4 ms·

There has to be a balance though. The last place I worked some guy would write literally 30-40 pages explaining a service he was going to write. No one was goin

There has to be a balance though. The last place I worked some guy would write literally 30-40 pages explaining a service he was going to write. No one was going to read that, nor should they. It could have been explained in 1-2 pages, easy.

loganfrederick 8y ago
Agreed, the level of "paperwork" varies depending on what you're actually trying to get done. Proposing a new product? 2-3 pages like the Amazon Press Release technique should probably be the max. Product and engineering manager scoping the implementation? Could total 10 pages, but split into 20 different tickets that go across 5 devs and a designer. Context definitely matters.
btilly 8y ago
Hence the importance of the other half of Amazon's policy. Not just "written form", but "written and of easily digestible length X". You want there to be nowhere for bad reasoning to hide. Neither in the disconnection that comes naturally with slide shows, or in a forest of spurious verbiage that long writing encourages. As Dijkstra famously commented about writing, "You cannot sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. Nor will 10 blunt axes suffice."
sib 8y ago
Yes, definitely. I wrote (or contributed significantly to) dozens of docs for Jeff Bezos and his senior team. It was important to understand whether you were writing a 2-pager or a 6-pager (depended on a number of factors, mostly relating to complexity of the issues involved, the size of risks, and the variances in expected outcomes.) Two examples: (1) An acquisition memo justifying a functional/technical area (and specific target company) that we wanted to be able to move into due diligence with. (2) A recommendation related to whether "Alexa" (the service) and "Echo" (the device) should have the same or different names. In case you're wondering, the former was a 2-page and the latter, a 6-pager. In each case, the recommendation that we presented was accepted, the second after much more vigorous debate than the first. Jeff was initially strongly opposed to having two different names. No one would read a 40-page document, but there were a few times when we ended up with 6-pagers that contained 20+ pages of detailed appendices. I also believe that the culture of the document is a key success factor for Amazon (but that it can't just be cargo-culted into other organizations without a lot of buy-in).
- sandGorgon 8y ago
  Could you talk a bit more about the "rules of thumb" for these documents. is it used in all meetings ? what should you NOT DO in these memo ? are they paragraph prose or bullet points ? etc I've been trying to find info about this practice (to use in my startup), but didnt find any.
  - sib 8y ago
    Sure - something I've been wanting to do for a while. I just wrote a Medium post, as I think it's a longer topic than HN comments are optimized for. Please take a read and let me know whether it's helpful. https://medium.com/@sib1013/writing-docs-at-amazon-e025808616bd https://medium.com/@sib1013/writing-docs-at-amazon-e02580861...
    - sandGorgon 8y ago
      This is super helpful ! Is there a format that you can create/share ? Like - is it like a spec (with "goal", "stakeholders", stuff like that). I'm betting it's not ...and that's makes this a little hard to get started on. You guys had the benefit of looking at your peers' work - what would be a good two pager that we can learn from ?
      - sib 8y ago
        Thanks! It's less a spec and more of, choose the tool that fits the job. A lot of these documents fit the overall structure of "high-level situation & recommendation; industry / product / customer context; more depth on recommendations considered; FAQ" I don't have any examples, anymore (I left Amazon some years ago), but here are a couple of links that have reasonable takes on the structure and guidelines: https://www.anecdote.com/2018/05/amazons-six-page-narrative-structure/ https://www.anecdote.com/2018/05/amazons-six-page-narrative-... https://use-cases.org/2018/01/03/the-evil-genius-of-the-amazon-six-page-narrative/ https://use-cases.org/2018/01/03/the-evil-genius-of-the-amaz... https://www.geekwire.com/2017/prepared-6-page-memo-geekwire-summit-session-amazons-jeff-wilke-please-read-silently/ https://www.geekwire.com/2017/prepared-6-page-memo-geekwire-... Bottom line: the purpose of the document is to drive a high-quality decision, so include what will help, and leave out anything extraneous. (I know, that's not very actionable.)
bbgm 8y ago
6 pages is not mandatory. It’s up to 6. A lot of decision meetings are a a page or two when it’s a very clear decision which doesn’t require too much framing.

