The Amazon Way of Writing(networkcapital.substack.com)
networkcapital.substack.com
The Amazon Way of Writing
https://networkcapital.substack.com/p/the-amazon-way-of-writing
7 コメント
I work at AWS. It is true we have a peculiar culture around writing. It goes much deeper than this post implies. There are several hour long training courses on writing, leaders are critiqued on their writing and those that can write the Amazon way move quickly through the org. Imagine having to make a decision and you have a concise, well written, data heavy document to read with your peers. It’s one of the many reasons we move so fast.
I like the article gave a screenshot of the bullet points to follow to reach the no bullet point state.
Making it shameful to start a group meeting discussion without authoring a meeting doc is indeed a great way to cut down on meetings.
One aspect of Amazon’s writing culture that is not so well done is there seems to be a common preference for ultra-wide text lines in the docs. The entire publishing industry knows these are hard to read, so they don’t use them. Not sure why this was lost on Amazon.
One aspect of Amazon’s writing culture that is not so well done is there seems to be a common preference for ultra-wide text lines in the docs. The entire publishing industry knows these are hard to read, so they don’t use them. Not sure why this was lost on Amazon.
Is this only referring to executive meetings, project meetings, or what? Most meetings I'm in finish within 30 minutes so doubling that to sit and read notes sounds pointless, even if it reduces total meetings by half.
Wait, wait, in Amazon form:
Is the scope 100% executive meetings? ~65% of my meetings are under 30 minutes, so the Amazon way seems inefficient.
Wait, wait, in Amazon form:
Is the scope 100% executive meetings? ~65% of my meetings are under 30 minutes, so the Amazon way seems inefficient.
I guess there's a tradeoff between amount of information being shared and time taken. So I guess if you're also communicating as much information as a 5-page doc beforehand and then talking about it, then you're being way more efficient. The reason they take so long to sit down at Amazon is because busy, mortal humans work there and it's not likely that anybody will sit down and read a big, dense doc beforehand.
Do Amazon employees underline every instance of the word Amazon with that orange arrow from their logo, even on whiteboards?
Piggybacking on the post - which courses and books on writing would you guys recommend?