19 ms·

The Document Culture of Amazon

488 points by ecliptik 5y ago

cratermoon 5y ago
I'm curious how this work with people who don't read or write English, or are L2 learners. Are they kept out of the loop?
- mwint 5y ago
  My neighbor’s first language is Spanish, but his grasp of English is very good. He went to work for Amazon corporate and said the first several months, coworkers would tear apart his documents on English issues. It worked. He quickly learned how to write documents up to Amazon standards. Amazon was a terrible place for him anyway (work/life balance), but he certainly wasn’t kept out of the loop. He was forced into the loop.
  - kyleee 5y ago
    Very good, that type of rigorous immersion is what should be done for ESL kids at all grade levels during education, otherwise they are at a varying degrees of disadvantage in all subjects
- civilized 5y ago
  There are text-to-speech converters
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  I think it's easier to read a foreign language than it is to speak it (assuming you know it at all).
  - smeej 5y ago
    I found this to be true for languages that use the same alphabet, but found I could understand spoken languages with different alphabets much faster than I could read them, especially when the direction of reading was different.
  - biztos 5y ago
    Being able to stop, go back, and look stuff up is huge. Googling the common form of a phrase you want to use is huge. Assuming you have basic reading proficiency already. I’m learning Thai: literacy is not for beginners here. But I look forward to one day googling stuff like I do when reading Hungarian legal contracts.
  - bjohnson225 5y ago
    That’s definitely my experience. The ability to lookup anything you don’t understand and not needing to battle against strong accents and/or poor enunciation makes a big difference.
- Zababa 5y ago
  I don't think these people are recruited in the first place. This is about Amazon on the software side.
  - cheeze 5y ago
    So, a sizable portion of Indians and Chinese folks? Many Indians have spoken english most of their lives, but definitely tons of Chinese (and other) devs where ESL is a very real thing.
    - Zababa 5y ago
      ESL doesn't mean that you can't read or write english. Amazon requiring the devs to be able to read and write english is not really surprising, I would consider it the bare minimum.
    - amusedcyclist 5y ago
      Most of the chinese people I've met in tech have been excellent at written English because they learn it starting in primary school. They're just uncomfortable speaking it.
- argomo 5y ago
  The written meeting format may be less disadvantageous to non-native speakers than the oral format. As the article mentions, it helps presenters sidestep accent issues. And I bet most non-native audiences appreciate being able to see the text instead of having to catch it from a single listen. It helps too that written communication isn't going to be laden with the various side comments, idioms, and in-jokes that an oral presenter always brings.
- cheeze 5y ago
  IMO, to some extent yes. Just like they'd be 'kept out of the loop' in many other cases for not having the best communication. It's not inherently fair but I don't know how to solve that problem either.
  - closeparen 5y ago
    It’s striking that command of written language could be considered an “unfair” expectation in a cerebral, white-collar job. In a not-very-distant cultural landscape that’s the baseline. Show up on time looking presentable, read, write, summarize, make deductions, discuss. All the domain specific stuff is taught on the job.
- brikil 5y ago
  In my org at least, most of the time the doc is distributed ahead of time. It gives people a chance to spend more time on it or start adding inline comments. But we still start meetings with reading for those that don’t read ahead of time.
- ryan93 5y ago
  How common is the inability to read English at Amazon?
- xyzelement 5y ago
  You are probably not an amazon knowledge worker unless you have those skills to start with.
java-man 5y ago
"If there’s no document, we cancel the meeting." this is a very good idea.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  I tried to push a "if there's no agenda, we cancel the meeting" at a prior job. It didn't really work that well. They had a lot of standing "status update" and "one-on-one" types of meetings that were just on the calendar without any specific goals or decisions to be made at any particular meeting.
  - beckingz 5y ago
    There are meetings which should not be thought of as "meetings" Labeling them as collaboration sessions or more social one-on-ones helps though.
- NAHWheatCracker 5y ago
  I love this idea. I've tried to push people to make agendas and just generally do some legwork to make meetings run smoother. There's only been a few times where I've had project managers who actually tried it out. It was glorious and meetings ran so smoothly, but it stopped shortly after. I guess they found it to be to onerous to spend 5 minutes write an email. I think it's hopeless to expect them to write an entire document.
- some_furry 5y ago
  A related good idea is "Ticket or it didn't happen." Every time a question gets answered, or something gets discussed, put in the appropriate ticket for the problem related to the meeting. If there isn't a ticket, why not?
- kator 5y ago
  Actually I have often pushed a meeting with a simple "The document is not ready". Obviously you can get push back if you do it too often, however nobody wants to join a bad doc read meeting, they'd rather you get a bit more time to work out the issues in the doc. Often times the issues are cross team, you need to get alignment with partner teams before you join the meeting, or if you can't you write a "hotly debated topics" section with the partner team and just go for it. There is a balance, you should not spend too much time driving for alignment, but you would be better served to come to the meeting showing both sides are talking and understand the point and counter-point.
planckscnst 5y ago
When I joined, I was perplexed by this way of operating meetings. It surprised me greatly that people wouldn't want to read the doc at ahead, give it time for thinking and researching, and then come to the table feeling prepare to contribute to the best if your ability. Now, I understand and deeply appreciate this method. I believe it provides lots of benefits. It drives towards better docs that can be understood quickly by non-experts. When there are just a few minutes to review the doc, we don't have time to go digging for information on our own - the critical information must be provided in the material given. There will also be SMEs in the room who can clarify any shortcomings here. Because the audience of the docs is non-SMEs, it drives towards inclusion of other teams. From this, you get more diverse viewpoints, considerations, and experience. It also contributes towards cross-team awareness and education. It makes it much easier to participate as a contributor to the meeting while simultaneously less impactful when you don't. It let's us timebox our attention span - you won't accidentally spend hours rabbit-holing into a doc.
- travisjungroth 5y ago
  The other side I heard from someone who worked at Amazon: The SMEs read critically and take the full time. The PMs skim it and start pitching whatever idea comes first to mind.
  - awsanswers 5y ago
    The PMs are often SMEs of related concerns and own stakes in the new idea being discussed
  - cle 5y ago
    If someone is wasting time in a meeting on tangents unrelated to the goal of the meeting, the person running the meeting has every right and obligation to shut down the tangent. This is a problem regardless of the document culture. If anything the document culture gives you an objective standard that makes it very clear whether a line of discussion is on topic.
    - pm90 5y ago
satisfice 5y ago
This is an interesting thing to try and learn from. It is an abusive thing to enforce on everyone all the fucking time. A meeting is a social event. Silent reading is not. Why does every young clever person think that his preferred method is the only thing that makes sense? Oh I know. Because young clever people have not had time to live, grow, and appreciate the full spectrum of human productivity. My meetings are for talking. Come prepared. Also, documents for everything? Great way to slow everything down and discourage certain people from making suggestions at all.
- civilized 5y ago
  Interesting that you baselessly accuse the author of saying that his preferred way is the only thing that makes sense, followed immediately by "My meetings are for talking. Come prepared." Your attitude seems to be just as rigid as you imagine the author's to be. And I definitely wouldn't want to encounter that gratuitously sarcastic attitude of yours in a meeting or anywhere else, it'd definitely strike me as abusive.
  - ben0x539 5y ago
    Okay, so, I figure a post that goes "those darn kids in amazon senior leadership!" is probably not made entirely sincerely
- gary_0 5y ago
  > Also, documents for everything? I worked for a smaller company with this extremist philosophy, to the point that they forbade voice or text chat outside of scheduled meetings; all discussion had to be written in public Teams threads. The CEO also had a habit of dropping into random threads and micromanaging. I think it was bad for everyone, but for me it was completely paralyzing.
  - rapsey 5y ago
    Chat apps are not documentation. What you are describing is just a moronic way of doing things and absolutely not documents for everything.
tanvach 5y ago
An ex-Amazon PM ‘promoted’ the silent reading culture in my previous company. Definitely brought a lot of benefits: - forced more senior / leadership members to read through and internalize the details. Reduces wasted time asking already answered questions. - we used google docs. Question and answers were posted as comments. This formed a log of the majority of the discussion. Less note taking needed. - allowed less assertive members to ask questions or give answers. The only drawback - the overwhelming silence at the start that I never really got over…
- grogenaut 5y ago
  I just pop on my headphones and get reading. Silence gone.
- xkjkls 5y ago
  > The only drawback - the overwhelming silence at the start that I never really got over… More the overwhelming anxiety you face being the person who has written and edited the document multiple times during the 30 minutes of silence at the beginning of the meeting.
- xzel 5y ago
  As a dev, o boy, the silence while people read your docs was maddening. Great people watching though as they digested and marked up what you wrote. Whole process is mildly cathartic to be honest.
- theshrike79 5y ago
  > The only drawback - the overwhelming silence at the start that I never really got over… Dealing with silence is a cultural thing. In Nordic countries silence is the norm.
  - whatever_dude 5y ago
    It seems that way to me too. In the US silence is basically a crime against humanity.
smeej 5y ago
