Amazon's Working Backwards vs. Systematic Inventive Thinking - contradictory innovation methodologies or a power couple?
Throughout the years I have helped dozens of organizations and teams learn, implement, and adopt a variety of innovation approaches and tools. It is almost a consensus today that innovation is critical to success and even survival, and that it is applicable across industries, organization sizes or types, and in every function of the organization. Most leaders also understand that it cannot be a one-time effort, but rather a mechanism or a systematic approach that is effective and repeatable.
Two systematic methodologies to innovation that I have found extremely powerful are Amazon’s Working Backwards innovation mechanism and the Systematic Inventive Thinking methodology. Using either of these, I saw teams and organizations achieve accelerated results and launching multiple new products and services within months.
At least at first sight, the two approaches seem to be strikingly opposite, and for a while, I have struggled to think if and how they might be reconciled. I now believe they can be, and I’d like to show you how – as a leader – you can take the best of both worlds and build a robust innovation mechanism for your teams and organization.
But let’s start by laying down the underlying elements and assumptions of each approach.
Unlocking Customer-Centric Innovation: Amazon's Working Backwards Innovation Mechanism
At the heart of Amazon’s impressive innovation track record lies a deceptively simple mantra: start with the customer and work backwards. But the simplicity of this statement hides the profound shift in mindset it requires. This customer-first approach is not merely a guiding principle; it’s the core around which all innovation at Amazon is built.
The Philosophy of Working Backwards
For Amazon, innovation begins with an intense and unwavering focus on customer satisfaction. This isn’t about looking at what the competition is doing; it’s about anticipating what customers don’t even know they need yet. It’s about writing the future customer experience and then mobilizing (or even building from scratch) your capabilities and resources to turn that fiction into reality.
Key Elements of Amazon’s Working Backwards
- The 5 Working Backwards Questions: Every Amazon innovation idea starts with five questions that delve deep into customer value, articulating the core purpose of any new product or service. They challenge teams to think critically about the customer problem they’re solving, the existing alternatives, and how the new offering will make a delightful difference.
- The PRFAQ: Amazon prefers carefully crafted written narratives over presentation as a decision-making mechanism. As a new Amazon employee, it was a bit strange at first, but soon I found it to be such a powerful forcing function that I don’t see how one could do without it. In the case of innovation, the narrative type is the “PRFAQ”. Standing for Press Release and Frequently Asked Questions, this document is a draft of the future. It’s written as if the product has already launched, capturing the essence of the innovation and answering potential questions by intended customers and internal stakeholders. It forces teams to envision the end state, ensuring the customer experience is the focal point of development, and articulating assumptions, risks, strategies, and unknowns.
- Experiments and Two-Way Doors: Amazon understands that not all decisions are final and encourages calculated risk-taking. Decisions considered ‘two-way doors’ can be reversed if they don’t yield the expected results. This philosophy encourages teams to experiment, learn, and iterate rapidly, without fear of failure.
- Customer Obsession: Every element of the Working Backwards methodology radiates from the core of customer obsession. It’s about more than understanding customers—it’s about relentlessly seeking to discover their root needs, and inventing on their behalf, even if they themselves are limited by the current standard solutions and models.
Systematic Inventive Thinking: Engineering Innovation from Within
While Amazon’s Working Backwards approach propels teams to start with the end in mind, Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT) anchors innovation firmly in the present, extracting creative solutions from existing realities, coupled with powerful innovation patterns or “templates” that have proved to be successful in the past. It’s a structured approach that champions constraints as catalysts for innovation.
The Philosophy of SIT
SIT doesn’t rely on brainstorming into the blue sky; it’s a disciplined method that finds the seeds of innovation within the ‘closed world’ of the product or service. It maintains that the answers to the next breakthrough often lie hidden within current operations and resources, waiting to be discovered through systematic analysis and inventive thinking.
Key Elements of SIT
- The ‘Closed-World’ Principle: SIT operates on the premise that the most innovative solutions can be found by looking inward, not outward. This principle challenges innovators to think differently about resources and constraints, driving them to leverage what they already possess in novel ways.
- Function Follows Form: Function-Follows-Form offers a way to manipulate existing resources of that Closed-World. In a departure from the conventional (and limiting) human tendency to attach a function to the form, this principle encourages innovators to create variations of a product’s form or components and only then identify potential functions that these new forms can fulfill.
- The 5 Typical Patterns of Product Innovation: These patterns are the backbone of the SIT methodology, providing a repeatable formula for generating new ideas. They act as lenses through which the current state can be examined to reveal unexplored opportunities. They are based on extensive research of form transformations that have occurred in countless inventions in the past, abstracted into universal patterns.
- Idea Rating and Selection: Once many ideas are generated through the SIT patterns, they are subjected to a rigorous selection process. This ensures that only the most viable, impactful innovations move forward to implementation.
Amazon's Working Backwards Meets SIT - can the two work together?
In the world of innovation, methodologies are like tools in a toolkit – each has its strengths, ideal uses, and limitations. As one who has led teams and customers to innovate with both Amazon’s Working Backwards and Systematic Inventive Thinking, I can confidently say that they can be seen not just as disparate approaches but rather complementary tools that, when used together, can provide a comprehensive innovation strategy.
