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How Amazon made me better at Business Writing

I studied business writing throughout my formal education — school, undergrad and postgrad. However, I learnt much more on the topic while working at Amazon. In this post, I am going to summarize the things that I learnt and that have helped me get better at writing. You may directly jump to the section ‘Key Learnings’, if you are in a hurry.

Amazon’s Writing Culture & Processes

Most of you might already be aware of the broad strokes of Amazon’s writing culture and processes. If so, please skip to the next section. For others, here is a summary:

1. At Amazon, exchange of ideas — with or without meetings, heavily rely on documentation
2. Almost all writing at Amazon is in narrative style documents and not in the form of presentations (PPTs are prohibited, although some use it anyway). In fact, documents are even required to use bullet points sparingly
3. The documentation — both style and format — have been prescribed to meet the company’s ethos and culture. For example, one cannot write documents of just any size. They have to belong to one of the following sizes — 2 Pager, 6 Pager, PRFAQ (2 Pager PR and 6 Pager overall)
4. Every non-trivial meeting happens on the basis of a document that belongs to one of the above types and is usually expected to be pre-read. However, in most cases, the first 5–15 mins of a meeting are reserved for reading the doc. Everyone quietly reads the document, makes notes and then the floor is opened for discussion. There is no such thing as document walk-throughs.
5. Like any MNC, Amazon has a highly distributed global workforce. Its internal wiki plays a very important role in documenting and distributing information of all kinds and is very heavily relied upon

How Amazon taught me to write better

I believe that Amazon taught me to write better in 2 broad ways -

Formal: Amazon has a wealth of resources about both — writing in its prescribed format and about writing better in general. It is not what you think — these are not books about better grammar, sentence correction, or any of the other high-school stuff. These are also not about writing to impress. Instead, these resources focus on:

1. Why to write: Amazon believes that writing is not just a tool to communicate but also a tool to think. It is a principle strongly reflected in everything the company does. PPTs were prohibited in the company, not just because they are easy to miss details in and can become gimmicky, but also because they do not force people who create them to think hard enough. Narrative style forces writers to write as if they are talking to someone, but only with structured thoughts.
2. How to write clearly and concisely: Clarity in writing is about communicating unambiguously and completely. This also means that a document should be self-sufficient. This is important in a company where building the smallest of things will touch tens of teams and hundreds of people. One cannot be expected to learn context from a separate document. Similarly, conciseness is important since one is bound by the aforementioned formats. The format of restricted document sizes is meant to prohibit people from being verbose. In fact, fitting your content compactly into one of the formats, forces more thinking, which the team and the company benefits from.
3. Good writing vs Normal Writing: This deals with tips, principles, DOs & DONTs to follow when writing. These are not just a tool to make reading a document easy and predictable, but also to weed out jargons and run the risk of being non-inclusive. But most importantly, these help removing any chance of people missing out the details
4. Writing process: The process followed while writing helps obtain desirable writing outcomes. This process is more suggestive than prescriptive, but I would say it should have been prescribed. The process deals with some rituals and some guidelines on writing docs in an iterative fashion. It also puts collaboration at the center of the writing process.

Informal: Amazon’s processes and culture informally imbibe a habit of writing among all its employees and also as a result, teach a lot about writing itself.

1. Pre-Reads: ‘Pre-reading’ as well as ‘Reading in the first 15 mins of a meeting’ are meeting practices that are followed quite religiously. This drives 2 things — a) Enough time to read b) Actually discuss stuff worth discussing only. Therefore, the author of a document is forced to make sure they are putting the context and the most important content in the aforementioned format in a clear, concise manner. There is no scope for bloating / padding, being ambiguous or running fast through the ill-prepared parts. This automatically ensures no one is bringing a half-baked document to the meeting.
2. Reading: Firstly, when you are reading others’ docs in meetings, you learn about the mistakes they have made and you ensure avoiding those in future. This improves the quality of your own writing. Further, since you heavily rely on internal wiki for learning about other teams, products, processes, customers, etc — you realize what a wiki / document is missing and the amount of pain you have to go through to get the missing information or to get responses to your queries. This increases your empathy towards your readers and makes you a better writer.
3. Collaboration: There might be a single anchor to a document, but most documents are often authored by a few people. If you write in a universally (within the company) established and accepted language, tonality and principles, merging documents becomes easier for everyone and more time can be spent on the content.