What kinds of feedback have come up about this for people with reading challenges like dyslexia? The closest comparison I have to this is reading in school where it became very obvious who the fast, skilled readers were and who had to work harder to understand the text, which caused a lot of anxiety for the slower readers (which didn't help). I can imagine a wide variety of possible outcomes for this, from accommodations being made to people just being a lot more mature as adults, but I'm also guessing there has been some trial and error about this at Amazon and some best practices have emerged. Does anyone here know what they are?
- rancar2 5y ago
  For my team, we take average reading speeds for the main document then add extra time for the appendices. This means that slower readers will at least get to read the main document. Also, providing documents in advance will give those who need time and technical assistance, the ability to take the steps they need prior.
  - GoodJokes 5y ago
    So what you are saying is that the "slower" readers are not at a disadvantage? It doesn't surprise me that amazon has crypto reading and writing tests for all of their meetings. sheesh.
- kator 5y ago
  Glad you asked, I have dyslexia, and I was very worried about writing, much less reading fast enough. In general we budget 4 mins per page, that said the meeting usually starts with a "here's the doc, please read until XXX and let us know if you're ready sooner". And then a "time check how are people doing?" and often you'll hear "I need N more minutes". And back to reading. I was very worried about this part of the experience because of my challenges, I'm not the world's fastest reader, but over time I got comfortable just saying "I need 5 more minutes". Or I'll say "I'm on page N". That said we do have some leaders who read incredibly fast, for them I always include some good appendices so they stay "in the room and on topic" rather than float off into their email.
zapstar 5y ago
Does this discourage attendees from reading/thinking about the topic ahead of time? If you’re the presenter or organizer, you’ve put all of this energy into a document. You’ve thought about it for days or weeks or months. And now meeting day is here, people sit down and read your document, and immediately, there is a discussion. Those people who literally just finished reading about the idea 2 minutes ago now have thoughts and opinions on it. This happens regardless of the existence of documents, of course. But I wonder if waiting until the meeting to read the document encourages this sort of immediate feedback from people new to a topic.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- tylerc230 5y ago
  Generally a link to the document is sent out earlier in the day. That way folks who are inclined can read ahead and comment. The slackers still get time to read the doc at the start of the meeting so they’re not completely in the dark.
- rancar2 5y ago
  Haven written many 6-pagers, PRFAQs, and other written narrative formats then centering the meeting around the written documents, the writer should write for the audience and the allotted time for reading and discussing. New people may have less to contribute in the moment, but now they can read and research it later for contributions.
- darksaints 5y ago
  Yes, it does. But I don't think that is a problem...quite the opposite. When you're preparing a document, and you know you've only got a half hour some some executives attention, it forces you to really think through the message. It forces you to ask yourself questions, and find ways to make the point more succinctly. It's an extremely refined elevator pitch devoid of the influence of charisma and showmanship. If you expect people to read before the meeting, there are two problems: 1) nobody will read before the meeting, and 2) the documents become too verbose and poorly thought out. If you don't expect any reading at all, you get presentation-led sales pitch that favors smooth talkers and charlatans. I absolutely hated about 99% of the culture at Amazon, but not the document-led meetings. It's an amazing bullshit filter.
flakiness 5y ago
I wonder how widespread this is outside Amazon. Compare it to, say, Google: In Bay Area, the cultural influence of Google is strong both in good and bad ways. Things like OKR, monorepo, snippets, go links etc. seem to be adopted by many younger companies. I don't think it means these cultural artifacts are always superior. It'd be more about familiarity for ex-Google employees. There must be a lot of ex-Amazon talents, but I haven't heard or read this outside the context of Amazon. If this is unique to Amazon, why? Maybe the book "Working Backwards" [1] is changing the situation? I'm very curious, and honestly, a bit envious. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Working-Backwards-Insights-Stories-Secrets/dp/1250267595/ https://www.amazon.com/Working-Backwards-Insights-Stories-Se...
- rejectedandsad 5y ago
  > It this unique to Amazon, why? I think it's because despite it working really well at Amazon, working at Amazon isn't considered impressive (the engineers are considered less intelligent, inherently less impressive etc). Nobody from Stanford or CMU goes to work at Amazon after college, while like a third of the class goes to Google. Because of that, the culture and people filter don't filter into Bay Area startups (which Amazonians usually can't get interviews at).
  - xenihn 5y ago
    Amazon is still a top 1% SWE employer. Note: I do not work for Amazon, and never plan to. I was considering it prior to making it into FANG. Unless they offered me a bunch of money, I guess. Like a million dollars year.
    - rejectedandsad 5y ago
      Your top 1% feels pretty expansive to me, I don't think many people consider it to be that impressive. I've talked to a lot of people about this, and they consider working at Amazon to be pretty similar to going to a state school - it's not "bad", but you can tell from the way they talk about it they think people that go there are objectively inferior to them.
beebs93 5y ago
Another nice add-on to this format within my department is that we utilize an internal retro tool for people to post their questions for discussion. After the 20ish or minutes of silent reading, we give people ~5min to post their questions for all others to see in real-time. We then give people a set number of votes and the presenter goes through the list answering the questions in descending order of votes. I was hesitant at first when they introduced this (since it felt like more red tape), but I've found it helps focus the discussion on the most important feedback while avoiding one person bikeshedding the discussion time right at the beginning.
- 8note 5y ago
  We've been doing ours in quip with wfh. Comments are added in real time as people read, and both readers and the author can respond to those questions as they go through. Its kinda changed the switch to talking where we mostly talk overall comments, and then go to the biggest comment threads to make sure everyone is aligned
- tomerico 5y ago
  Can you share the tool name?
  - beebs93 5y ago
    It's an internal tool developed at Amazon so it's not available to the general public. That said, it's nothing super fancy. Simple collaborative sticky note app that supports Markdown and has the ability to vote once per sticky.
  - melzarei 5y ago
    You can use https://retrotool.io/ https://retrotool.io/
bnj 5y ago
I’d love to get insight into how orgs with cultures like these organize docs so they’re discoverable
- grogenaut 5y ago
  Generally the docs are linked from the project wiki pages. So you can find say the docs for DynamoDB on their wiki page (I'm not sure that's true anymore but it's an example) The docs are actually not as important as a legacy item as you would think. They're good to go back and look at for context. They're also good to hand to people as examples. But their real purpose is for forming consensus / alignment around an idea and then choosing to pursue, iterate, or can the idea.
  - bnj 5y ago
    Thanks for sharing! This makes a lot of sense given my own experience -- my workplace is very document centered but the docs are fairly transient and disposable once the decision is made. My takeaway is that there's a high bar of institutional memory and personal processing time to engage with the history of docs, which is made higher when there isn't a curated index of some kind.
achou 5y ago
How does this culture work at the boundary? How does it work when meeting with people outside Amazon? I'm all for this idea but I can see it quickly breaking down for certain key roles, like product managers, who often interface with customers.
- estsauver 5y ago
  At our organization, we use doc-meetings to drive core operational meetings, core strategic questions etc. We still put together presentations for partners, our all-hands etc. A thing that my coach told me at one point is "You can shape how your company and especially your reports communicate with you to make things work better for you" but the opposite is also true, you should proactively shape how you communicate with others to work for them.
- JustinGarrison 5y ago
  Docs are for internal review. I've never been in a customer meeting where we reviewed a doc.
throwaway20875 5y ago
It has far less to do with "everybody silently sit in this room and read the paper at the beginning of this meeting" and more to with forcing the driver of meeting with articulating their thinking in writing form. Few understand that the 6-pager isn't about the reader but about the writer.
- dv_dt 5y ago
  That’s an interesting thought that suggests that if you’re someone holding meetings, that you can get some of the benefit by writing a brief for the meeting even if the culture isn’t to stop and read and comment on it. I say some because I’d expect you get better at composing your thoughts if others are reading and critiquing the output.
- alok-g 5y ago
  That applies to presentations as well.
andreskytt 5y ago
This seems to be an indication of a very highly formal culture. All the benefits I’ve seen described sound to me like solving a problem that should not exist in the first place. If we all spend half an hour of reading the doc then, by definition, we all had that half hour for reading in the first place. We just decided not to take the time or were not permitted to do so by a meeting scheduled for an hour. Instead of disadvataging people who can’t publicly speak, the system disadvantages people who can’t write. It wastes time of the writer (who apparently needs special training) and the time of those who can read faster. Why have so many meetings anyway? The format does not seem to work for creative discussions etc., why is there so much collective decisionmaking? But I’m not an Amazon employee. Not trying to diss the idea, just reflecting on how deeply such routines are linked with the organizational culture and would utterly fail in a, say, result-oriented culture.
- wrs 5y ago
  This is explained in the post. The reading time is scheduled for everyone as part of the meeting time; therefore everyone is guaranteed to have time reserved to do the reading. If you only do the document, or only schedule the discussion time and not the reading time, some people will not read the document. I can certainly confirm that from 30 years of experience in companies large and small. I’ve never worked at Amazon, but it sounds a bit off to imply it isn’t a results-oriented culture.
- jjallen 5y ago