Starting Points and Focus
Amazon’s Working Backwards begins with a clear vision of the future – a product or service that fills a gap in the customer’s life, sometimes even before they realize the gap exists. In contrast, SIT starts by asking the product “What are all the possible things you can evolve into?”. It’s an inward-looking process that innovates within the confines of existing capabilities and resources. Taken to the extreme, one might say Amazon’s approach intentionally ignores existing resources and constraints, while SIT intentionally ignores customer needs or value propositions, at least at the outset.
Scope and Risk Management
The scope of innovation with Amazon’s methodology tends to be broad and ambitious, often aiming for disruptive change. It’s about big bets with potentially big payoffs. SIT, with its structured patterns, might favor incremental innovation or evolution, where less risky but equally valuable improvements are made within the existing product framework.
Cultural Underpinnings
Amazon’s culture of customer obsession demands that innovations directly address customer needs, often leading to intuitive products that resonate deeply with the market. SIT’s approach might not start with the customer, but by focusing on what’s already available, it can lead to efficient and sometimes unexpected solutions that still meet customer needs, albeit from a different starting point. It may also be used in other cultural contexts and lead to other values, rather than to customer-centric initiatives.
Ideation and Solution Design
SIT has a systematic process for generating ideas based on its 5 patterns. Working Backwards does not provide much structure around how to ideate – it assumes ideas will be developed in one way or another, and leaves that open to teams. When I was using Working Backwards to help customers come up with Digital Innovation solutions in my role at AWS, I found this gap to be one of the weak spots in Amazon’s methodology. In fact, I utilized SIT innovation and other structured ideation techniques to facilitate more prolific and focused ideation sessions as part of the workshop.
A Structured, Detail-Oriented Approach
Both methodologies recognize that innovation is best served not by random chance, but by a disciplined, methodological approach. This structure is key – it turns the often fuzzy task of “being innovative” into a concrete, actionable process. In Amazon’s case, the structure comes from a clear set of steps that begin with envisioning the customer’s future experience and working backwards to make it a reality, and a disciplined structure for the PRFAQ and its contents.
Similarly, SIT offers a structured template for innovation, characterized by its patterns and principles that guide creative thinking. It does not leave innovation to spontaneous “aha” moments; instead, it provides a repeatable and systematic process for generating and evaluating ideas. This methodical approach ensures that creativity is not left to the whims of inspiration but is harnessed in a way that it can be replicated and scaled across the organization.
These structured methodologies guide the innovation journey. They help leaders and teams navigate the often chaotic process of creating something new, providing a clear path through the uncertainty of developing novel products and services. This approach can be particularly helpful in corporate environments where risk and return are carefully measured.
Moreover, these approaches also emphasize the importance of rigorous documentation and communication. Amazon’s Working Backwards insists on clear and detailed narratives like the PRFAQ, which not only aligns internal teams but also serves as a litmus test for the idea’s viability. SIT’s structured process likewise results in a trail of documentation that captures the journey from mapping resources, to idea conception and selection, ensuring that good ideas are not lost and can be revisited or built upon in the future.
Finding the Innovation Leadership Sweet Spot
Despite these differences, there are overlaps. Both methods, at their core, are systematic and structured, which appeals to leaders looking for repeatable and teachable approaches to innovation. They both encourage a form of thinking that is not your conventional path to innovation, allowing for creativity within their respective frameworks. And perhaps most importantly, they can both be tailored to fit an organization’s specific needs and culture.
Synergizing the Approaches – what leaders can and should do
In practice, these methodologies can be more powerful together than apart. Amazon’s customer-focused, long-term-oriented innovation can benefit from SIT’s resourcefulness. In fact, it is very much in line with one of Amazon’s other Leadership Principles of Frugality (which literally reads “Accomplish more with less. Constraints breed resourcefulness, self-sufficiency, and invention. There are no extra points for growing headcount, budget size, or fixed expense.”). For instance, the imaginative leaps made during the PRFAQ process could be grounded with SIT’s inventive patterns to ensure they are achievable with the resources at hand. Conversely, SIT ideas can be tested against the customer-focused questions of Amazon’s approach to ensure they have market relevance.
As a leader, recognizing when and how to apply these methodologies can be extremely powerful. It’s about knowing your organization’s appetite for risk, the resources at your disposal, and the needs of your customers – and then choosing the right tool for the job or, more innovatively, combining the tools to create something new that is just right!
In my own practice, I’ve seen this combination unlock potential in teams that seemed to struggle with how to go about innovation. This is even more true in enterprises that have been successful for a long time and have not (until recently) experienced the urgency of innovating. effectively.
As a leader, understanding and implementing these structured approaches can elevate your innovation strategy from sporadic and unpredictable to consistent, reliable, and even cost-effective. In my experience, teams with a clear framework to guide their innovation efforts are more confident, more productive, and ultimately more successful in bringing their ideas to fruition. And today, more than ever, we need to have focused innovation in light of the complexity and gravity of the problems we face – as individuals, teams, organizations, and societies.
If you are curious about these methodologies and would like to learn more, reach out, and let’s have a conversation.