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Comment by toephu2 | Hacker News Reader

I thought this letter provided many a great lessons, up until "we write narratively structured six-page memos."

Wow, can any Amazonians speak to this? Sounds like a huge time sink to be writing a 6 page memo instead of preparing a few slides (or writing a 1 page technical design doc)

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Yes, we do write six-page memos. It's not just leadership, even on the engineering side, design documents are six pagers. Contrary to your initial reaction, six-pagers are very effective for both parties—the writer and the reader. You're right in that writing narratives as opposed to making slides takes longer, but that's not inherently a bad thing. Writing a narrative helps me articulate my design well. If I cannot communicate my design via a narrative, it means there are gaps in my understanding/formulation of the same. For the readers, it gives them a coherent understanding of the problem, approach, pros and cons, along with an appendix of material. This helps them to attack the problem with almost as good an understanding of it as the writer—sometimes better, because they come in with some prior knowledge. The writing exercise takes a few months to get good at, but once you're comfortable writing documents, you retain that skill forever. I'm not kidding when I say this practice is something that'll make me stick with Amazon for a long time.

Can you talk about the format of this doc? I did some googling but came up with nothing / a bunch of fluff pieces.

There's no format as it is; whatever suits the occasion I guess. If you're presenting an engineering design, it is expected that your document conveys the what, the why, and the how—ideally many hows along with pros and cons for each. A good narrative would be data-driven, and not riddled with intangibles.

Ah OK. Basically, a written doc with sentences and paragraphs as opposed to a PPT or outline with bullet points then?

That's more or less it. There are training sessions you can take where people who are good writers, teach you how to be a better writer. And the meetings, since they revolve around the narratives, involve getting constructive feedback on your writing besides simply getting feedback on your design.

Yes

A common format is posed as a "Press Release" for the idea as if it existed, with quotes from customers — even if it's purely an internal service, the downstream teams are your customers

The documents are fixed length to 1, 2, or 6 pages for different purposes/stages, and reference data goes in appendices that don't count. It's also impossible to be hired as a senior contributor or any management role without submitting a writing sample, which gets reviewed in the hiring meeting along with everyone's interview feedback.

While I agree written communication skills are critical for senior roles, do you ever find this format stifling for more visual ideas and concepts?

Or are designs and comps just included in the appendix with a couple embedded highlight images?

They're either embedded in the text or as an appendix. Its not really a hard fast 6 pages exactly thing, more of a guideline. You want it to have depth but not be too long. Thats pretty much it. For more details: I'd say 1 pager is an idea. 2 pager is idea with the why and some details fleshed out. 6 pager is idea, why/how/people, design docs, stats/analysis and maybe even some tech choices.

I thought it was a good model look into and plan projects. IMO, programming should be / is only 20-30% of a softdev's job, the rest should be planning (and probably fixing bugs afterwards haha).

Source: Former Amazon dev.

I don't - there are plenty of ways to get visual ideas/concepts into the document. You can refer them to the appendix or embed it in. Appendixes are often quite large on complex topics.

The big benefit is that meetings start with people reading the documents and thinking about them - you'll see people making notes in the margins, etc. Only after everyone has had a chance to read the doc do you start discussing it, so you save a lot of time answering questions that are answered in the doc.

Now that you have acquired that skill, why don't you move elsewhere?

I meant the practice of writing docs is unique to Amazon. I would imagine it isn't the case at say Google or Facebook to spend the first 15-20 minutes of a meeting reading narratives.

By saying this will keep me at Amazon, I meant that I would like to continue doing the narrative style meetings for as long as possible. Also, there are plenty of other skills you gain by working on things at the scale AWS operates at. I don't believe I've learned all that I can, yet.

Amazon, as an organization, cares more about thoughtful, evidence-based argument than any company I've ever worked for and, I suspect, any company I will ever work for. Having left Amazon (twice!), this is the thing I miss the most.

We do "architecture docs" where I work. Although there really isn't as much of a narrative in them. It's mainly a summary, why we should do it, and a bunch of graphs/charts.

Honestly, I find it a bit arduous, although it's definitely necessary. I really just wish people just whiteboarded it all out and it was recorded.

I don't work at Amazon, but narrative memos probably encourage better thinking and communication. PowerPoint often amounts to hand-waving assertions delivered so fast you don't have time to evaluate them.

Current Amazonian, my opinions are my own.

I love the emphasis on writing these papers to drive a meeting, and 6 pages is an upper limit. I personally prefer trying to condense it to 1 page. I will sometimes need get Product, Tech, and Ops to agree on something, and I find writing the paper really helps me solidify my argument. If you're just trying to get your team and principal engineer to agree to a design, however, the 1 page technical doc you mentioned is sufficient. Full 6-pagers are more common when working across orgs, in my experience.

I used to work at Amazon as an engineer, and it is all about making meetings effective. Writing is an effective tool to thinking effectively. Six pages is actually about keeping things brief and to the point, and many people will cheat at make the font really small.

"PowerPoint makes us stupid" -- James Mattis

(Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html)

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/beauty-amazons-6-pager-brad-p... explains it well.

P&G also does not do slides (most of the time). The typical format is a one-page memo for anything that requires a decision.

6 pages design doc is too short for a company with 1000+ engineers.

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