Learning from Amazon Web Services (AWS): about three months ago, our colleagues Manuel Völkl, Tim-Christian R., Julia Lackas, Constanze Ranfeld, Konstantin Beckstein, Lena R. and Kayla Kinadeter had the opportunity to dive into a 2-days workshop on #workingbackwards together with Marina Vester, Marina Burkhardt and Jan Kopp from Amazon Web Services (AWS). It was an absolute pleasure and its always worth it to get insights about other innovation approaches and the one of Amazon seems to be very hands on. This leaves us not only with great ideas, but also with some valuable take aways for our own innovation process. Today we share with you our most important findings.
Working Backwards in a nutshell
The Working Backwards approach really puts the user/ customer in the centre of all thoughts. Working Backwards is the Amazon innovation approach that is applied across all Amazon subsidies and for all kinds of new idea. It is set up to start with the problem of the user/customer and to work yourself back to a solution for that problem.
Working Backwards in operation
You put your idea/solution into words, by creating a Press release. Sounds simple, but is challenging indeed if you do it for the first time. In practice you really need to force yourself as a team to describe your idea and the important things about it, so that a interested reader from your target group would be delighted. This automatically makes you leave the surface of the idea and forces you to discuss the key elements within the team. For more details that might interest customers there is a FAQ to explain some things in more detail. For technical topics (e.g. IT setup), business related questions (e.g. about the market size) and everything that might interest the management or colleagues there is a stakeholder FAQ in which these things are explained.
What´s next then?
Send the document to some stakeholders and ask for feedback. Ideally they are from several different departments and hierarchies.
Our view on Working Backwards
The approach builds a framework that brings ideas into a tangible and understandable format very quickly. Nevertheless putting the idea into easy words in time-consuming. Don´t underestimate that.
Will we use the approach again?
Probably yes. It is an interesting option to our own innovation approach and it is very easy to ask for feedback among stakeholders.
Learnings?
Make sure that you have understood the market before the Kick-Off. Here we would invest some more time. Ideally you have already agreed on a persona to ideate about upfront and invite some participants from this exact target group to ideate with us. Furthermore it makes sense to cut off customer FAQs and stakeholder FAQs after a certain amount of questions. Otherwise you create numerous pages of text that make it difficult to handle.
#workingbackwards #innovation #aws
