Amazon’s Working Backwards Process

I worked for Amazon Game Studios only for a short time. But one of the things that I learned there and still take with me is the “Working Backwards” process.

Amazon is a Word doc culture. PowerPoint is almost never used.

The Working Backwards process almost always manifests itself in a mock press release. Amazon believes forcing their employees to think about the end first for any proposal or project lets them go backwards and think deeply about all the necessary steps and questions to be answered in order to achieve the promises in the press release.

For games, this was super useful. Writing a mock launch press release for a game helps focus you on what is truly important to communicate to potential customers of your game.

Here is the outline and process in the image:

✅Clearly define who the game is for (segmentation)
✅Describe the game in a couple of sentences (elevator pitch/positioning)
✅Call out topfeatures (feature prioritization)
✅What genre gaps does the game fill? (competitive differentiation/SWOT)
✅How do you know what players need or want? (insights from research)
✅What does the player experience look like? (sell the vision)

#WorkingBackwards#Amazon