Working Backwards

"Essentially what you're working backwards from is an entire machinery at a particular day that is working for... For the date of GTM, what do we need to do from here till that particular day so that the GTM is successful, but also, what will be the machinery we would have created so that this product is successful?"

"Jeff would say, we took it as an article of faith. If we served customers well, if we prioritized customers and delivered for them, things like sales, things like revenue and active customers and things like the share price and free cash flow would follow. So therefore, when we're making a decision thinking about a problem, we're going to start with what's best for the customer and then come backward from there."

"The principle states something along the lines of that great leaders start with the customer's needs and work backwards from there to sort of meet those needs or solve them. Then also because we created a process in this window I was talking about earlier, the 2004 to 2007 window, we created this process for new product innovation called the Working Backwards PR/FAQ process."

"He calls it backcasting as distinct from forecasting. ... standing in that future, five years out, looking back to the present, what did we do to make this different future happen? That's category design. That's how you unshackle yourself from the past."

"How do I imagine the company and the product is going to be different and better for our customers in a quarter from now? And from that, walk it backwards."

"Start with the ending. Come up with how you want things to turn out, and then work your way back. And start as far out as you want... imagine you're there. Engage all your senses... And then if you've got something exciting, go back to the beginning and then imagine how you got there and just write that journey out."

"Working backwards is all about the problem and starting there and obsessing about the problem and being guided by it to then go into the solution. So when teams that do it wrong is they don't do that. They don't work backwards. They have something they want to build... And if you say we could and it's not grounded in a customer or customer's problem, you're not working backwards."

"The press release has a paragraph about the problem. That's what you write. And then you write the solution paragraph and then the customer quote. And then the fact which is is there a legitimate plan to succeed?"

"One, is it a big idea? And then second, is it something we should be doing?... And the third test, is there a legitimate plan to succeed? And you got to have all three of those things. And I think the FAQ part of the working backwards process is that early stage legitimate test of whether this thing has a plan."

"Amazon is well-known for is the working backwards process, and for those that don't know, the idea is try to define effectively an ideal end state... and usually the mechanism for doing this is what's called a PRFAQ, and that's a press release and frequently asked questions, and it forces a certain degree of clarity to have to actually write a press release about the product that you're going to eventually launch."

"So column A is the traditional just work from today's world. Column B is work from this dream reality and work backwards from how to achieve that."

"Work backwards from your end state. Almost think of career as a product. So if you're building a good product, you think about, 'Well, here's what a great product would look like,' and then you break it into version one, version two, version three."

"instead of incrementally going, doing a jump to make it a little better, a little better, a little better, you can never get there. How do we take two years, and end up there? ... What is the theoretical minimum cost for moving money into a market? What is the theoretical maximum speed? Not just make it instant, make it cheap, but what actually is the lowest it could possibly be?"

"What we found was that six weeks is the maximum that we can see into the future where we could actually say, 'How do we work backward and figure out something we could build in that six weeks and really land it?'"

"Amazon has this great process where the PMs have to write a press release for the finished product even before they start building the product. That's the first thing that they have to do is to write that press release like the product is about to launch today. What are you telling the users about that product? Really forces them to think about the value proposition more thoroughly."