The Document Culture of Amazon
Amazonion here. The purpose of doc writing is for the author to dump their ideas and convey the critical pieces of information. It lets the reader consume the information at their pace, and re-read even after the meeting. The document starts the conversation and let’s the reader understand the problem, why it’s important, what things we have or have not considered, what trade offs have been made, and how we arrived at the conclusion or solution.<p>There are many, many things Amazon does not get right. The document writing culture is probably one of our not so secret, “secret weapons”.<p>At many companies I worked at, we had a PowerPoint or presentation driven culture. And the purpose of those meetings is to listen to the presenter, at the presenters pace. The meeting becomes about the presenter and what they think is important, as opposed to being about the reader. In presentation driven meetings, the presenter talks and questions actually distract from the presentation - often times presenters will bluntly ask for questions to be saved to the end.<p>My own team has a strong culture of getting engineers to write, and help them write well. It’s not about perfect English, but it is about touching on the key points and letting readers comment and ask questions.<p>Meetings without documents often go completely off the rails - especially because if the kinds of problems we’re solving. Without focus, meetings delve into tangents and branches off of those tangents. To be fair - this still happens if the document hasn’t been adequately prepared, but often because you find the document owner hasn’t fully thought through the problem or fully did their homework.