The two smart pieces of Amazon’s approach to product development

@Peterme pointed out this great Q&A thread on Quora on “What is Amazon’s approach to product development and product management?”

There’s two great ideas here that I push all the time with clients, internally at Adaptive Path, and when I teach and speak:

1. Working backwards — working backwards from the customer rather than starting with a product then trying to make it acceptable to customers. I call this an “outside-in” approach, working from the customer’s perspective back into the business. Businesses, often for very good reasons, start with the internal systems and procedures perspective and work outward to the customer. At Adaptive Path, we try to counter this bias and work from the customer’s perspective inwards.
2. Internal press releases — Amazon initiatives reportedly often start with the product manager writing an internal press release to describe the finished product. At Adaptive Path we often call this type of envisionment, a tangible future, or a [whatever]-from-the-future. That’s because these can take forms other than a press release. We’ve done blog posts, t-shirts, and posters from-the-future to help show the benefits of a successful initiative from the customer’s perspective. What they create is a clear vision for where we want to end up. Of course the final service deviates somewhat from the original vision, but everyone involved knows from the start what direction we are heading in.

Somehow, it doesn’t surprise me that Amazon’s on top of it.