Amazon Six Pager
The Amazon Six Pager goes way beyond just a future press release as described in Working Backwards. It’s more like a full-blown business plan for a significant new initiative to be addressed inside an existing business. The idea is to craft an extensive description of a new product idea in exactly six pages (plus appendices that might contain additional data, statistics, etc.). This document shall be a narrative. No visuals, no charts, and no slides – as if the writer were on stage and giving a speech without any visual aids. Just the speaker and her voice tell a convincing story. Of course, the final Six Pager is only the result of significant effort. It might easily take 1 or 2 full weeks to write it, to discuss aspects with colleagues and team members, and to revise aspects.
A six-pager is when you distill the most essential ideas of your hundred-pager and cut the clutter. It forces you to utilize real estate for the most important ideas you want to convey.
To a reader, a six-pager adds the perception of a well-thought-out document with thought-through ideas, which creates much less inertia than when served a binder with a hundred pages.
For details, see references below, but in a nutshell, the Six Pager should contain:
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the introduction stating the intention of that initiative
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a list of goals that will be used to measure success
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long-term objectives or North Star, that this initiative leads to
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a description of the status quo of the business with enough detail such that later changes can be compared against the current state
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actions, or strategic intents, as Melissa Perri would call them, so an execution strategy with priorities that, finally, target the goals mentioned before.