Amazon uses a method called “working backward” to make sure that discovering a true customer problem is the very first thing a team focuses on. It starts with one of the internal press releases I mentioned in the Amazon Fire phone story in Chapter 1. The audience for that document is the new or updated product’s customers, internal or external, and it details not just the problem itself, but the current solutions and the ways in which the new solution will solve the problem better than anything before has.6 Until the team can truly articulate the problem from the customer’s point of view,
...more