loganfrederick 8y ago

Agreed, the level of "paperwork" varies depending on what you're actually trying to get done. Proposing a new product? 2-3 pages like the Amazon Press Release technique should probably be the max. Product and engineering manager scoping the implementation? Could total 10 pages, but split into 20 different tickets that go across 5 devs and a designer. Context definitely matters.

btilly 8y ago

Hence the importance of the other half of Amazon's policy. Not just "written form", but "written and of easily digestible length X". You want there to be nowhere for bad reasoning to hide. Neither in the disconnection that comes naturally with slide shows, or in a forest of spurious verbiage that long writing encourages. As Dijkstra famously commented about writing, "You cannot sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. Nor will 10 blunt axes suffice."

sib 8y ago

Yes, definitely. I wrote (or contributed significantly to) dozens of docs for Jeff Bezos and his senior team. It was important to understand whether you were writing a 2-pager or a 6-pager (depended on a number of factors, mostly relating to complexity of the issues involved, the size of risks, and the variances in expected outcomes.) Two examples: (1) An acquisition memo justifying a functional/technical area (and specific target company) that we wanted to be able to move into due diligence with. (2) A recommendation related to whether "Alexa" (the service) and "Echo" (the device) should have the same or different names. In case you're wondering, the former was a 2-page and the latter, a 6-pager. In each case, the recommendation that we presented was accepted, the second after much more vigorous debate than the first. Jeff was initially strongly opposed to having two different names. No one would read a 40-page document, but there were a few times when we ended up with 6-pagers that contained 20+ pages of detailed appendices. I also believe that the culture of the document is a key success factor for Amazon (but that it can't just be cargo-culted into other organizations without a lot of buy-in).

sandGorgon 8y ago
Could you talk a bit more about the "rules of thumb" for these documents. is it used in all meetings ? what should you NOT DO in these memo ? are they paragraph prose or bullet points ? etc I've been trying to find info about this practice (to use in my startup), but didnt find any.
- sib 8y ago
  Sure - something I've been wanting to do for a while. I just wrote a Medium post, as I think it's a longer topic than HN comments are optimized for. Please take a read and let me know whether it's helpful. https://medium.com/@sib1013/writing-docs-at-amazon-e025808616bd https://medium.com/@sib1013/writing-docs-at-amazon-e02580861...
  - sandGorgon 8y ago
    This is super helpful ! Is there a format that you can create/share ? Like - is it like a spec (with "goal", "stakeholders", stuff like that). I'm betting it's not ...and that's makes this a little hard to get started on. You guys had the benefit of looking at your peers' work - what would be a good two pager that we can learn from ?
    - sib 8y ago
      Thanks! It's less a spec and more of, choose the tool that fits the job. A lot of these documents fit the overall structure of "high-level situation & recommendation; industry / product / customer context; more depth on recommendations considered; FAQ" I don't have any examples, anymore (I left Amazon some years ago), but here are a couple of links that have reasonable takes on the structure and guidelines: https://www.anecdote.com/2018/05/amazons-six-page-narrative-structure/ https://www.anecdote.com/2018/05/amazons-six-page-narrative-... https://use-cases.org/2018/01/03/the-evil-genius-of-the-amazon-six-page-narrative/ https://use-cases.org/2018/01/03/the-evil-genius-of-the-amaz... https://www.geekwire.com/2017/prepared-6-page-memo-geekwire-summit-session-amazons-jeff-wilke-please-read-silently/ https://www.geekwire.com/2017/prepared-6-page-memo-geekwire-... Bottom line: the purpose of the document is to drive a high-quality decision, so include what will help, and leave out anything extraneous. (I know, that's not very actionable.)

bbgm 8y ago

6 pages is not mandatory. It’s up to 6. A lot of decision meetings are a a page or two when it’s a very clear decision which doesn’t require too much framing.