  Everyone should be able to write. If they can’t they should practice. Pretty much everyone needs to write articulate emails but not publicly speak, it seems. I invite you to open your mind about this practice. I strongly agree with this approach, though admittedly I have not practiced it, because my company is only one employee. There is tons of background about it in a book called Working Backwards written by two longtime Amazon execs that explain further why they use it. If I ever have a larger company I will likely use this approach.
heldsteel7 5y ago
Writing forces presenter to think about the idea in much more detail. This is major benefit IMO. Many times, where document culture is prevalent, people come up with vague ideas and expect others to clean it up. Definitely see a value in this approach. Thanks for the write up.
thrualoo2020 5y ago
I've been at Amazon over a decade (joined right after grad school) and so, I've been molded by this doc writing culture. I've not only written countless docs myself, but have helped train others in effective document writing. I wouldn't have it any other way. Writing narratives forces the owner to think deeply about the topic, and that in turn forces structured problem solving. You can't hide behind the ambiguity of slides (or spoken words). If you have muddled thinking, it shows in the write-up. In my time here, I've read a ton of documents and you often see a lot of variation in the quality of documents. Like Jeff points out in his '18 shareholder letter[1], often the difference lies in how much time the author spent thinking about, and refining his/her write-up. [1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312518121161/d456916dex991.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312518...) "Often, when a memo isn’t great, it’s not the writer’s inability to recognize the high standard, but instead a wrong expectation on scope: they mistakenly believe a high-standards, six-page memo can be written in one or two days or even a few hours, when really it might take a week or more!"
adreamingsoul 5y ago
I miss that culture.
- nivenkos 5y ago
  I don't miss having to use Word and Outlook.
hendry 5y ago
"Agenda" out, silent reading of document in. Bit bizarre, but in this attention economy, I guess it's the only way to make sure participants are on the same page. For example I put an agenda in a Google Calendar meeting and most people don't notice it.
- xyzelement 5y ago
  It depends on company culture. My old job, people read meeting descriptions. New job, no. My favorite is to try to CHANGE the culture to what I want it to be. Though I am not starting with the meeting agendas on that.
GoodJokes 5y ago
I have to imagine that this culture has to lead to hiring for this culture. Unless you are confident people can write well, and by well I mean mostly arbitrary classist standards, then you will have created a huge roadblock for people who come from different education backgrounds. Also, jesus, some people learn differently than silently reading a doc for ten minutes. I need time to digest stuff. Also the way you all talk about L8 and L6s is disgusting. Just because you give time to read a document in a meeting doesn't mean jack squat. People aren't robots that just perform a trick on command.
throwawaySlu 5y ago
Amazonion here. The purpose of doc writing is for the author to dump their ideas and convey the critical pieces of information. It lets the reader consume the information at their pace, and re-read even after the meeting. The document starts the conversation and let’s the reader understand the problem, why it’s important, what things we have or have not considered, what trade offs have been made, and how we arrived at the conclusion or solution. There are many, many things Amazon does not get right. The document writing culture is probably one of our not so secret, “secret weapons”. At many companies I worked at, we had a PowerPoint or presentation driven culture. And the purpose of those meetings is to listen to the presenter, at the presenters pace. The meeting becomes about the presenter and what they think is important, as opposed to being about the reader. In presentation driven meetings, the presenter talks and questions actually distract from the presentation - often times presenters will bluntly ask for questions to be saved to the end. My own team has a strong culture of getting engineers to write, and help them write well. It’s not about perfect English, but it is about touching on the key points and letting readers comment and ask questions. Meetings without documents often go completely off the rails - especially because if the kinds of problems we’re solving. Without focus, meetings delve into tangents and branches off of those tangents. To be fair - this still happens if the document hasn’t been adequately prepared, but often because you find the document owner hasn’t fully thought through the problem or fully did their homework.
- alok-g 5y ago
  In my experience, the issue is not presentations actually. Whatever can be presented using documents can be presented using slides too. The real challenge is that slides present much less word-count space to deliver the right message, and most authors fail to do that right. A phrase commonly attributed to Blaise Pascal comes to mind [1]. That presentations being synchronous vs. everyone reading their own pace is not the key issue. Sharing the slides in print for the meetings can solve that. At one employment I was in, we were using PowerPoint even more effectively than we use Word. [1] https://intenseminimalism.com/2010/if-i-had-more-time-i-would-have-written-a-shorter-letter/ https://intenseminimalism.com/2010/if-i-had-more-time-i-woul...
  - 5y ago
timmt 5y ago
Having witnessed this through a flood of incoming ex-Amazon folks I agree that it brings so much more content and focus on a meeting. It is amazing. The silence, the reading, the staying on topic (apart from tangents that sometimes need to be brought up, but are vulnerable to being just dismissed with the power of The Document) all helps to get the attention and feedback you need. The thing is though, that while the article mentions briefly challenges with the writing, it does not shine light on the hours and hours or reviews, rewrites and re-reviews when preparing the document. The endless and often times pointless arguments and bad blood between people on how to write a sentence so that it would be "correct" and every word and number counts. Arguments if a given word should be "benefit" or "impact". If the word should be "system" or "solution". It does not feel productive and I am not sure if counting the hours spent would actually add up classical "hours wasted" in a typical 10 person "pointless meeting". And also when usually a piece of writing has some soul of the writer, in these documents they end up being soulless, blank format robotic texts only aiming to convincing the reader to fund your project or sell your idea over others. And that leads to quite an Amazonian culture that is a subject of many different articles. I just felt there was something omitted by OP. So while it has benefits, it does have a cost associated.
- sudhirj 5y ago
  The downsides sound a bit odd. The process as usually described seems like a single person usually writes the doc, often the person in charge of delivering the project? Why would there be much argument about the wording then? And if there is a duo or team, it sounds like the same rules as pull request / code reviews apply? Make sure it's objectively correct, then concise, and last stylish?
  - glenngillen 5y ago
    It varies on the attendees in the meeting and the length of the document. If it’s what is typically referred to as a “6 pager” the situation that parent outlined is certainly believable. Lots of collaboration with peers and your manager and weeks of refinement before that meeting. Similar with the working backward process/PRFAQ. You might stop shopping it around when it’s just the answer to the 5 questions and an aspirational testimonial. By the time it’s a meeting reviewing the 1-2 page press release it’s likely been months of refinement. That isn’t to say it’s a full time effort over that period though. These things are usually background/parallel work with whatever else you you’re doing.
stunt 5y ago
Some companies have powerpoint fetish and those are basically the exact opposite of this. You go to a meeting and someone without presentation skills that has spent more time choosing the background picture than thinking about the content is going to give you a lot of information that nobody will document after the meeting ends. You will end up with some random notes that you won't remember after a week.
- apexalpha 5y ago
  This is my company right now. Everything is in PowerPoint. Even guides or system documentation gets put in PowerPoint in stead of a document, it's really annoying. I've read this blog and comments with great interest.
nevon 5y ago
We operate in the same way in the company I work for, and while it's certainly an improvement over useless presentations, the silent reading being part of the meeting drives me insane. The fact that people can't manage their calendars to allocate whatever time they need to prepare before a meeting now means that the rest of us have to sit around for 15 minutes twiddling our thumbs. Even if I purposefully ignore the material until the meeting itself, I typically finish reading in about half the time it takes the slowest reader. I almost wish meetings would have two different start times - one for people that want to do meeting prep during the meeting and one for people that do it at some other time, so that I can just join 15 minutes in when everyone is actually ready to start the meeting. I complain, but again, overall I think it's an improvement over what came before and I wouldn't want to go back.
- grayclhn 5y ago
  > I almost wish meetings would have two different start times - one for people that want to do meeting prep during the meeting and one for people that do it at some other time, so that I can just join 15 minutes in when everyone is actually ready to start the meeting. They do. Show up 15 minutes late, or bring your laptop and get work done while you wait.
- jacinda 5y ago
  The author implies that going to meetings later if you've already done the reading is an option at Amazon. > If a document is provided early and I have a conflict at the begining of the meeting I can read the document ahead of time and join the meeting 10-20 minutes late without missing anything.
- asoneth 5y ago
  > The fact that people can't manage their calendars to allocate whatever time they need to prepare before a meeting If I wanted to manage my calendar in the way you suggest using my current calendar system it seems like I would manually allocate a block of "prep time" every time someone invites me to a meeting with prerequisites, correct? If prep time is publicly blocked out then we may have to manually negotiate a suitable time because no one knows which blocks are prep and which are meetings. Alternately if prep time is not publicly visible then anyone can schedule over it then people need to start rejecting meetings after all blocks are filled by meetings or prep. In both cases everyone has to manually reshuffle prep time and potentially manually negotiate schedules which sounds like a lot of work for every new meeting. In reality everywhere I've worked assumes that "prep time" is something that everyone handles in their own way. In practice that means some people mange to squeeze it in during normal business hours, some people do it the night before during their personal time, some people (usually the most important stakeholders) come with an apology that they haven't gotten to the material yet. Perhaps it wouldn't be so bad if calendaring tools better supported this use case (e.g. "reserve 30m up to a week before this meeting") but until then blocking out time during a meeting for reading seems very civilized.
