Once you become accustomed to this culture, it's difficult to go back. At one of my previous companies, there was a PowerPoint heavy culture. Every meeting had

Once you become accustomed to this culture, it's difficult to go back. At one of my previous companies, there was a PowerPoint heavy culture. Every meeting had a presenter who brought PowerPoint slides. There's something to be said about PowerPoint being boring, but the bigger issue with PowerPoint culture is that the focus stays on the presenter and whatever information they provide... questions were typically saved towards the end. Some presenters who are open to disruption during their presentation will answer question, but it never fosters a rigorous, thorough deep dive. Instead, using a written document absolutely forces the presenter/writer to have clarity in thought and it absolutely requires that they "cut the bullshit" and get to the point – what matters and what doesn't matter. These kinds of meetings will derail if the writer hasn't fully fleshed out their ideas or even if the document is missing important structure ... the purpose of the document, what the author is trying to get out of the meeting ("what is the success criteria for the document or meeting?"), what's in scope, if it's a technical document then clarity in functional requirements, non-functional requirements/constraints, options/alternatives, trade offs, and so on. In my honest opinion, the document driven meetings provide Amazon a competitive advantage.