Amazon's innovation method for a product management guild

The situation

AT&T's product guild brings together product management roles from across teams and products, many of them highly experienced. The guild's purpose is to spark curiosity and push new approaches into practice, which sets a specific bar: an audience of experienced product managers will not sit through an introduction to customer centricity. What they wanted was the principles and mindset behind Amazon's Working Backwards methodology, plus enough real application to know what it feels like to use it.

What we did

A focused session, prepared against their context rather than delivered from a shelf. A preparation meeting mapped the audience, captured relevant examples, and reviewed the AI tools available to them.

• Customer-centric innovation philosophy: Working Backwards as a systematic approach that puts customers before solutions, and investment decisions supported by vision, evidence and genuine stakeholder argument.
• The framework in practice: the five questions, Today Statements that compress the answers into a single sentence that either holds together or exposes that the answers do not, then PRFAQ documents.
• From concept to validation: experiments that can disprove an assumption before major investment.

What participants kept

The Working Backwards job aid, a complete workshop companion, and access to an AI-powered PRFAQ generator usable with their own approved internal AI tools. That second item matters more than it looks: methodology sessions decay because the method is never at hand when it is needed. A prompt set that works inside already-approved tools is method that survives contact with the following Tuesday.