Working Backwards or the “Amazon Working Backwards” process is becoming part of the mainstream vernacular, at least in the tech and product strategy world. I’ve seen people referring to it as a method and other people referring to it as a framework, but it’s neither. It’s more of a philosophical approach to strategy and decision making. The words themselves make it a little confusing. It also doesn’t help that people writing about it don’t grasp the process and infuse it with whatever interpretation they see fit.
The real meaning of “working backwards” is to start your vision from the desired outcome. There are three desired outcomes that need to be considered: the customer, the business, and yours! Articles about Working Backwards, and even my experience working at Amazon, tell me people don’t get this. There is no solution to a customer problem that is not viable for the business and that doesn’t satisfy the professional needs of those working on the project.
Let’s talk about three myths about Working Backwards.
#1—Working Backwards is not about requirement gathering
Requirements are about creating a plan and providing the information for the team to execute activities in a specific order to build a product. The philosophy of working backwards is to start from the customer, with a vision and a strategy for a product, before the building starts. You don’t write user stories, PRDs, or create sophisticated Gantt charts until you decide on a vision and a strategy.
#2—Working Backwards is not only about customer value
If I pick one overused, abused, and weaponized term when talking about Working Backwards, it is Customer Obsession (or Customer-Centric). It gets misconstrued as “what customers asked.” Customers can’t clearly articulate their pain points, needs, or desires beyond what they imagine. That’s not the biggest issue, though. The common deficiency is solutions that address the customer problem but don’t take into consideration the impact on the business or the team building and operating it. Either these projects are going to lead to poor results or to a revolt.
#3—Working Backwards is not about working backwards!
The words “working backwards” have a dissonance between what they mean in English and what they mean in the business/product strategy world. After having dozens of conversations with people who were not familiar with it or superficially familiar, I can attest it’s confusing. People assume you need to build a product in reverse, like putting in the walls of a house, then the structure and plumbing, then the foundation. A precise term is “discover the desired outcome first.” It doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily, though.
What Working Backwards is!
The working backwards approach means that you need to discover your desired outcome first. Notice that I use the word “discover” and not “know.” When you are getting started, because you identified a new opportunity, your knowledge is still full of assumptions. Any desired outcome at this point is wishful thinking. You can say the desired outcome is to maximize revenue, capture a new market, or expand an existing product to a new segment. These are too abstract to be useful. And, they lack inspiration, which is a crucial component for an organization to be aligned and for people to be motivated.
For you to work backward from a desired outcome, you need to discover three key elements for the project: 1) What problem are we solving and for whom? 2) What’s a solution that’s feasible, viable, and valuable? 3) How do we get it in the hands of the customer?
Here’s where things go off the rails: people using the Working Backwards approach focus on building a plan that has a detailed specification, like building a bridge. The true value of working backwards is not agreeing on a plan, it’s agreeing on a vision and a strategy. A plan is part of the work, the execution. You must not be executing a project until there is agreement on the desired outcome. This is a circular issue. How do you establish a clear enough desired outcome without a plan?
The Press Release and Frequently Asked Questions (PRFAQ) framework is the system that Amazon invented to implement working backwards. Other vision and strategy frameworks may work as well, including Business Model Canvas, Lean Canvas, Blue Ocean Strategy, and Value Proposition Canvas. In the PRFAQ Framework book, I adapted it to make it clearer and less costly for founders and product managers to use as their primary working backwards system. It iteratively uses the best knowledge from your team and other resources to establish assumptions and hypotheses and eliminate them as you go through the PRFAQ method. This leads to the level of clarity you need to decide if a project is worth pursuing.
Adopting the Working Backwards mentality requires that you first start with “why.” There has to be a concrete purpose that addresses a specific set of problems for a specific set of customers with a solution the company can execute and maintain. Once you discover, debate, and decide on those, the team creates the plan and builds it.