streamofdigits 5y ago
You could call this literate management :-). Not sure how this works for some purposes though, do audit / risk people make important decisions on docs they have just read? The ritualistic sounding silence of the first half of the meeting could probably eliminated with an automated document distribution system that does not allow you to participate in a meeting unless you've scrolled through the docs for sufficient time within a few days prior (a bit like those license aggreement buttons at the end of oracle's java downloads)
- kator 5y ago
  Jeff has talked about this in public, "good executives will cheat, they're busy they won't take the time to pre-read". I have found some leaders I can do "off line" with, but in general it's because their calendar and mine just don't overlap properly for a couple weeks and I want them to give me feedback earlier. I've been at Amazon 3 years, 6 months, and 7 days (thanks phonetool). In that time I've only seen a couple pre-read meetings, and a couple "offline review" (still in your calendar). Most of the pre-read meetings are less effective, they usually happen because of calendar pressure and the need for rapid decision on a topic. The one thing I don't like about WFH is that we sometimes "lose" people, they come to the meeting but float off into email, chat or whatever. When I first started we'd have 20 people in a room, laptops closed, reading, you could hear a pin drop. And usually I knew it was time to start the discussion because people looked up from their doc to see if others were done. I miss these meetings because the focus was amazing. To have all these people who I really respect read my doc and give me their 100% undivided attention is awesome. The nice thing about WFH is sometimes we spawn a bit of related topic in the chat, however it can be really hard to keep the debate going while the chat runs across a different thread but related to the overall topic.
momento 5y ago
Does anyone have an example of one of these documents to share? Preferably a "6 pager". I'd love to see what a real-world example looks like.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- easton 5y ago
  Someone who used to work at Amazon wrote one[0] describing their game engine, as well as a description[1] of the important mechanics of the document. 0: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LPh1LWx1z67YFo67DENYUGBaoKk39dtX7rWAeQHXzhg/view https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LPh1LWx1z67YFo67DENYUGBa... 1: https://writingcooperative.com/the-anatomy-of-an-amazon-6-pager-fc79f31a41c9 https://writingcooperative.com/the-anatomy-of-an-amazon-6-pa...
  - momento 5y ago
    Thanks for sharing!
  - belval 5y ago
    The tenets section is missing the traditional "These are our tenets, unless you know better ones".
bomdo 5y ago
I was always interested in this but could not yet find deep resources on it. Sadly the post skips over the format of these docs - is there a good resource for examples/templates of the different doc types (with comments?)? Also, how are these documents shared and made discoverable internally? Do they refer to each other?
- JustinGarrison 5y ago
  There are lots of other articles about what's in an Amazon doc [0]. They're mostly accurate but it depends on the team quite a bit. Comments are exactly what you'd expect from any doc comments. (what does this mean? who's the audience? does it scale? what are alternatives?) There are other links in the comments here with more examples if you're curious. Most of the documents are shared via calendar invite. Lots of teams/products have team folders to collect docs centrally. Finding docs at Amazon has been the biggest gap IMO. There are too many places a document can exist and no way to centrally search them all. [0]: https://writingcooperative.com/the-anatomy-of-an-amazon-6-pager-fc79f31a41c9 https://writingcooperative.com/the-anatomy-of-an-amazon-6-pa...
  - bomdo 5y ago
    Thank you very much for both your comment and link. This cleared things up for me. It feels like an obvious oversight that there is not some company-wide Wiki to organize all of these docs. Since we are talking about Amazon/AWS, this has to be intentional. Can you speculate on why this gap exists?
daniel-thompson 5y ago
The first time I heard of this idea was at an Edward Tufte* seminar. He researches and publishes on the design of presented information and how that impacts how it's communicated. His books, especially The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, are highly recommended. * https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...
- htrp 5y ago
  Tufte is required reading for everyone in my group. I actually give every team member a copy of his book.
Tycho 5y ago
When I first heard about this, I thought it was a brilliant idea. The alternative, perhaps the norm these days, is PowerPoint-driven meetings. I find this fraught with so many problems. Firstly, while most people receive a lot of training/education on how to write well, the came cannot be said for putting together decks of slides. Some people are great at it, most are not. Secondly, condensing everything onto a few slides allows for people to skate by on some sort of 'impression management.' If you put down the right buzzwords, maybe some diagrams, it may resonate with your audience but it does not guarantee that you or they have a detailed understanding of the important details, or even the same understanding of what the important details are. And thirdly, the presentation is distributed outside the meeting as a static document, shorn of context, and more likely to be misinterpreted. Not to mention, during the presentation, people are more easily distracted as you go through the content, compared to if everyone just reads a memo in the allotted time. Equalizing the level of preparedness for the meeting is also a great benefit, although that's a more general problem.
celticninja 5y ago
Wonderful that Amazon has a great culture around documentation, got to keep those documents happy. Now they just need to find a way to improve the culture for their employees. Obviously they are a much less important resource than documents but still they should probably give it a go.
devops000 5y ago
Do you suggest a guide how to write these documents?
- JustinGarrison 5y ago
  There are general style guidelines Amazon tries to foster. Here's a bunch https://www.linkedin.com/posts/herbertyang_i-joined-amazon-to-write-love-the-amazonian-activity-6664843818975801344--MwM/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/herbertyang_i-joined-amazon-t... You can also find templates and guidelines online by searching Amazon 6 pager or PRFAQ
hkrgl 5y ago
I am curious if Amazon follows this process for engineering design documents. I worked there a very long time ago and don't recall this. At another company I worked for, folks from Amazon introduced this for eng reviews. I found it very difficult to get or do a thorough review after reading a document for the first time at the meeting. Some things are nuanced and need time to process - I thought this style just didn't work for these cases.
- alok-g 5y ago
  Writing is followed for design reviews as well. The recommendations to solve the challenge you mention are to (a) writing better, (b) splitting into a sequence of meetings, (c) reading the document ahead of the time. There's no real reason why writing process should not apply to design documents as well.
  - hkrgl 5y ago
    I wasn't questioning the writing process - written design documents are very necessary. My experience with the Amazon-style design review meeting is that there wasn't sufficient time to read the document, process it and come to a decision. If you're reading the document ahead of time, then that isn't really following Amazon style :)
    - alok-g 5y ago
      +1 We try to go slower with such documents. E.g., the meeting may start by asking to read the first five sections and discussing them first. The meeting then may naturally be longer than an hour, usually two hours, and still may need a follow up slot. Nothing in the Amazon style precludes reading ahead of the time, and it is recommended to send the document to the audience ahead of the time. That people often don't is another thing. I start reading ahead of the time as I read slower (but also read more carefully and thoughtfully).
jrochkind1 5y ago
What I immediately like about this idea is it requires the meeting convener to do some prep in advance to guide the meeting.
stronglikedan 5y ago
I wish I could read a document while using a step climber. I find that I get focused on the reading, and stop moving. Then I focus on moving for a bit, and lose comprehension. Then I have to read that section over, and stop moving. Rinse and repeat.
- JustinGarrison 5y ago
  I usually have to stop while I write comments and occasionally if I start thinking about something a lot I'll stop. But overall in 20-30 minutes I still get 10-15 minutes of climbing. I don't have that many meetings so this usually only happens 2-3 times a week for me.
digikata 5y ago
The thought occurred to me that the language development process for Rust and Python (and I’m sure others) encourage a variation of this document first process. Many high level engineers that I’ve been impressed working with are very good at merging in a technical memo or brief, often at the start or early in the process.
lr1970 5y ago
Few anecdotes from Amazon's folklore. "Why a six-pager has 6 pages?" A typical meeting at Amazon is 1 hour long -- 30 minutes reading followed by 30 minutes discussion. It is rumored that it takes Jeff Bezos 5 minutes to read and fully understand 1 page (10pt font, 1.2 line spacing). Hence 6 pages in 30 minutes. BTW, a six-pager can have an unlimited number of appendixes that do not count to the 6 pages limit. These appendixes provide extra in-depth info and often discussed during a meeting. But appendixes are not required reading. That said, quick readers oftentimes cover extra 10 pages during the silent portion of the meeting.
troelsSteegin 5y ago
I like the attention-focusing and emphasis on clear, concise, structured argument. I gather the idea is to get the right people together to introduce and critically assess a proposal or recommendation. I am suprised about not reading before the meeting, but reassured that one may read and reflect after. If I want to roll this out in another organization, how does the rest of it work? - what is the process before and after the doc? What kinds of decisions or issues typically warrant a doc? Is there a process or situation that triggers the development of a doc, like a quarterly planning cycle? How does a doc review translate to someone making a decision - does a decision-focused meeting have a different grammar than a doc-centered meeting? Is there a book that covers the approach?
perfmode 5y ago
anyone have examples of how to write documents in this style?

