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, and experienced product managers are unlikely to want an introduction to customer centricity. They wanted the principles and mindset behind Amazon’s Working Backwards methodology, and enough hands-on practice to know what it feels like to use it.

What we did

We prepared a focused session for their context. 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 stakeholder debate.
• The framework in practice: the five questions, Today Statements that write the answers as one sentence and show whether they are consistent with each other, and PRFAQ documents.
• From concept to validation: experiments that can disprove an assumption before major investment.

What participants kept

Participants kept the Working Backwards job aid, a complete workshop companion, and access to an AI-powered PRFAQ generator they can use with their own approved internal AI tools. Because the PRFAQ generator runs inside AI tools AT&T has already approved, participants can keep using the method in their own work after the session.