Key Learnings

It’s been a while since I moved out of Amazon and I do not obviously remember everything that I learnt. But here are the things that I do recall and put to use regularly:

1. Choose a form of document: Following one of the aforementioned standard document sizes helps drive the right expectation regarding a document, allowing only the most relevant information in the doc. Appendix can be extra & all supporting information can be put there.
2. Purpose: Almost every 2 and 6 pager should begin with a ‘Purpose’. A purpose is a section that briefly communicates the objective of the document. Here, you can mention whether you are trying to propose a new direction or seek alignment from the readers or communicate to the readers or something else. It is the best way to set context about the document. This section is not to be used to communicate the context of the problem at hand and that can be a separate section later. This section usually begins with ‘The purpose of this document is …’. PRFAQs don’t have this section, since the very definition of PRFAQ is to create and communicate a new product / process to be built and is well understood within the company (More on that later)
3. Writing clearly and concisely:

a. Provide appropriate context: Context is not just important, it can make or break your document (and thus the meeting). Someone who doesn’t understand the context of the document as much as you do, will interpret the contents of the same document differently and take the conversation in a different, often undesirable, direction. Hence, setting appropriate context is important. To do so in as few words as possible is important, without losing the meaning of the document.

b. Replace adjectives with data: Your writing will be crisper and more informative if you use facts as opposed to adjectives, that don’t convey specific information. For example:

• made the performance much faster → reduced server-side TP90 latency from 10ms to 1ms
• made delivery much faster → reduced P90 delivery time from 2 days to 1.6 days

c. Replace weasel words: Weasel words weaken your business case and makes you look ill-informed. Replace them with specific data. For example:

• Nearly all customers → 10% of all Indian customers
• Significantly better → +20 basis points

d. Answer questions directly: If you are responding to a question, answer in one of the following ways, before adding details or justifications:

• Yes
• No
• A number
• I don’t know (and will follow up when I do)

e. Avoid jargon and abbreviations: Documents have to be self-sustaining and using jargon and abbreviations make them dependent on presentation. Expand every abbreviation when you use them for the first time in a document.

f. Avoid fancy terms: If you find yourself using fancy terms in the document, ask yourself whether 100% of your readers would be able to comprehend them without looking up a dictionary. Often, fancy terms are used to impress or for conciseness. However, both can be achieved by the other principles mentioned above. The purpose of business writing is to communicate and impress readers with your content and not with your command over the language. Further, at least at Amazon, easily half of your readers wouldn’t have English as their native language and the fancy terms might confuse them instead.

4. Formatting: Format the document for ease of reading and discussion. These mean using the prescribed document layout guidelines around margins, header, footer, page numbers, etc; so that readers know how to navigate a doc in the same fashion across docs. Some of the aspects of the styling that stood out for me are:

a. Add Line numbers. They aid the discussion of documents and saves times

b. Leave enough margins on right-side, for comments / notes during the discussion

c. Limit the use of colors to 2–3, so that doc is easy on the eyes

d. Justified text is easy on the eyes

5. Good writing vs Normal Writing: Some of the things under this section are already covered above. Adding the ones that aren’t:

a. Keep sentences short: Use less than 30 words per sentence. Short crisp sentences make your writing impactful. You can do so by replacing phrases with words. For example:

• Due to the fact that → because
• totally lacked the ability to → could not

b. Don’t break the narrative-flow: As far as possible, try to retain the narrative flow of the document, since it aids a smooth flow of reading. If you want to add extra information to support your narrative such as charts, images, further-reading, etc.; move them to the appendix, but reference them in the document at this stage. Obviously, this has exceptions.

