A LESSON FROM AMAZON

“Jeff Bezos is famous for creating the future press release before launching a new product, undergoing any kind of transformation, or entering a new market. The process of creating a simple, but specific product announcement clarifies the original vision. It acts as a forcing function to thoroughly examine key features, adoption, and your project’s likely path to success. Committing to a press release, speculative though it may be, also helps leadership clearly express to important stakeholders the road map to success.

The Rules for the Future Press Release

The future press release is a great approach to defining clear and lofty goals, requirements, and objectives and to building broad understanding from the start of a program or enterprise change. There are, however, rules to make this approach effective:

Rule 1. The goal must be stated at a future point in time at which success has been achieved and realized. Press releases at launch are good, but a better one is sometime after launch, where true success can be discussed.

Rule 2. Start with the customer. Use the press release to explain why the product is important to customers (or other key stakeholders). How did the customers’ experience improve? Why do the customers care? What delights customers about this new service? Then discuss other reasons it was important and key goals.

Rule 3. Set an audacious and clear goal. Articulate clear, measurable results you’ve achieved, including financial, operating, and market share results.

Rule 4. Outline the principles used that led to success. This is the trickiest and most important aspect of the future press release. Identify the hard things accomplished, the important decisions, and the design principles that resulted in success. Discuss the issues that needed to be addressed to achieve success. Getting the “tricky” issues on the table early on helps everyone understand the real nature of the change needed. Don’t worry about how to solve these issues yet. You’ve still got time to figure that out.”

This excerpt was from a book written by John Rossman the former Amazon executive who launched and scaled Amazon Marketplace

I look at this process as an adjunct to the BizQuack Vision Based Business Plan. What a great way to think about a new product or service before launching it.