488 points by ecliptik 5y ago

I'm curious how this work with people who don't read or write English, or are L2 learners. Are they kept out of the loop?

mwint 5y ago
My neighbor’s first language is Spanish, but his grasp of English is very good. He went to work for Amazon corporate and said the first several months, coworkers would tear apart his documents on English issues. It worked. He quickly learned how to write documents up to Amazon standards. Amazon was a terrible place for him anyway (work/life balance), but he certainly wasn’t kept out of the loop. He was forced into the loop.
- kyleee 5y ago
  Very good, that type of rigorous immersion is what should be done for ESL kids at all grade levels during education, otherwise they are at a varying degrees of disadvantage in all subjects
civilized 5y ago
There are text-to-speech converters
throwawayboise 5y ago
I think it's easier to read a foreign language than it is to speak it (assuming you know it at all).
- smeej 5y ago
  I found this to be true for languages that use the same alphabet, but found I could understand spoken languages with different alphabets much faster than I could read them, especially when the direction of reading was different.
- biztos 5y ago
  Being able to stop, go back, and look stuff up is huge. Googling the common form of a phrase you want to use is huge. Assuming you have basic reading proficiency already. I’m learning Thai: literacy is not for beginners here. But I look forward to one day googling stuff like I do when reading Hungarian legal contracts.
- bjohnson225 5y ago
  That’s definitely my experience. The ability to lookup anything you don’t understand and not needing to battle against strong accents and/or poor enunciation makes a big difference.
Zababa 5y ago
I don't think these people are recruited in the first place. This is about Amazon on the software side.
- cheeze 5y ago
  So, a sizable portion of Indians and Chinese folks? Many Indians have spoken english most of their lives, but definitely tons of Chinese (and other) devs where ESL is a very real thing.
  - Zababa 5y ago
    ESL doesn't mean that you can't read or write english. Amazon requiring the devs to be able to read and write english is not really surprising, I would consider it the bare minimum.
  - amusedcyclist 5y ago
    Most of the chinese people I've met in tech have been excellent at written English because they learn it starting in primary school. They're just uncomfortable speaking it.
argomo 5y ago
The written meeting format may be less disadvantageous to non-native speakers than the oral format. As the article mentions, it helps presenters sidestep accent issues. And I bet most non-native audiences appreciate being able to see the text instead of having to catch it from a single listen. It helps too that written communication isn't going to be laden with the various side comments, idioms, and in-jokes that an oral presenter always brings.
cheeze 5y ago
IMO, to some extent yes. Just like they'd be 'kept out of the loop' in many other cases for not having the best communication. It's not inherently fair but I don't know how to solve that problem either.
- closeparen 5y ago
  It’s striking that command of written language could be considered an “unfair” expectation in a cerebral, white-collar job. In a not-very-distant cultural landscape that’s the baseline. Show up on time looking presentable, read, write, summarize, make deductions, discuss. All the domain specific stuff is taught on the job.
brikil 5y ago
In my org at least, most of the time the doc is distributed ahead of time. It gives people a chance to spend more time on it or start adding inline comments. But we still start meetings with reading for those that don’t read ahead of time.
ryan93 5y ago
How common is the inability to read English at Amazon?
xyzelement 5y ago
You are probably not an amazon knowledge worker unless you have those skills to start with.

java-man 5y ago

"If there’s no document, we cancel the meeting." this is a very good idea.

throwawayboise 5y ago
I tried to push a "if there's no agenda, we cancel the meeting" at a prior job. It didn't really work that well. They had a lot of standing "status update" and "one-on-one" types of meetings that were just on the calendar without any specific goals or decisions to be made at any particular meeting.
- beckingz 5y ago
  There are meetings which should not be thought of as "meetings" Labeling them as collaboration sessions or more social one-on-ones helps though.
NAHWheatCracker 5y ago
I love this idea. I've tried to push people to make agendas and just generally do some legwork to make meetings run smoother. There's only been a few times where I've had project managers who actually tried it out. It was glorious and meetings ran so smoothly, but it stopped shortly after. I guess they found it to be to onerous to spend 5 minutes write an email. I think it's hopeless to expect them to write an entire document.
some_furry 5y ago
A related good idea is "Ticket or it didn't happen." Every time a question gets answered, or something gets discussed, put in the appropriate ticket for the problem related to the meeting. If there isn't a ticket, why not?
kator 5y ago
Actually I have often pushed a meeting with a simple "The document is not ready". Obviously you can get push back if you do it too often, however nobody wants to join a bad doc read meeting, they'd rather you get a bit more time to work out the issues in the doc. Often times the issues are cross team, you need to get alignment with partner teams before you join the meeting, or if you can't you write a "hotly debated topics" section with the partner team and just go for it. There is a balance, you should not spend too much time driving for alignment, but you would be better served to come to the meeting showing both sides are talking and understand the point and counter-point.

planckscnst 5y ago

When I joined, I was perplexed by this way of operating meetings. It surprised me greatly that people wouldn't want to read the doc at ahead, give it time for thinking and researching, and then come to the table feeling prepare to contribute to the best if your ability. Now, I understand and deeply appreciate this method. I believe it provides lots of benefits. It drives towards better docs that can be understood quickly by non-experts. When there are just a few minutes to review the doc, we don't have time to go digging for information on our own - the critical information must be provided in the material given. There will also be SMEs in the room who can clarify any shortcomings here. Because the audience of the docs is non-SMEs, it drives towards inclusion of other teams. From this, you get more diverse viewpoints, considerations, and experience. It also contributes towards cross-team awareness and education. It makes it much easier to participate as a contributor to the meeting while simultaneously less impactful when you don't. It let's us timebox our attention span - you won't accidentally spend hours rabbit-holing into a doc.

travisjungroth 5y ago
The other side I heard from someone who worked at Amazon: The SMEs read critically and take the full time. The PMs skim it and start pitching whatever idea comes first to mind.
- awsanswers 5y ago
  The PMs are often SMEs of related concerns and own stakes in the new idea being discussed
- cle 5y ago
  If someone is wasting time in a meeting on tangents unrelated to the goal of the meeting, the person running the meeting has every right and obligation to shut down the tangent. This is a problem regardless of the document culture. If anything the document culture gives you an objective standard that makes it very clear whether a line of discussion is on topic.
  - pm90 5y ago

satisfice 5y ago

This is an interesting thing to try and learn from. It is an abusive thing to enforce on everyone all the fucking time. A meeting is a social event. Silent reading is not. Why does every young clever person think that his preferred method is the only thing that makes sense? Oh I know. Because young clever people have not had time to live, grow, and appreciate the full spectrum of human productivity. My meetings are for talking. Come prepared. Also, documents for everything? Great way to slow everything down and discourage certain people from making suggestions at all.

civilized 5y ago
Interesting that you baselessly accuse the author of saying that his preferred way is the only thing that makes sense, followed immediately by "My meetings are for talking. Come prepared." Your attitude seems to be just as rigid as you imagine the author's to be. And I definitely wouldn't want to encounter that gratuitously sarcastic attitude of yours in a meeting or anywhere else, it'd definitely strike me as abusive.
- ben0x539 5y ago
  Okay, so, I figure a post that goes "those darn kids in amazon senior leadership!" is probably not made entirely sincerely
gary_0 5y ago
> Also, documents for everything? I worked for a smaller company with this extremist philosophy, to the point that they forbade voice or text chat outside of scheduled meetings; all discussion had to be written in public Teams threads. The CEO also had a habit of dropping into random threads and micromanaging. I think it was bad for everyone, but for me it was completely paralyzing.
- rapsey 5y ago
  Chat apps are not documentation. What you are describing is just a moronic way of doing things and absolutely not documents for everything.

tanvach 5y ago

An ex-Amazon PM ‘promoted’ the silent reading culture in my previous company. Definitely brought a lot of benefits: - forced more senior / leadership members to read through and internalize the details. Reduces wasted time asking already answered questions. - we used google docs. Question and answers were posted as comments. This formed a log of the majority of the discussion. Less note taking needed. - allowed less assertive members to ask questions or give answers. The only drawback - the overwhelming silence at the start that I never really got over…

grogenaut 5y ago
I just pop on my headphones and get reading. Silence gone.
xkjkls 5y ago
> The only drawback - the overwhelming silence at the start that I never really got over… More the overwhelming anxiety you face being the person who has written and edited the document multiple times during the 30 minutes of silence at the beginning of the meeting.
xzel 5y ago
As a dev, o boy, the silence while people read your docs was maddening. Great people watching though as they digested and marked up what you wrote. Whole process is mildly cathartic to be honest.
theshrike79 5y ago
> The only drawback - the overwhelming silence at the start that I never really got over… Dealing with silence is a cultural thing. In Nordic countries silence is the norm.
- whatever_dude 5y ago
  It seems that way to me too. In the US silence is basically a crime against humanity.