6. Writing Process: A structured process makes it easier to write structured documents. The following process usually works and is expected to be a multi-day process. Any quality document takes time to get created and will certainly save more time compared to a lower quality document.

a. Dump: Time-box and dump the content on a document. Don’t think about the above rules while doing so. Just try to put your free-flowing thoughts on a document. You can also scribble it on a notepad, your favorite note taking tool, etc. At this stage, while you should attempt to write a narrative, it is okay to put some aspects as bullets, keywords, etc. Remember the purpose is to dump what you know. Dumping serves 2 purposes — a) it makes sure that the activation energy to start a document is very low. If you try to do too many things right in the first go, you will have a higher mental barrier to begin authoring the document. b) Secondly, free-flowing writing forces you to think, question your own beliefs and seek answers to them, i.e. you come to know what you don’t know. Time-boxing is another important aspect of the dump stage. It ensures you don’t get lost in your free-flowing thoughts and are forced to generate a first draft quickly. After the dump, your document is at best 20–30% of the desired state.

b. Seek and Elaborate: The data, questions, aspects that are unknowns from the Dump stage, you can seek / fact-find / explore in this stage. Once gathered, add them to the above document. Also, now is the time to expand on your phrases, bullets, etc with details. Based on the facts, you might also want to add / edit / eliminate several parts of the dump. At the end of this stage, your document should be about 40–50% complete. This is a good point to start socializing the document with strictly L0 stakeholders i.e. within your immediate team / co-authors.

c. Make Coherent: After an initial review with the L0 stakeholders, it is time to work on making the document coherent and begin trimming it down to fit it in the desired size and based on the principles mentioned above. This will require you to read your document a few times. During each pass, be ruthless with cutting flab or add new missing information.

d. Format: Now is the time to format your document, so that it becomes easier to read, collaborate and discuss.

e. Read, critique, iterate: While you will read the document during each of the above stages, now is probably the time to read with your L0, followed by L1 stakeholders and expect it to be a final version and match it with the desired quality and make the changes. This will be an iterative process.

7. PRFAQ: A PRFAQ — Press Release and Frequently Asked Questions — is Amazon’s process of creating new products, technology and processes. A PR is a dummy PR that one writes imagining what would you communicate to your customers (internal or external) when you launch something.

A PR serves two main purposes: a) It forces you to think about the customer, the problem and the solution. It ensures by structure, that you think and talk about the actual problems. It is a tool to define the scope really well. b) Secondly, if your PR doesn’t excite you, it will seldom excite your actual customers. It forces you to answer the SO WHAT question. Like everything else in writing, it is an iterative process.

A PR is followed by FAQs. FAQs belong to 2-categories — Customer FAQs and Internal FAQs. Customer FAQs make you imagine and think what customers might ask and hence force you to think corner cases, so-what, discovery, etc. Internal FAQs are where you allow the details to unfold. The What, How, etc.

It will be unfair of me to bundle everything about writing PRFAQs in this same post and will therefore defer it to a later post.

8. Hotly Debated Topics: Another interesting tool in Amazon’s writing arsenal is a section called Hotly Debated Topics. It is a section that puts out what the document authoring group couldn’t agree on, until that moment. It allows them to state the topics that are being debated and the sides / options in some detail. During meetings, these are discussed and resolved among the various stakeholders and leaders. Often, it is the place where one of Amazon’s most important Leadership Principles of ‘Disagree and Commit’ is exhibited. Once resolved, the document is updated with the responses in the same section.

Caveats

1. All these were designed for writing at a specific company and culture and might not necessarily work for another company and / or culture. However, most inherent learnings are transferable across contexts.
2. These pertain to writing business documents. Most of these might not apply to writing in general or when writing fiction, copy, etc. — since the motives of different documentation could be different