The most counterintuitive habit at Amazon is also one of its most durable: before building a product, you write the press release announcing it - as if it already shipped. No code, no designs, no spreadsheet. Just the story a customer would read on launch day. It feels backwards. That’s the point, and it’s why the Working Backwards method has outlasted a dozen planning fads.
Why a press release, of all things
A press release has a property no slide deck does: it’s written for the customer, not for you. The moment you write “customers can now…,” you have to say something a real person would actually care about. You can’t hide behind a feature list or a roadmap. If the story isn’t compelling on one page, no amount of engineering will make it compelling in production.
The forcing function
Amazon calls the press release a “forcing function” - a mechanism that compels the right behavior. Here, it forces the team to obsess over the customer’s outcome instead of their own cleverness.
What it catches that a plan doesn’t
Writing the launch story first surfaces the three quiet killers of product ideas:
- A fuzzy customer. If you can’t name who the headline is for, you haven’t found them yet.
- A soft problem. If the problem paragraph reads as a mild inconvenience, the product won’t earn a place in anyone’s budget.
- A benefit that doesn’t beat the status quo. If the customer quote could describe a competitor, you don’t have differentiation.
Each of these is cheap to fix on paper and brutally expensive to discover after launch. The press release moves the discovery to the cheapest possible moment.
The so-what test
Once the release is drafted, you read it and ask one question: so what? Is this meaningfully better, faster, easier, or cheaper than what the customer does today? If the honest answer is no, you don’t rewrite the sentence - you change the idea. The so-what test is the method’s built-in honesty check, and it’s the step most people skip.
It works on a startup idea too
This isn’t only for companies with a PR department. A solo founder can write a press release for an idea in an afternoon and learn more about its viability than a month of building would teach. It’s the cheapest form of idea validation there is - and unlike a landing page or a prototype, it costs nothing but honesty.
- Write the headline, the problem, the solution, and a customer quote.
- Add the FAQ - the customer questions, then the ones a skeptic would ask.
- Run the so-what test. Rewrite the idea, not the words, until it holds.
The whole point in one line
Write the press release before you write the code - because it’s far cheaper to delete a paragraph than a product.
Write the press release before you write the code
Turn your idea into an Amazon-style PR/FAQ, a scored verdict, and a PRD - free to start.
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