[bradwschiller]

I've given significant thought to the writing problem, and I firmly believe the lack of writing is dramatically slowing the pace of innovation in the world. Writing is really Amazon's superpower. It's why they get big things done quickly.

Both the author and the audience greatly benefit from the writing. Writing clarifies and structures thinking – helping the reader understand the points the author is making.

As a bit more context, I used to work at McKinsey and much of my job fit into two roles: (1) translating what employees were thinking into something executives could understand, and (2) making PowerPoint slides. In other words, I was often there because employees couldn't write well. But, I also found PowerPoint lacking – it's hard to get some of the more important points across (creating some confusion) because it doesn't allow for longer-form thought.

I've put a bunch of thoughts together on why writing is important and how we fix our education system to make people better writers. It's based on my experiences supporting tens of thousands of students on improving writing skills – https://bradsblog.com/2020/05/15/1-writing-is-the-most-impor....

[baix777]

Amazon has a few superpowers. One is writing, but the other is so many metrics. I worked at AWS and saw how the weekly metrics meeting was ran, with execs questioning why some metric, out of 10s of thousands, was behaving in a certain way. A good product manager had a good reason, an acceptable one found a reason quickly after the meeting. Without an understanding of the business writing is worthless, and one of the ways Amazon creates this understanding is comprehensive metrics gathering.

It is the combination of business understanding and writing that is Amazon's superpower.

[bradwschiller]

Agreed that understanding the business is critical. Writing is one of the best ways for someone to develop a better understanding of the business - e.g., what metric are we tracking and why?

Overall, I'm not saying that there aren't a bunch of other important things to running a business, just that great writing makes running a business far easier.

On a side note – implementing performance management gets crazy gains without requiring process changes. I used to get an immediate 30%+ productivity bump when I'd implement performance management (e.g., metrics, daily huddles) in a place that had little of it.

[ryanar]

Hey, just want to say I read your blog posts and was searching for a call to action, how do I sign up for Prompt?! I kept asking myself while reading the blog posts. Then I tried googling Prompt / Prompt writing, that name is -not- favorable to SEO. When I hit the landing page, I found out that Prompt is meant for students, not people already in the workplace. I don't even know how it would work, but I was hoping there was some way a working professional could improve their writing. That said, when you do hit the Prompt landing page, the I am a student is highlighted and there is no other call to action or thing to do, I guess you are supposed to sign up in the top right? Anyways, wish you well!

[bradwschiller]

Hey! Thanks for the comment and going to the site (Prompt.com). We're focused on students for now, but we will be launching supports for professionals in the future. We're almost all B2B sales, which is why you found it harder to find us than you'd have probably liked.

As it turns out, most people aren't similar to the Hacker News population – they won't seek out and act on feedback on their own. As such, we've found the best way to improve writing skills is to require people to get feedback and act on it. This means working with K-12 and higher ed institutions.

[jwilkinson9]

Are there any great examples of how Amazon writes their white papers? I've heard of the Press Release method, but are there any examples online? Also curious if there are white papers that don't fit the Press Release model.

[bobthepanda]

Here's an AWS article explaining how root cause analysis is done at Amazon: https://aws.amazon.com/elasticsearch-service/resources/artic...

> The technique consists of asking the question “Why?” iteratively until you get to the root of the problem. Let’s see a quick example:

Problem: The website is showing error 500.

1. Why? Because the web framework’s routing component malfunctioned.

2. Why? Because it requires another component, which itself malfunctioned.

3. Why? Because this component of the web framework requires the intl extension, which isn’t working.

4. Why? Because it was accidentally deactivated after the server software got updated.

[swyx]

worth noting that there are reasonable criticisms of the 5 why's method. complex system failures often do not have a single root cause.

[tomjen3]

What would your recommendation for a professional who wishes to improve his writing? Word can mostly fix my grammar.

[bradwschiller]

The philosophy of Deliberate Practice applies very well to writing. There are some online writing courses you can take (e.g., David Perrell has one), but there's a lot you can do on your own (and with the help of some friends). Here are the two biggest things.

1. Start with an outline. This will help you cement the most important points of your writing/argument in your mind and enable you to start filling in the gaps. Often, I'll spend a lot of time getting the major points I'm making very crisp before I write a full draft. Doing this will also help you identify what's missing. The most important parts to focus on are (1) where a reader may disagree (i.e. where you'll need to make your argument stronger and back with evidence), and (2) where your reader will have questions that you'll need to answer.

2. Get feedback and revise 2-3 times. Getting feedback and acting on it is the single most valuable thing you can do; however, most people don't know how to provide writing feedback. They'll focus on grammar unless you specify what you want the reader to think about. There are two strategies here – (1) Provide your reader with a list of questions you want them to answer. I always use the following four: What did you learn? Is what you learned compelling (if not, why wasn't it compelling)? What didn't you learn that you wanted to learn? Where was it clear/not clear? (2) add specific comments/questions within your writing in places you are less comfortable with and want feedback.

[tomjen3]

Thank you for the suggestions. What would be a good strategy for finding people to give feedback early?

[bradwschiller]

I'd test out some of your more thoughtful and detail-oriented friends. You may find one or two who you feel are adding value and pushing your work forward. If you're going to pay for someone, it's very difficult to find a good editor. Most "editors" are only used to providing sentence-level feedback and may not have enough context about the subject your writing about to be helpful with content feedback. At Prompt, we find only 2% of the thousands of Writing Coach applicants we receive are good enough to make it into our network – i.e., the writing feedback skill is really hard to find.

[jerome-jh]

The sure advantage of a powerpoint is that it gives much less way to criticism.

Imagine someone wants details on a graph or table, the presenter replies orally and can often remain as vague as desired, possibly making the requester look like an a*e if he/she insists.

[MavropaliasG]

How do you know? Does Amazon have a blog? Where do you read their documents? Aren't they internal?

[bradwschiller]

There's not much out there on the specifics of Amazon's approach to writing, but there are bits and pieces around.

Jeff Bezos's 2017 shareholder letter highlights some of his thinking around 6-page narratives: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312518...

This Slab article by Ben Bashaw is pretty good on the topic: https://slab.com/blog/jeff-bezos-writing-management-strategy...

Scott does a good job of some of the major points of Amazon writing based on his time there (this was written based on a previous HN discussion on Amazon writing): https://blog.usejournal.com/writing-docs-at-amazon-e02580861...