smeej 5y ago

What kinds of feedback have come up about this for people with reading challenges like dyslexia? The closest comparison I have to this is reading in school where it became very obvious who the fast, skilled readers were and who had to work harder to understand the text, which caused a lot of anxiety for the slower readers (which didn't help). I can imagine a wide variety of possible outcomes for this, from accommodations being made to people just being a lot more mature as adults, but I'm also guessing there has been some trial and error about this at Amazon and some best practices have emerged. Does anyone here know what they are?

rancar2 5y ago
For my team, we take average reading speeds for the main document then add extra time for the appendices. This means that slower readers will at least get to read the main document. Also, providing documents in advance will give those who need time and technical assistance, the ability to take the steps they need prior.
- GoodJokes 5y ago
  So what you are saying is that the "slower" readers are not at a disadvantage? It doesn't surprise me that amazon has crypto reading and writing tests for all of their meetings. sheesh.
kator 5y ago
Glad you asked, I have dyslexia, and I was very worried about writing, much less reading fast enough. In general we budget 4 mins per page, that said the meeting usually starts with a "here's the doc, please read until XXX and let us know if you're ready sooner". And then a "time check how are people doing?" and often you'll hear "I need N more minutes". And back to reading. I was very worried about this part of the experience because of my challenges, I'm not the world's fastest reader, but over time I got comfortable just saying "I need 5 more minutes". Or I'll say "I'm on page N". That said we do have some leaders who read incredibly fast, for them I always include some good appendices so they stay "in the room and on topic" rather than float off into their email.

zapstar 5y ago

Does this discourage attendees from reading/thinking about the topic ahead of time? If you’re the presenter or organizer, you’ve put all of this energy into a document. You’ve thought about it for days or weeks or months. And now meeting day is here, people sit down and read your document, and immediately, there is a discussion. Those people who literally just finished reading about the idea 2 minutes ago now have thoughts and opinions on it. This happens regardless of the existence of documents, of course. But I wonder if waiting until the meeting to read the document encourages this sort of immediate feedback from people new to a topic.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tylerc230 5y ago
Generally a link to the document is sent out earlier in the day. That way folks who are inclined can read ahead and comment. The slackers still get time to read the doc at the start of the meeting so they’re not completely in the dark.
rancar2 5y ago
Haven written many 6-pagers, PRFAQs, and other written narrative formats then centering the meeting around the written documents, the writer should write for the audience and the allotted time for reading and discussing. New people may have less to contribute in the moment, but now they can read and research it later for contributions.
darksaints 5y ago
Yes, it does. But I don't think that is a problem...quite the opposite. When you're preparing a document, and you know you've only got a half hour some some executives attention, it forces you to really think through the message. It forces you to ask yourself questions, and find ways to make the point more succinctly. It's an extremely refined elevator pitch devoid of the influence of charisma and showmanship. If you expect people to read before the meeting, there are two problems: 1) nobody will read before the meeting, and 2) the documents become too verbose and poorly thought out. If you don't expect any reading at all, you get presentation-led sales pitch that favors smooth talkers and charlatans. I absolutely hated about 99% of the culture at Amazon, but not the document-led meetings. It's an amazing bullshit filter.

flakiness 5y ago

I wonder how widespread this is outside Amazon. Compare it to, say, Google: In Bay Area, the cultural influence of Google is strong both in good and bad ways. Things like OKR, monorepo, snippets, go links etc. seem to be adopted by many younger companies. I don't think it means these cultural artifacts are always superior. It'd be more about familiarity for ex-Google employees. There must be a lot of ex-Amazon talents, but I haven't heard or read this outside the context of Amazon. If this is unique to Amazon, why? Maybe the book "Working Backwards" [1] is changing the situation? I'm very curious, and honestly, a bit envious. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Working-Backwards-Insights-Stories-Secrets/dp/1250267595/ https://www.amazon.com/Working-Backwards-Insights-Stories-Se...

rejectedandsad 5y ago
> It this unique to Amazon, why? I think it's because despite it working really well at Amazon, working at Amazon isn't considered impressive (the engineers are considered less intelligent, inherently less impressive etc). Nobody from Stanford or CMU goes to work at Amazon after college, while like a third of the class goes to Google. Because of that, the culture and people filter don't filter into Bay Area startups (which Amazonians usually can't get interviews at).
- xenihn 5y ago
  Amazon is still a top 1% SWE employer. Note: I do not work for Amazon, and never plan to. I was considering it prior to making it into FANG. Unless they offered me a bunch of money, I guess. Like a million dollars year.
  - rejectedandsad 5y ago
    Your top 1% feels pretty expansive to me, I don't think many people consider it to be that impressive. I've talked to a lot of people about this, and they consider working at Amazon to be pretty similar to going to a state school - it's not "bad", but you can tell from the way they talk about it they think people that go there are objectively inferior to them.

beebs93 5y ago

Another nice add-on to this format within my department is that we utilize an internal retro tool for people to post their questions for discussion. After the 20ish or minutes of silent reading, we give people ~5min to post their questions for all others to see in real-time. We then give people a set number of votes and the presenter goes through the list answering the questions in descending order of votes. I was hesitant at first when they introduced this (since it felt like more red tape), but I've found it helps focus the discussion on the most important feedback while avoiding one person bikeshedding the discussion time right at the beginning.

8note 5y ago
We've been doing ours in quip with wfh. Comments are added in real time as people read, and both readers and the author can respond to those questions as they go through. Its kinda changed the switch to talking where we mostly talk overall comments, and then go to the biggest comment threads to make sure everyone is aligned
tomerico 5y ago
Can you share the tool name?
- beebs93 5y ago
  It's an internal tool developed at Amazon so it's not available to the general public. That said, it's nothing super fancy. Simple collaborative sticky note app that supports Markdown and has the ability to vote once per sticky.
- melzarei 5y ago
  You can use https://retrotool.io/ https://retrotool.io/

bnj 5y ago

I’d love to get insight into how orgs with cultures like these organize docs so they’re discoverable

grogenaut 5y ago
Generally the docs are linked from the project wiki pages. So you can find say the docs for DynamoDB on their wiki page (I'm not sure that's true anymore but it's an example) The docs are actually not as important as a legacy item as you would think. They're good to go back and look at for context. They're also good to hand to people as examples. But their real purpose is for forming consensus / alignment around an idea and then choosing to pursue, iterate, or can the idea.
- bnj 5y ago
  Thanks for sharing! This makes a lot of sense given my own experience -- my workplace is very document centered but the docs are fairly transient and disposable once the decision is made. My takeaway is that there's a high bar of institutional memory and personal processing time to engage with the history of docs, which is made higher when there isn't a curated index of some kind.

achou 5y ago

How does this culture work at the boundary? How does it work when meeting with people outside Amazon? I'm all for this idea but I can see it quickly breaking down for certain key roles, like product managers, who often interface with customers.

estsauver 5y ago
At our organization, we use doc-meetings to drive core operational meetings, core strategic questions etc. We still put together presentations for partners, our all-hands etc. A thing that my coach told me at one point is "You can shape how your company and especially your reports communicate with you to make things work better for you" but the opposite is also true, you should proactively shape how you communicate with others to work for them.
JustinGarrison 5y ago
Docs are for internal review. I've never been in a customer meeting where we reviewed a doc.

throwaway20875 5y ago

It has far less to do with "everybody silently sit in this room and read the paper at the beginning of this meeting" and more to with forcing the driver of meeting with articulating their thinking in writing form. Few understand that the 6-pager isn't about the reader but about the writer.

dv_dt 5y ago
That’s an interesting thought that suggests that if you’re someone holding meetings, that you can get some of the benefit by writing a brief for the meeting even if the culture isn’t to stop and read and comment on it. I say some because I’d expect you get better at composing your thoughts if others are reading and critiquing the output.
alok-g 5y ago
That applies to presentations as well.

andreskytt 5y ago

This seems to be an indication of a very highly formal culture. All the benefits I’ve seen described sound to me like solving a problem that should not exist in the first place. If we all spend half an hour of reading the doc then, by definition, we all had that half hour for reading in the first place. We just decided not to take the time or were not permitted to do so by a meeting scheduled for an hour. Instead of disadvataging people who can’t publicly speak, the system disadvantages people who can’t write. It wastes time of the writer (who apparently needs special training) and the time of those who can read faster. Why have so many meetings anyway? The format does not seem to work for creative discussions etc., why is there so much collective decisionmaking? But I’m not an Amazon employee. Not trying to diss the idea, just reflecting on how deeply such routines are linked with the organizational culture and would utterly fail in a, say, result-oriented culture.

