My Experience: Writing at Amazon

While I was at Amazon, I became a very effective writer. In the 5 years I spent at the company I wrote several documents. The last 3 years I authored 5 (plus one) paper which were all presented and approved by the company leadership. Through great mentorship and hands on experience I developed a very effective process to be successful securing approval from Amazon leadership for these PRFAQs. It’s not hard – simply check with all your stakeholders, their leaders, and bring them all along with all of their questions answered to the final meeting with leadership where everyone smiles and nods :). I call this the concentric circle approach. It starts with the customer and focusing in on building clear prioritized epics and stories which solves the consumer problem. The subsequent rings come from clearly articulating through a well written PRFAQ to the stakeholders and their leaders the problem and the solution. If questions arise during the process, take those questions and answer them with data and detail clearly in the FAQ part of the document. I love this process.  It works so well at Amazon because the culture has embraced it from the top down and through their leadership principles. 

Customer Insight <-> PRFAQ <-> Stakeholders Alignment <-> Leadership Approval

I believe this process works so well at Amazon because the leadership principles are so strong and the company aligns around these. At other companies where I implemented this process it was sometimes a little more challenging, however the process always provided clarity of thinking for product leaders no matter which organization I was in.

Below is my recollection of the process – some of which has been burned into my brain due to the intensity of the work, however it was formative and incredibly valuable growth. What I learned during each paper follows the description of the process.

PRFAQ #1: Alexa SmartHome – This was the initial paper that started the Alexa home automation project. When I wrote this document there was no SmartHome team, and it was simply an idea. The initial features were limited to only lighting to create a simple MVP. This PRFAQ took ~ 2 weeks and maybe 8 rounds of feedback from the Alexa leadership team.  It was presented to Amazon leadership and approved. Because we were building a consumer facing set of features as well as a developer platform, there were 2 audiences and therefore 2 documents.  The developer document was a blog post if I remember correctly.

Add KPIs and examples of these to the feature list as part of the MVP.

PRFAQ #2: Alexa Thermostat – Immediately after we launched SmartHome, I focused on the next thing which was thermostats. With some great market research and a team of 5 amazing developers, we proposed this PRFAQ to Amazon leadership. This document took a few more internal reviews with our stakeholders through the concentric circle process because of the complexities of the segment however it was approved by leadership on the first pass. 

Be sure to clearly address partner risk in the document in order to facilitate and direct that part of the discussion with leadership.

PRFAQ #3: Works with Alexa – At this time I realized that there was going to be many partners wanting to participate in the ecosystem. We needed to create a mechanism to ensure that the quality of third party devices maintained a high bar as we allowed more partners to participate. Taking a page from what I learned at Microsoft in the certification process for Windows, I crafted a paper which we presented to Alexa leadership. This paper took ~ 6 weeks to flow through the creation and research process because it is a hard problem and there are many parties at Amazon involved. This paper was not approved on the first review with Alexa leadership due to some of the partner complexities. We had to go back to resolve some of the business issues. We did, the document was approved on the next leadership review, and this process is still employed by Alexa today to certify new devices coming onto the Alexa smarthome platform. 

Works with Alexa was less of a technical problem and more of a business and operations problem. The solution required a much different type of implementation and therefore a different set of stakeholders and approval process

PRFAQ #4: Alexa Door Locks – Immediately following the Works with Alexa approval I began writing the door lock document. Door locks is a bit complicated because it is the first project for that involved safety and security. But again, armed with research and data, I pulled together the features which met the consumer’s expectations. During the approval process for this document I learned that, sometimes, the consumer will tell you things that they may not really want. When the initial document was approved I recall that we had the unlock feature defined as part of the MVP because that is what consumers had told us they wanted. However, after much debate, we realized that it may be difficult to support the safety requirement for the consumer requirement. So, we had to cut this feature as part of the MVP and implement it much later after we had the ability to support it. That was a huge learning for me and the team and required additional documents other than the PRFAQ.

Start with the customer but consider other aspects. Customer safety and security takes priority.  Changing the MVP is okay, however communicate this change early and communicate all additional research.

PRFAQ #5: Alexa Security – And with the follow on of door locks, we defined support for security systems. Our customers expressed interest in being able to manage their security with their voice. By this time, the Alexa team was quite large, and as a result, the review process for this document required several levels of approvals and overhead from all parts of the team. And near the end of the process Amazon acquired a few companies which changed the complete trajectory of the project. This project was not fully approved, however key concepts like hunches were extracted and launched separately.

When a team is new and small it is sometimes more efficient to develop the document and build the feature. As a team expands and is still in the forming stage, the velocity for feature development can decline as you ramp up the new team members.

PRFAQ #6: Project Q – Being in active long term recovery from addiction myself, I discovered that Amazon’s then ~500,000 employees may cost the company an estimated $400M every year due to Substance Use Disorder. Off the side of my desk, and in my spare time I wrote a paper outlining how the company could possibly reduce these costs through some very specific and mindful activities. I presented this paper to HR leadership. This year, my friend John drove the first initiative over the finish line and I believe has a roadmap to develop more features for this effort.

Building technology is simple compared to solving human behavior issues. This paper clearly described the problem, however the solution is complex.