Writing forces clarity before building

Amazon has this great process where the PMs have to write a press release for the finished product even before they start building the product. That's the first thing that they have to do is to write that press release like the product is about to launch today. What are you telling the users about that product? Really forces them to think about the value proposition more thoroughly.

We're going to start by writing a press release describing the feature and describing it in a way that speaks to the customer and to some degree the external press and world where the idea is, in my description of this, it better jump off the page of something like, wow, as a customer I will really need this.

I call it top 10 things you should know. It's a living document. So in my org right now I've got quite a number of PMs and for each of those PMs in this living Google Doc, they literally put 10 things, like 10 problems you should know.