wrs 5y ago
This is explained in the post. The reading time is scheduled for everyone as part of the meeting time; therefore everyone is guaranteed to have time reserved to do the reading. If you only do the document, or only schedule the discussion time and not the reading time, some people will not read the document. I can certainly confirm that from 30 years of experience in companies large and small. I’ve never worked at Amazon, but it sounds a bit off to imply it isn’t a results-oriented culture.
jjallen 5y ago
Everyone should be able to write. If they can’t they should practice. Pretty much everyone needs to write articulate emails but not publicly speak, it seems. I invite you to open your mind about this practice. I strongly agree with this approach, though admittedly I have not practiced it, because my company is only one employee. There is tons of background about it in a book called Working Backwards written by two longtime Amazon execs that explain further why they use it. If I ever have a larger company I will likely use this approach.

heldsteel7 5y ago

Writing forces presenter to think about the idea in much more detail. This is major benefit IMO. Many times, where document culture is prevalent, people come up with vague ideas and expect others to clean it up. Definitely see a value in this approach. Thanks for the write up.

thrualoo2020 5y ago

I've been at Amazon over a decade (joined right after grad school) and so, I've been molded by this doc writing culture. I've not only written countless docs myself, but have helped train others in effective document writing. I wouldn't have it any other way. Writing narratives forces the owner to think deeply about the topic, and that in turn forces structured problem solving. You can't hide behind the ambiguity of slides (or spoken words). If you have muddled thinking, it shows in the write-up. In my time here, I've read a ton of documents and you often see a lot of variation in the quality of documents. Like Jeff points out in his '18 shareholder letter[1], often the difference lies in how much time the author spent thinking about, and refining his/her write-up. [1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312518121161/d456916dex991.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312518...) "Often, when a memo isn’t great, it’s not the writer’s inability to recognize the high standard, but instead a wrong expectation on scope: they mistakenly believe a high-standards, six-page memo can be written in one or two days or even a few hours, when really it might take a week or more!"

adreamingsoul 5y ago

I miss that culture.

nivenkos 5y ago
I don't miss having to use Word and Outlook.

hendry 5y ago

"Agenda" out, silent reading of document in. Bit bizarre, but in this attention economy, I guess it's the only way to make sure participants are on the same page. For example I put an agenda in a Google Calendar meeting and most people don't notice it.

xyzelement 5y ago
It depends on company culture. My old job, people read meeting descriptions. New job, no. My favorite is to try to CHANGE the culture to what I want it to be. Though I am not starting with the meeting agendas on that.

GoodJokes 5y ago

I have to imagine that this culture has to lead to hiring for this culture. Unless you are confident people can write well, and by well I mean mostly arbitrary classist standards, then you will have created a huge roadblock for people who come from different education backgrounds. Also, jesus, some people learn differently than silently reading a doc for ten minutes. I need time to digest stuff. Also the way you all talk about L8 and L6s is disgusting. Just because you give time to read a document in a meeting doesn't mean jack squat. People aren't robots that just perform a trick on command.

throwawaySlu 5y ago

Amazonion here. The purpose of doc writing is for the author to dump their ideas and convey the critical pieces of information. It lets the reader consume the information at their pace, and re-read even after the meeting. The document starts the conversation and let’s the reader understand the problem, why it’s important, what things we have or have not considered, what trade offs have been made, and how we arrived at the conclusion or solution. There are many, many things Amazon does not get right. The document writing culture is probably one of our not so secret, “secret weapons”. At many companies I worked at, we had a PowerPoint or presentation driven culture. And the purpose of those meetings is to listen to the presenter, at the presenters pace. The meeting becomes about the presenter and what they think is important, as opposed to being about the reader. In presentation driven meetings, the presenter talks and questions actually distract from the presentation - often times presenters will bluntly ask for questions to be saved to the end. My own team has a strong culture of getting engineers to write, and help them write well. It’s not about perfect English, but it is about touching on the key points and letting readers comment and ask questions. Meetings without documents often go completely off the rails - especially because if the kinds of problems we’re solving. Without focus, meetings delve into tangents and branches off of those tangents. To be fair - this still happens if the document hasn’t been adequately prepared, but often because you find the document owner hasn’t fully thought through the problem or fully did their homework.

alok-g 5y ago
In my experience, the issue is not presentations actually. Whatever can be presented using documents can be presented using slides too. The real challenge is that slides present much less word-count space to deliver the right message, and most authors fail to do that right. A phrase commonly attributed to Blaise Pascal comes to mind [1]. That presentations being synchronous vs. everyone reading their own pace is not the key issue. Sharing the slides in print for the meetings can solve that. At one employment I was in, we were using PowerPoint even more effectively than we use Word. [1] https://intenseminimalism.com/2010/if-i-had-more-time-i-would-have-written-a-shorter-letter/ https://intenseminimalism.com/2010/if-i-had-more-time-i-woul...
- 5y ago

timmt 5y ago

Having witnessed this through a flood of incoming ex-Amazon folks I agree that it brings so much more content and focus on a meeting. It is amazing. The silence, the reading, the staying on topic (apart from tangents that sometimes need to be brought up, but are vulnerable to being just dismissed with the power of The Document) all helps to get the attention and feedback you need. The thing is though, that while the article mentions briefly challenges with the writing, it does not shine light on the hours and hours or reviews, rewrites and re-reviews when preparing the document. The endless and often times pointless arguments and bad blood between people on how to write a sentence so that it would be "correct" and every word and number counts. Arguments if a given word should be "benefit" or "impact". If the word should be "system" or "solution". It does not feel productive and I am not sure if counting the hours spent would actually add up classical "hours wasted" in a typical 10 person "pointless meeting". And also when usually a piece of writing has some soul of the writer, in these documents they end up being soulless, blank format robotic texts only aiming to convincing the reader to fund your project or sell your idea over others. And that leads to quite an Amazonian culture that is a subject of many different articles. I just felt there was something omitted by OP. So while it has benefits, it does have a cost associated.

sudhirj 5y ago
The downsides sound a bit odd. The process as usually described seems like a single person usually writes the doc, often the person in charge of delivering the project? Why would there be much argument about the wording then? And if there is a duo or team, it sounds like the same rules as pull request / code reviews apply? Make sure it's objectively correct, then concise, and last stylish?
- glenngillen 5y ago
  It varies on the attendees in the meeting and the length of the document. If it’s what is typically referred to as a “6 pager” the situation that parent outlined is certainly believable. Lots of collaboration with peers and your manager and weeks of refinement before that meeting. Similar with the working backward process/PRFAQ. You might stop shopping it around when it’s just the answer to the 5 questions and an aspirational testimonial. By the time it’s a meeting reviewing the 1-2 page press release it’s likely been months of refinement. That isn’t to say it’s a full time effort over that period though. These things are usually background/parallel work with whatever else you you’re doing.

stunt 5y ago

Some companies have powerpoint fetish and those are basically the exact opposite of this. You go to a meeting and someone without presentation skills that has spent more time choosing the background picture than thinking about the content is going to give you a lot of information that nobody will document after the meeting ends. You will end up with some random notes that you won't remember after a week.

apexalpha 5y ago
This is my company right now. Everything is in PowerPoint. Even guides or system documentation gets put in PowerPoint in stead of a document, it's really annoying. I've read this blog and comments with great interest.

nevon 5y ago

We operate in the same way in the company I work for, and while it's certainly an improvement over useless presentations, the silent reading being part of the meeting drives me insane. The fact that people can't manage their calendars to allocate whatever time they need to prepare before a meeting now means that the rest of us have to sit around for 15 minutes twiddling our thumbs. Even if I purposefully ignore the material until the meeting itself, I typically finish reading in about half the time it takes the slowest reader. I almost wish meetings would have two different start times - one for people that want to do meeting prep during the meeting and one for people that do it at some other time, so that I can just join 15 minutes in when everyone is actually ready to start the meeting. I complain, but again, overall I think it's an improvement over what came before and I wouldn't want to go back.

grayclhn 5y ago
> I almost wish meetings would have two different start times - one for people that want to do meeting prep during the meeting and one for people that do it at some other time, so that I can just join 15 minutes in when everyone is actually ready to start the meeting. They do. Show up 15 minutes late, or bring your laptop and get work done while you wait.
jacinda 5y ago
The author implies that going to meetings later if you've already done the reading is an option at Amazon. > If a document is provided early and I have a conflict at the begining of the meeting I can read the document ahead of time and join the meeting 10-20 minutes late without missing anything.
asoneth 5y ago
> The fact that people can't manage their calendars to allocate whatever time they need to prepare before a meeting If I wanted to manage my calendar in the way you suggest using my current calendar system it seems like I would manually allocate a block of "prep time" every time someone invites me to a meeting with prerequisites, correct? If prep time is publicly blocked out then we may have to manually negotiate a suitable time because no one knows which blocks are prep and which are meetings. Alternately if prep time is not publicly visible then anyone can schedule over it then people need to start rejecting meetings after all blocks are filled by meetings or prep. In both cases everyone has to manually reshuffle prep time and potentially manually negotiate schedules which sounds like a lot of work for every new meeting. In reality everywhere I've worked assumes that "prep time" is something that everyone handles in their own way. In practice that means some people mange to squeeze it in during normal business hours, some people do it the night before during their personal time, some people (usually the most important stakeholders) come with an apology that they haven't gotten to the material yet. Perhaps it wouldn't be so bad if calendaring tools better supported this use case (e.g. "reserve 30m up to a week before this meeting") but until then blocking out time during a meeting for reading seems very civilized.

