Linear Academy | What If a Product PRD Were a Press Release? Notes from Amazon's Reverse Workshop

In mid-October, Linear Capital co-hosted a workshop with Amazon's Digital Innovation team to help Linear's portfolio companies understand Amazon's Working Backwards methodology. Nearly 50 team members from Linear portfolio companies attended. With assistance from Amazon's Digital Innovation team, participants experienced firsthand the Working Backwards approach that Amazon advocates.

Chen Hua from Amazon's Digital Innovation team first gave a detailed overview of the origins of Amazon's Working Backwards methodology and what it entails.

He noted that one of Amazon's distinctive features is its use of a unified project initiation method for entering new business areas or incubating internal projects — the "legendary" Working Backwards approach. The "customer obsession" that Working Backwards points to is precisely the business logic and driving force behind Amazon's growth. So what exactly is Working Backwards? Simply put, it starts from the customer and works backwards until the team has a clear idea of the product to build.

To understand this, we can first look at forward thinking, which starts from one's own interests and capabilities. You identify what product you can build based on "what skills do I have," then push it to market and sell to customers. Working Backwards, by contrast, starts from the customer: figuring out who the customer is, what they need, and what would satisfy them, then building the product and bringing it to market. It emphasizes not being constrained by your existing skill set, but rather focusing more intently on customer needs.

"Of course, it's also possible that following customer needs leads you to realize you can't actually build the product," Chen Hua explained. "Both approaches have their merits. Starting from skills helps build core competencies, but you risk launching products the market rejects, leading to losses — and if the market shifts significantly, the company faces major challenges."

While Working Backwards may also lead to the discovery that you ultimately can't build a product that satisfies customer needs, starting from customer demand gives teams a continuous source of innovation momentum — because customers always have some level of dissatisfaction, which means teams must keep thinking and iterating to meet their needs.

For many B2B companies, starting from customer needs sounds like a given. But how do you ensure you consistently follow the "customer obsession" logic in actual execution? In sharing Amazon's experience, Chen Hua said this requires organizational structure, culture, mechanisms, and architecture to work in concert so that "customer obsession" can be accurately implemented.

On organization and culture, they shared Amazon's 16 Leadership Principles. On mechanisms, Amazon's Digital Innovation team assisted Linear portfolio company teams in detailed discussions around five questions (the Amazon team emphasized not being limited to these five, but using them as the core):

• "Who is the customer?"
• "What are the customer's pain points and opportunities?"
• "What is the customer's core value?"
• "How do we know what the customer needs?"
• "What is the customer experience?"

The discussions around these five questions were the centerpiece of the workshop. Yang Guotai from Amazon's enablement team encouraged founders to approach these questions with curiosity, bold ideas, and full commitment. They believe that deep thinking on these five questions allows product teams and company leaders to fully understand business opportunities and constraints, and by going through this thought process, clearly identify what problems the product needs to solve.

Once you've thought it through, a team needs to secure resources to launch a project, which requires clear articulation — in other words, building a project document. Amazon's distinctive project document is a press release, which embodies the key to Working Backwards: shifting perspective from an internal/company viewpoint to the customer's viewpoint.

Teams from Linear portfolio companies said the discussions prompted deep reflection on their businesses. Above, we've briefly distilled the key points from the day's event, hoping to give everyone a preliminary understanding of the Amazon Working Backwards workshop. For more information, you can follow updates from Amazon's Digital Innovation team. Meanwhile, the origins and practice of Amazon's Working Backwards methodology have been compiled into a book titled Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon, which we recommend.

About Linear Capital

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Linear Capital is a professional investment firm focused on "Data Intelligence" and "Frontier Technology."

Linear Capital currently manages ten funds with total assets under management of approximately $2 billion.

We focus on early-stage projects in "Data Application," "Data Infrastructure," and "Frontier Technology" application areas. Our investment stage is primarily seed to Series A lead investments, with typical check sizes of $3 million to $8 million or equivalent RMB per project.

To date, we have made early-stage investments in over 120 startup teams including Horizon Robotics ($3B valuation), Tongdun (>$1B), Kujiale (>$1B), Sensors Data, Tezign, Rokid, Guandata, Agile Robots, and others. The combined valuation of Linear's portfolio companies is approximately $20 billion.

In the near term, Linear Capital is working to become the premier "Data Intelligence Technology Fund," and in the long term, to gradually build itself into the most influential "Frontier Technology Application Fund."