§ 75
Working Backwards
Teams that start from a solution often build things no customer needed; starting from the announcement exposes that early.
Keep in mind
If you cannot say what the customer gets, you are not ready to build
What to do
Before a project starts, write a one-page press release and an FAQ for the customer, and review them as a team. If you cannot name the customer and their problem in the first paragraph, do not start building.
Why it happens
Engineers start from what they can build and look for customers afterwards. A press release written before any code forces the team to state who the customer is, what problem they have and why existing options fail, in words the customer would use. If that page is hard to write, the product is unclear, and rewriting a page is far cheaper than rewriting the product.
When it stops applying
Build to Learn: when customers cannot judge an idea on paper (a new platform, an infrastructure change, something with no precedent) a cheap prototype tells you more than a polished press release.
Source
Werner Vogels, Working Backwards (All Things Distributed, 2006) — Amazon's CTO describing the press-release-first process; Ian McAllister's Quora answer "What is Amazon's approach to product development and product management?" is the source of "if the press release is hard to write, the product is probably going to suck"; Colin Bryar & Bill Carr, Working Backwards (St. Martin's Press, 2021) — the PR/FAQ process in full.
Read the sourceCite this
Hammurabi, § 75, “Working Backwards.” https://kanywst.github.io/hammurabi/laws/working-backwards/
BibTeX
@misc{hammurabi-working-backwards,
title = {Working Backwards},
author = {{Hammurabi contributors}},
note = {Hammurabi, § 75},
url = {https://kanywst.github.io/hammurabi/laws/working-backwards/}
}Read in a column
- Deciding what to build Next in the column: Most Ideas Fail
Related laws
- 10XY ProblemPeople ask for help with their attempted fix instead of the problem they actually have.
- 58YAGNICode built for imagined future needs costs time now and rarely fits the need that arrives.
- 96Narratives, Not SlidesAn argument cut down to slides and bullets loses the links between its points, so the gaps and warnings that prose would have exposed pass through the review unnoticed.
- 109Pre-MortemPeople who doubt a plan the team has already committed to tend to keep quiet; asking them to explain a failure that has already happened draws the doubts out.
- 110Wicked ProblemsFor some problems, working out what the problem is and choosing a solution are the same act, so the requirements cannot be settled before the design starts and there is no point at which the problem is done.
- 111Most Ideas FailIn online controlled experiments at large web companies, most ideas that survived the team's own pruning do nothing or make things worse once they are measured, and experts tend to be poor at telling in advance which ones.