Working Backwards

Amazon’s practice of beginning every new initiative from the desired customer experience and reasoning back to the product, rather than starting from internal capabilities or competitors. In Kyle’s notes it is bound tightly to Customer Obsession — the first of Jeff Bezos’s leadership principles is described as “working backwards from the customer,” captured in the Jeffism “when given the choice of obsessing over competitors or obsessing over customers, we always obsess over customers” (Customer Obsession).

Mechanically, “working backwards” shows up as the press-release-first innovation ritual described in Amazon Unbound: “the six-page narrative Amazonians craft in the form of a press release at the start of a new initiative to envision the product’s market impact… forces them to begin any conversation about a new product in terms of the benefit it creates for customers.” It pairs with Bezos’s prompt “tell me what would be a magical product, then tell me how to get there.” In User-Centered Design, Kyle reads the same discipline through an empathy lens — grounding decisions in the end user, the variant of working backwards expressed in the Six-Page Narratives memo culture.

Context: “Working Backwards” is also the title of a 2021 book by former Amazon executives Colin Bryar and Bill Carr documenting the company’s operating mechanisms — including the PR/FAQ (“press release / frequently asked questions”) document that formalizes the working-backwards method.

Where this appears

• Customer Obsession — leadership principle #1, “working backwards from the customer”; Borders as the contrast case that obsessed over stores and quarterly numbers instead.
• Amazon Unbound — the press-release-first innovation ritual and “magical product” prompt that operationalize the method.
• User-Centered Design — Kyle’s empathy-lens reading of working backwards from the customer.
• Six-Page Narratives — the memo format that carries the working-backwards press release at the start of a new product.