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Comment by bradleybuda | Hacker News Reader

This was (still is?) a big part of the development methodology at Amazon; there it was called "starting by writing the press release": http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2006/11/working_backward...

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Amazon did a great job with that technique and we were inspired a lot by that. Of course companies/startups do less "press-releases" these days, so we adopted it to blogging.

The content of published articles does help not only with team focus, but also is a natural "deliverable" definition for UI-less products such as SDK. Blog post simply cannot be published unless code is in the Github repo, tutorials and sample apps are there as well as illustrations and narration communicating new features.

Tanuj from Estimote business team here. It's also super useful for my efforts. Makes it so much easier to communicate to customers what we're working on, and there's also the intangible benefit of impressing potential customers with how fast and how much we ship -- e.g., https://twitter.com/stevecheney/status/598905085826043905

I imagine it has parallels with README-driven development too.

(blog author here) Thanks for adding the link. Absolutely - it's one of the inspirations for us using this approach. I'd also add Gojko Adzic's Impact Mapping (http://www.impactmapping.org/) as a further source of ideas that was in the back of my mind when tweaking and adapting Blog Post Driven Development with our team.

Perhaps one of the things I should have stressed more is what good fun it is to have robust debate about why our work matters! Planning SDK work (even refactoring / housekeeping) doesn't have to be dull.

I worked at Amazon at the time that blog post was written and this was not a part of the methodology. While it's true they released press releases with BS. EG: The "drone delivery" is an example (no way they are working on that, they know it can't work, they're not dumb, but it does make Amazon seem like a tech company, rather than like Walmart (which is what it's more like.) )

This blog post is an example the BS PR that Amazon does. IT's frankly dishonest self aggrandizement.

Thanks! I sometimes can't see through the B.S., and need to be reminded. In the end, it's about making money--moving goods to consumers. I'll keep an eye out for MCRed. I like the way you think!

It's the best way of setting up a clear goal. At my current job for a new project we only had marketing send over specs to some UX/UI designers and we're going to get the prototype UI sent to the devs for feedback. No idea what the exact goal of this new project is other than to keep up with the competition or to make existing corporate/enterprise users happy. Not the most ideal situation.

I think writing a mission statement or press release before development would sink a lot of projects before they began and save millions.

I thought of this while reading OP's post as well! I think both approaches are a good idea.

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