I'm so fired up @stevesi wrote a long post on "writing = thinking". As many others have commented before, working with him in Office years ago gave me a bunch of tools I use to this day. Writing = thinking is one of them.
But there is a back story. First, I was in Office product management and @stevesi was running all of Office (again, dating me... circa 2001ish). I remember meeting a bunch of the GPMs ('Group Program Managers' for you non-MSFT'ers...basically the PMs that drove product fwd).
I remember scheduling GPMs and remember them saying "I can't meet you... I'm working on the [Word/Excel/PowerPoint/etc.] vision document". I remember vividly thinking "Huh. You don't hear that every day for a reasonably mature product. What more vision could we have?"
Surely not the exact method of @amazon and @JeffBezos, but close enough to comment: the GPMs literally wrote a long (forget how long exactly) document about the vision for their product before really much code was written. These would be shared among devs/test/PM/release/etc.
Few observations: 1/ it was amazing how it anchored everyone. Prod Mgnt, PM, planning, research. There was no question as to what the goal was for prod X. 2/ it was used over and over as guide rails. If there was a question/debate, often folks came back to the vision doc.
Marketing (ah! marketing folks again!) used them as well - it was a clear articulation of the customer segments and value proposition. Of course there would be the "positioning" debate towards launch on how to take to market, but at least there were fundamentals to start with.
I started to do this for all my biz plans/GTMs/etc. Still do. Most people don't realize (1) how hard this is, but (2) how much value it can create x-organization. I tell many people I work with to actually spend time and write their ideas down before presenting.
I tell start-ups pitching me for $$ to "write the one pager" that clearly outlines their biz/opportunity/etc. Usually I get a "What! One pager! I have a 32 slide PPT! You don't get it!" Um. You are right. I *don't* get it. That is the problem.
And it's getting harder. When we judge ourselves these days on having a zero-inbox and confuse effort with results (see other thread) it makes sitting quietly in your office/home/etc. and *thinking* that much harder. But not less important. / END
