Working Backwards and Systematic Inventive Thinking

What each method assumes

Working Backwards starts with the customer and reasons back to the solution. It asks a team to describe a finished experience before anything is built, then to find the capabilities that would make the description true. Taken to its extreme it ignores what the organization currently has.

Systematic Inventive Thinking starts from the product or service in front of you and asks what it could become. It treats constraints as the raw material of invention rather than as obstacles. Taken to its extreme it ignores the customer, at least at the outset.

Both are systematic rather than inspirational. Neither waits for the room to have a good idea, and both leave a documented trail from starting position to selected concept, which is what makes either one teachable.

The four elements of Working Backwards

• The five customer questions, answered before any solution is discussed, so the disagreement about who the customer is surfaces in the first hour.
• The PRFAQ: a press release and FAQ written as though the thing has already launched, which forces the end state into words and exposes the assumptions underneath it.
• Two-way doors: separating the decisions that can be reversed from the ones that cannot, so a team can move fast on most of them.
• Customer obsession as the tiebreaker, including inventing on a customer’s behalf when the customer can only describe the solution they already know.

The four elements of Systematic Inventive Thinking

• The closed world principle: the next useful idea is usually inside the product and its immediate surroundings, not outside them.
• Function follows form: change the form first, then ask what the new form is good for. This inverts the ordinary habit of fixing a function and hunting for a shape to deliver it.
• Five patterns of product innovation, abstracted from form changes that recur across large numbers of real inventions, used as lenses on the current state.
• Rating and selection: many ideas generated deliberately, then filtered against stated criteria, so volume does not become the output.

The five patterns are taught with the product in the room rather than on a toy example, because the closed world only means something once a team is standing inside a specific one.

Choosing between them

Running them together

1. 1
   Frame with the customer questions

   Answer the five questions first, so the work has a customer and a problem rather than a topic.

2. 2
   Generate with the patterns

   Use the SIT patterns on the products, assets and capabilities already in the closed world. This is the step Working Backwards leaves open, and leaving it open is where most sessions thin out.

   Facilitated ideation belongs here, not at the framing stage, where it produces solutions in search of a problem.

3. 3
   Test the ideas against the customer answers

   An idea generated from the product still has to survive the question of who wants it and why. Ideas that cannot answer that are dropped here rather than in the PRFAQ.

4. 4
   Write the PRFAQ for what survives

   The written narrative is where an idea grounded in existing resources becomes a proposal a leadership team can decide on.

   Amazon’s own principle of frugality argues for the same combination: constraints breed resourcefulness, and an idea reachable with what you already have gets built sooner.

How this is delivered

Both methods are facilitated on a real initiative and taught to the people who will run them next time. The combination above is what we use when a team has an existing product and an ambition that outruns it.