streamofdigits 5y ago

You could call this literate management :-). Not sure how this works for some purposes though, do audit / risk people make important decisions on docs they have just read? The ritualistic sounding silence of the first half of the meeting could probably eliminated with an automated document distribution system that does not allow you to participate in a meeting unless you've scrolled through the docs for sufficient time within a few days prior (a bit like those license aggreement buttons at the end of oracle's java downloads)

kator 5y ago
Jeff has talked about this in public, "good executives will cheat, they're busy they won't take the time to pre-read". I have found some leaders I can do "off line" with, but in general it's because their calendar and mine just don't overlap properly for a couple weeks and I want them to give me feedback earlier. I've been at Amazon 3 years, 6 months, and 7 days (thanks phonetool). In that time I've only seen a couple pre-read meetings, and a couple "offline review" (still in your calendar). Most of the pre-read meetings are less effective, they usually happen because of calendar pressure and the need for rapid decision on a topic. The one thing I don't like about WFH is that we sometimes "lose" people, they come to the meeting but float off into email, chat or whatever. When I first started we'd have 20 people in a room, laptops closed, reading, you could hear a pin drop. And usually I knew it was time to start the discussion because people looked up from their doc to see if others were done. I miss these meetings because the focus was amazing. To have all these people who I really respect read my doc and give me their 100% undivided attention is awesome. The nice thing about WFH is sometimes we spawn a bit of related topic in the chat, however it can be really hard to keep the debate going while the chat runs across a different thread but related to the overall topic.

momento 5y ago

Does anyone have an example of one of these documents to share? Preferably a "6 pager". I'd love to see what a real-world example looks like.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
easton 5y ago
Someone who used to work at Amazon wrote one[0] describing their game engine, as well as a description[1] of the important mechanics of the document. 0: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LPh1LWx1z67YFo67DENYUGBaoKk39dtX7rWAeQHXzhg/view https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LPh1LWx1z67YFo67DENYUGBa... 1: https://writingcooperative.com/the-anatomy-of-an-amazon-6-pager-fc79f31a41c9 https://writingcooperative.com/the-anatomy-of-an-amazon-6-pa...
- momento 5y ago
  Thanks for sharing!
- belval 5y ago
  The tenets section is missing the traditional "These are our tenets, unless you know better ones".

bomdo 5y ago

I was always interested in this but could not yet find deep resources on it. Sadly the post skips over the format of these docs - is there a good resource for examples/templates of the different doc types (with comments?)? Also, how are these documents shared and made discoverable internally? Do they refer to each other?

JustinGarrison 5y ago
There are lots of other articles about what's in an Amazon doc [0]. They're mostly accurate but it depends on the team quite a bit. Comments are exactly what you'd expect from any doc comments. (what does this mean? who's the audience? does it scale? what are alternatives?) There are other links in the comments here with more examples if you're curious. Most of the documents are shared via calendar invite. Lots of teams/products have team folders to collect docs centrally. Finding docs at Amazon has been the biggest gap IMO. There are too many places a document can exist and no way to centrally search them all. [0]: https://writingcooperative.com/the-anatomy-of-an-amazon-6-pager-fc79f31a41c9 https://writingcooperative.com/the-anatomy-of-an-amazon-6-pa...
- bomdo 5y ago
  Thank you very much for both your comment and link. This cleared things up for me. It feels like an obvious oversight that there is not some company-wide Wiki to organize all of these docs. Since we are talking about Amazon/AWS, this has to be intentional. Can you speculate on why this gap exists?

daniel-thompson 5y ago

The first time I heard of this idea was at an Edward Tufte* seminar. He researches and publishes on the design of presented information and how that impacts how it's communicated. His books, especially The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, are highly recommended. * https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...

htrp 5y ago
Tufte is required reading for everyone in my group. I actually give every team member a copy of his book.

Tycho 5y ago

When I first heard about this, I thought it was a brilliant idea. The alternative, perhaps the norm these days, is PowerPoint-driven meetings. I find this fraught with so many problems. Firstly, while most people receive a lot of training/education on how to write well, the came cannot be said for putting together decks of slides. Some people are great at it, most are not. Secondly, condensing everything onto a few slides allows for people to skate by on some sort of 'impression management.' If you put down the right buzzwords, maybe some diagrams, it may resonate with your audience but it does not guarantee that you or they have a detailed understanding of the important details, or even the same understanding of what the important details are. And thirdly, the presentation is distributed outside the meeting as a static document, shorn of context, and more likely to be misinterpreted. Not to mention, during the presentation, people are more easily distracted as you go through the content, compared to if everyone just reads a memo in the allotted time. Equalizing the level of preparedness for the meeting is also a great benefit, although that's a more general problem.

celticninja 5y ago

Wonderful that Amazon has a great culture around documentation, got to keep those documents happy. Now they just need to find a way to improve the culture for their employees. Obviously they are a much less important resource than documents but still they should probably give it a go.

devops000 5y ago

Do you suggest a guide how to write these documents?

JustinGarrison 5y ago
There are general style guidelines Amazon tries to foster. Here's a bunch https://www.linkedin.com/posts/herbertyang_i-joined-amazon-to-write-love-the-amazonian-activity-6664843818975801344--MwM/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/herbertyang_i-joined-amazon-t... You can also find templates and guidelines online by searching Amazon 6 pager or PRFAQ

hkrgl 5y ago

I am curious if Amazon follows this process for engineering design documents. I worked there a very long time ago and don't recall this. At another company I worked for, folks from Amazon introduced this for eng reviews. I found it very difficult to get or do a thorough review after reading a document for the first time at the meeting. Some things are nuanced and need time to process - I thought this style just didn't work for these cases.

alok-g 5y ago
Writing is followed for design reviews as well. The recommendations to solve the challenge you mention are to (a) writing better, (b) splitting into a sequence of meetings, (c) reading the document ahead of the time. There's no real reason why writing process should not apply to design documents as well.
- hkrgl 5y ago
  I wasn't questioning the writing process - written design documents are very necessary. My experience with the Amazon-style design review meeting is that there wasn't sufficient time to read the document, process it and come to a decision. If you're reading the document ahead of time, then that isn't really following Amazon style :)
  - alok-g 5y ago
    +1 We try to go slower with such documents. E.g., the meeting may start by asking to read the first five sections and discussing them first. The meeting then may naturally be longer than an hour, usually two hours, and still may need a follow up slot. Nothing in the Amazon style precludes reading ahead of the time, and it is recommended to send the document to the audience ahead of the time. That people often don't is another thing. I start reading ahead of the time as I read slower (but also read more carefully and thoughtfully).

jrochkind1 5y ago

What I immediately like about this idea is it requires the meeting convener to do some prep in advance to guide the meeting.

stronglikedan 5y ago

I wish I could read a document while using a step climber. I find that I get focused on the reading, and stop moving. Then I focus on moving for a bit, and lose comprehension. Then I have to read that section over, and stop moving. Rinse and repeat.

JustinGarrison 5y ago
I usually have to stop while I write comments and occasionally if I start thinking about something a lot I'll stop. But overall in 20-30 minutes I still get 10-15 minutes of climbing. I don't have that many meetings so this usually only happens 2-3 times a week for me.

digikata 5y ago

The thought occurred to me that the language development process for Rust and Python (and I’m sure others) encourage a variation of this document first process. Many high level engineers that I’ve been impressed working with are very good at merging in a technical memo or brief, often at the start or early in the process.

lr1970 5y ago

Few anecdotes from Amazon's folklore. "Why a six-pager has 6 pages?" A typical meeting at Amazon is 1 hour long -- 30 minutes reading followed by 30 minutes discussion. It is rumored that it takes Jeff Bezos 5 minutes to read and fully understand 1 page (10pt font, 1.2 line spacing). Hence 6 pages in 30 minutes. BTW, a six-pager can have an unlimited number of appendixes that do not count to the 6 pages limit. These appendixes provide extra in-depth info and often discussed during a meeting. But appendixes are not required reading. That said, quick readers oftentimes cover extra 10 pages during the silent portion of the meeting.

troelsSteegin 5y ago

I like the attention-focusing and emphasis on clear, concise, structured argument. I gather the idea is to get the right people together to introduce and critically assess a proposal or recommendation. I am suprised about not reading before the meeting, but reassured that one may read and reflect after. If I want to roll this out in another organization, how does the rest of it work? - what is the process before and after the doc? What kinds of decisions or issues typically warrant a doc? Is there a process or situation that triggers the development of a doc, like a quarterly planning cycle? How does a doc review translate to someone making a decision - does a decision-focused meeting have a different grammar than a doc-centered meeting? Is there a book that covers the approach?

perfmode 5y ago

anyone have examples of how to write documents in this style?