Today, all new projects inside Amazon kick off with memos. Set in the future, these memos describe exactly what a potential product will look like before anyone starts working on it. Amazonians call this “working backwards.” They dream up the invention first and then work backward from there. Limited to six pages, the memos are typically single-spaced, typed in eleven-point Calibri font, a half inch at the margins, and picture-free, and detail everything you could want to know about a proposed new product and service.
