product or service. Inspired by my decade of experience in news and digital media, I proposed a content management system that would address my frustrations with current tools. And since it was an exercise in imagination, my concept would adopt revolutionary technology like generative AI to make digital content creation, management, and distribution more manageable and effective. Because why not?!
At the time, I didn’t realize that the process of writing that thesis employed the Working Backwards framework. I had to envision and document the ideal CMS I believed digital content creators would love and then work backward to determine what resources were needed to build it.
What is Working Backwards?
Working Backwards is an operating principle popularized by Amazon in the early 2000s and later documented in the book Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr. It involves a team or product leader identifying a target customer, a key pain point, envisioning a product or service as a solution, and planning the project’s development based on the end goal.
The primary tool used in Working Backwards is the PR/FAQ, a press release the visionary leader writes as if the final product or service had already been launched. This narrative also includes a set of answers to anticipated questions by potential customers and existing stakeholders. At Amazon, it is customary for the press release author to present the PR/FAQ to managers and executives, collect feedback, and iterate on the narrative until the idea has been fully fleshed out and proven to make a strong case.
When the higher-ups approve a final PR/FAQ, the team kicks off the project and receives allocated resources to make the ideas in the narrative come to life.
Click here to view the sections in a PR/FAQ.
How to Apply Working Backwards
The Working Backwards process follows a similar path to the stages in Design Thinking and is compatible with the steps in product development. As Amazon Senior Product Manager Anshul Bhamore outlines in this Product School webinar, below are the five stages:
1. Know and listen to the customer.
The goal of the first stage in the Working Backwards process is to identify a target customer and dive deep into their lives. You need to empathize with them and understand what they need and want to achieve in their position. Working Backwards invests heavily upfront in the expertise of UX researchers, business/data analysts, subject matter experts, customer success managers, and customers to provide the best insights on what customers may need or want.
(Later in the process, these types of stakeholders could provide feedback on a PR/FAQ and question any assumptions.)
Additionally, many successful product managers transitioned from a different field or role they now serve. I used content management tools as a journalist; now, I work on a product team that develops content management tools for technical writers. Career transitioners like myself often bring domain expertise, having once been the customer.
2. Define the problem or opportunity.
With that in-depth insight into your target customer’s needs and desires, Working Backwards requires clearly defining the problem or opportunity you would like to resolve. It later becomes the thesis in a PR/FAQ in which you must articulate what key pain point or gap your future solution will alleviate or fill.
For this stage, you can select the problem or opportunity that most thrills you or you are the most confident in addressing. But if you are indeed customer obsessed, you will leverage prioritization methods to rank what will have the most beneficial impact on your target customer.
3. Be inventive!
Once you’ve learned about your customer and prioritized an opportunity area, next in Working Backwards is the crux of the framework — to think big! While potentially anyone can put themselves in the shoes of a target customer, it takes a strategic and visionary thinker to imagine what they would do if there were no limits.
What might you conceptualize if money were no object and if you had all the talent in the world? Your only prerequisite is knowing that customer and having good instincts.
Sometimes the ideas come from your team brainstorming. Sometimes it comes from the customer. My colleague, a UX Researcher, likes to survey our customers by asking, “What would you do if you had a magic wand?” which always yields creative answers. Other times, the ideas come from different industries or new technologies disrupting your current field.
In the PR/FAQ, you can express ideas born in the Invent stage as the ideal customer journey, illustrated in a customer journey map. It would help if you detailed what their new experience would be like and what features they can expect. And if you have a UX designer on your team, you can draft wireframes and mockups and even develop a prototype. Include these artifacts in your PR/FAQ.
4. Refine your idea.
At this stage in the Working Backwards process, you should have drafted a document, ideally, a PR/FAQ, that identifies your target customer, the main problem or opportunity you will address, and the proposed solution, whether a product or service. Before jumping into action, your proposal must first go through the fire.
At Amazon, holding “doc reads” or meetings where stakeholders read the PR/FAQ and provide constructive feedback, is customary. This stage should move you to improve the PR/FAQ with an even stronger argument for why the organization must execute your proposed solution.
5. Test and iterate the solution.
After you check in with stakeholders, the Working Backwards process also requires checking in with customers. A team of UX designers and researchers can conduct surveys or lightweight usability studies on wireframes or prototypes to validate concepts with customers.
Research into the customer should also inform how to tell if your customer is adopting your solution and using it as intended, a.k.a. success metrics. Thinking about how customers may interact with the final output of your project requires setting up goals, OKRs, or KPIs so that you can quantify the success of your solution. You’ll also need to incorporate feedback mechanisms to continue learning from your customer and improve your output once it’s in customers’ hands.
In a PR/FAQ, there is a fun and qualitative way to demonstrate whether customers are delighted by the proposed solution — the customer quote. The quote is either authentic, pulled from earlier tests with customers, or imagined, written to show what customers would say when they benefit from your solution. So once customers use your product or service, their reactions, compared to the previously conceived customer quote, will show you whether your solution is qualitatively successful.
Pros and Cons of Working Backwards
Like most frameworks used in product management, it’s up to you to figure out if Working Backwards is the proper process for what your team or organization would like to achieve. So below is a quick list of some advantages of the process and possible pitfalls you want to avoid.
Pros
- Describing the key features in a PR/FAQ allows your project manager and engineering manager to more accurately plan the tasks and milestones in realizing the vision.
- It also gives you an idea of what type of resources and skillset you’ll need to achieve the end solution. Your team or organization can plan to procure the right tools or hire/upskill the right talent.
- The storytelling format of the PR/FAQ provides your marketing manager with the foundational elements of a go-to-market strategy. It lets them know who the solution is for and how they will benefit. The marketing team can begin planning their campaigns and engaging potential customers from the beginning.
Cons
- Without proper research, discovery, and iteration of the proposal, your team may perceive an approved Working Backwards narrative as a rigid plan they must adhere to. Meeting customer needs will fall more heavily on the feedback mechanisms post-launch.
- A criticism of Working Backwards is that until the output is in customers’ hands, companies may take a considerable risk in thinking big instead of starting small and iterating until you’ve got a hit. For a large company like Amazon, it can afford significant, planned investments upfront. Smaller organizations and cash-strapped teams may have to pare back the concept or follow a more traditional Agile development path.
Conclusion
So my Columbia University thesis on an ideal CMS may have been too revolutionary for me alone to achieve. But drafting it prepared me for my tenure at Amazon, where we often write PR/FAQs and deliver digital products. Working Backwards has challenged me to stretch my imagination, become one with the customer, and gather the right resources upfront. It’s also taught me to leverage collaboration to challenge assumptions and that operational excellence allows one to improve upon any outputs quickly. When following the Working Backwards process well, the initial product or service should help you move forward in serving your customers.
