We’ve all heard of the “Amazon Effect” and the impact it created in e-commerce and digital marketplaces, as well as for traditional brick-and-mortar retailers. It started in 2004, when the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, who was already thinking about how to put Customer Experience (CX) at the forefront, asked his teams to innovate by starting customer-first and working backward from there.
“Done correctly, the Working Backwards process is a huge amount of work,” said Bezos. “But it saves you even more work later. The Working Backwards process is not designed to be easy, it’s designed to save huge amounts of work on the backend, and to make sure we’re actually building the right thing.”
18 years later, consumers have grown used to digital-first experiences and expect organizations to keep raising the bar. So, how do you apply the Working Backwards theory at your organization and innovate rapidly? Former Principal of App Technology at Amazon and current Co-Chief Innovation Officer at Capgemini, Neerav Vyas shared his Amazon experience at our CX Innovation Summit. Here are a few key takeaways.
Working Backwards Innovation
Working Backwards Innovation is the internal process Amazon uses to drive innovation. Since 2004, almost every single product developed at Amazon has used the Working Backwards system. If an employee had an innovative idea, they would work through this process.
While delivering his keynote address, Neerav told the audience of CX executives, “Working Backwards was developed to create scalable innovation within Amazon itself. Think about the inception of the Kindle. You had teams who were innovating, building this new product offering and how to bring this product to market, and the key question that came up was, ‘what are successful product teams doing well and how are they rapidly able to get products to market within Amazon?’” Neerav said the question then became, “what if Amazon created a framework surrounding best practices learned and democratized that across the entire organization?” The visibility into those key learnings allowed everyone to offer new ideas, new products, new services, and get them to market at an accelerated speed.
Empathize With Customers
Amazon is known as the one of the most customer-centric organizations on the planet. Understanding and deeply empathizing with customers to make sure the solutions they are building resonate and solve problems. Neerav says, “it’s not about monetizing something, it’s about solving a problem and a pain point. And if we’re making the lives of the customers better, in the long run you should see value brought back to the organization from brand loyalty, brand affinity, as well as revenue and profits.”
Key Elements of Working Backwards
Amazon starts with an internal press release to define and clarify the future state. This is followed by storyboards and prototypes to bring the future state to life and answer any questions stakeholders may pose. Next, it’s time to take a deep dive to better understand the customers, asking these five questions as a helpful guide:
- Who is the customer?
- What is the customer problem or opportunity?
- What is the most important customer benefit?
- What does the customer experience look like?
- How do you know what customers need or want?
Neerav added, “this isn’t a secret sauce; the key element is these five questions help you create your core framework that everyone in the organization can use, and allows us to start deeply probing and empathizing to make sure the things that we are building are designed well and customer-centric from the get-go.”
Following the questions, Amazon breaks down what they know into experience layers: brand journey, customer journey, employee journey, business capabilities and processes, application and integration, data, and information management, as well as opportunities and pain points. These layers help provide a collective vision. Neerav says, “when it comes to customer-centric transformations, it’s just as important to understand the underlying aspects of the employee journey that are going to be involved in the experiences that you create, as it is the end customer.”
Testing and Learning is an Iterative Process
As you think about analytics and machine learning and how that drives innovation and customer experiences, don’t collect data for the sake of collecting data. It’s learning how to drive those insights into assets for innovative thinking and transform experiences.
Neerav uses this to drive creativity across different teams and suggests, “if you have products and services that are driving experiences, you’re getting feedback. And that feedback has been produced by data and insights. Leverage that to help improve how you target, market and modify based on future products and services.”
In other words, test, relearn, iterate. “When done well, Working Backwards, whether it is end-consumer experiences or end-employee experiences, can drive a lot of wonderful innovation and it can create innovation from some of the most unlikely places,” concludes Neerav. “It comes down to really understanding why a customer experience is not done well and leveraging those insights to drive tangible action across multiple pieces of an organization.”
At GDS Group, we know these transformations are a marathon, not a sprint. Are you on the path to becoming more customer centric and need to learn more? Join us at our next CX summit!
CX Innovation
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