Sample frameDay 264·Product · Definition

Morning. The launch announcement is usually written last — when it's far too late for it to change anything.

Product.

Working Backwards

5 min read·Apply by lunch

The question

Your team is building something right now that nobody outside the building has heard of yet — so on the day it ships, when the announcement goes out with the customer named, the problem stated and the reason anyone should care in two plain sentences, will a stranger read that and want the thing, or read a list of capabilities and feel nothing at all?

The idea

Colin Bryar and Bill Carr each spent more than a decade inside Amazon — Bryar as Jeff Bezos's technical adviser, the job the company calls the shadow; Carr building and running its digital music and video businesses. In Working Backwards (2021) they set out the practice that decides whether a new product gets built there at all: before anyone writes code, someone writes the press release. One page, dated to the launch, in language a customer would read — who has the problem, what it costs them, what this does about it, and a quote you'd only publish if you meant it. Under the release sits the FAQ: the customer's awkward questions first, then the internal ones — what it costs to build, what could break, what has to be true for any of the numbers to work. The room reads the whole thing before anyone speaks, then argues with the document rather than with the presenter. The trap is writing the announcement last, as a marketing job, once the thing exists and the money is gone — at which point its purpose is to make what got built sound exciting, not to test whether it deserved building. Written first, it's cheap to throw away.

The framework

01
A one-page release, written for a customer who owes you nothing.
The release is not a document about your company; it's the thing a customer would read and either want or ignore. Give it a headline in their words, a sub-head naming exactly who it's for, two sentences on the problem as it exists today without you, and two on what changes. Add a quote from a customer describing the difference in their own terms, and a first step so obvious it needs no explaining. Keep the whole thing to one page, and strip out every internal word — the roadmap language, the platform language, the metrics only you care about.
02
Whose questions come first — yours or theirs?
The FAQ is where the honesty lives, and it runs in two halves. The customer's half holds the questions they would actually ask: what does it cost, how is this different from what I already use, what happens to the work I've already done, why should I believe you. The internal half holds the ones that decide it: what has to be true for the model to hold, what it costs to build and to run, which existing product it cannibalises, what breaks if it works. Write the answers you have; where you haven't got one, say so, because an unanswered internal question is a cheap finding.
03
Nothing circulated beforehand — the document is the meeting.
You already know the case for reading before anyone talks; the pre-mortem and the retrospective both turn on it. What's specific here is that nothing goes out in advance: copies land on the table cold, everyone reads the release and the whole FAQ, and the proposal gets judged instead of the person sponsoring it. Have people mark the sentences they don't believe as they read, because those marks are the agenda. Then work the objections in the document's own order rather than loudest first. A weak idea with a confident sponsor survives a deck almost every time. It rarely survives a marked-up page.
04
Rewrite it until it stops being dull — or kill it there.
Most of these documents go through several rounds before anything gets built, and the rounds are the point: paper is the cheapest place in your company to be wrong. Watch what happens across drafts. One that gets shorter, clearer and more specific is a product coming into focus. One that gets longer, hedged and crowded with segments is a product being defended, and the defending has begun before a single customer has seen it. If three honest rewrites can't make the announcement interesting, you've learned something worth far more than the sprint you didn't spend.

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