Working Backwards: A New Version Of Amazon’s “Press Release” Approach To Plan Customer-Centric Projects

One of the many legacies of Steve Jobs was his annual product launch keynotes. It was (and still is, to a certain extent) at these events where Apple would showcase its latest innovations designed to make customers more successful and revolutionize communication, computing, and creativity.

These keynotes were the culmination of years of work and preparation. They were intended as the last step in the launch of a product that had been secretly developed and was now being revealed for the first time. Apple’s hope was that this would be enough to send products flying off the shelf. And, in most cases, it worked.

However, the majority of us don’t work at Apple.

Our companies don’t hold flashy keynotes to launch new products. At best we might publish a press release. And, perhaps most importantly, our products don’t naturally fly off the shelves just because we launched them.

In fact, launching fully built, production-ready products and services is a huge risk for our organizations. What if no one buys them? Worse, what if no one even tries them? The impact of such a failure would often be significant for the company.

But what if we could reduce the risk of these launches…