Working Backwards.
Not as crazy as it sounds, but when you are designing something new, you sometimes can do worse than start by working backwards. Werner Vogels recently wrote how Amazon use this process to help their small teams produce services that customers (internal or external) want:
The product definition process works backwards in the following way: we start by writing the documents we’ll need at launch (the press release and the faq) and then work towards documents that are closer to the implementation.
The Working Backwards product definition process is all about is fleshing out the concept and achieving clarity of thought about what we will ultimately go off and build.
Given the recent bounce back in Amazon’s commercial performance and the quality of their Amazon Web Services suite, working backwards is clearly, err, working well for them.
Update: The AWS blog has announced the beta release of yet another monster web service, the Amazon Flexible Payment Service (FPS).
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