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Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”

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Re: Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”

#91

Post by mpyne »

ekianjo wrote: post #67
agent00f wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was remarking on this point: >In a famous Ranked 1st Consumer Goods company (i'll let you guess which one) all team memos to management are only allowed to be of a single page. This is really hard to adapt to it at the beginning but decision making is so much faster. I'm sure less info makes decisions faster, but this seems rather the opposite of a virtue. Eg. GWB "the decider".

It does not mean there is less info. It means the info is more dense, more concise, well prepared and summarized and straight to the point. It's not because you have 6 pages that it's a guarantee to avoid putting 5 pages of garbage or unnecessary prose.

It also means you can, by definition, not put more than 1 page of details into a given issue.

As usual the Navy/DoD seems to have this figured out:

BLUF: "Bottom-Line Up Front": Concise description of the problem, recommended solution w/out corroborating detail.

FYSA: "For Your Situational Awareness": This may help the boss understand the problem better, but it isn't something they need to know or understand right now.

FYI: "For Your Information": Boss, you need to read this before making your decision.

If you can't trust your underlings to use each appropriately so that you can triage what you have time for, then you either need new underlings or you need to take responsibility for training them better.

A 1-page limit on decisional memorandums is just as artificial as a 64-KB limit on code page size for executable programs.

Re: Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”

#93

Post by stfu »

rschmitty wrote: post #69
amirmc wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "6 pages is a bit too long, though..." It does depend on the structure of those 6 pages. If I had to do these regularly I can easily imagine settling on a (largely) routine format, e.g 1st page is overview, 2nd page is problem detail, 3rd page is solution/implementation, 4th page risks/mitigation blah blah blah. Note that the article says the first 30 minutes of the meeting is reading the memo. It doesn't take 5min…

Isn't it an indicator when you are defending 6 pages not being too long with a "blah blah blah" already?

I guess the 6 page idea comes from getting more substance from these presentations. Sure you can threw around 1-page bulleting lists all day, but if you want to include stats, references, screenshots, visualizations and have some reading-friendly formatting, the 6 page look about right.

Re: Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”

#95

Post by res0nat0r »

mallipeddi wrote: post #30
waster wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This just doubles my question from reading the original post: A full half-hour, for a six-page memo? Are these incredibly dense and full of new information to the readers? People don't really read that slowly. Average adult reading speed is something like 250 wpm. Average memo might be, what, 300 wpp? So, six minutes to read, maybe ten if you're taking your time? Not sure anyone has the answer, but that length of rea…

I worked at AWS for a while. So a lot of times when I've been in such meetings, the 6-page document was actually full of technical details (design docs, product FAQs, post-mortem reports, etc). So taking 20-30 mins to read through the full document, re-read some sections and write down questions/comments is not that unusual.

When I was with AWS last year none of our meetings followed this type of structure. Someone put together a presentation in PowerPoint if needed, went through their items, people asked questions and action items were assigned. Pretty typical of any company I've worked for. Although I thought there were too many meetings to attend which took away many peoples development time.

Re: Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”

#96

Post by nahname »

draugadrotten wrote: post #73
Maro wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried Prezi? http://prezi.com (I work there.)

Prezi looks good but only replaces boring bullet points with pretty bullet points. To really focus the presentation to the speaker's voice I find that HAIKU DECK for iOS really removes bullet point syndrome. http://www.haikudeck.com/ (I don't work there.)

Not available in Canada. My daughter really likes their music in the video though.

Re: Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”

#97

Post by amirmc »

rschmitty wrote: post #69
amirmc wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "6 pages is a bit too long, though..." It does depend on the structure of those 6 pages. If I had to do these regularly I can easily imagine settling on a (largely) routine format, e.g 1st page is overview, 2nd page is problem detail, 3rd page is solution/implementation, 4th page risks/mitigation blah blah blah. Note that the article says the first 30 minutes of the meeting is reading the memo. It doesn't take 5min…

Isn't it an indicator when you are defending 6 pages not being too long with a "blah blah blah" already?

Not in the slightest. I just didn't want to spell out each heading (I just threw out the ones obvious to me). If I'd said "etc" instead of "blah" would you still have picked on it? (I sometimes use those interchangeably when speaking).

In any case, the actual structure I'd use would evolve over time, based on my experience of such meetings.

Re: Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”

#98

Post by stephencanon »

_pmf_ wrote: post #34
ekianjo wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

6 pages is a bit too long, though. In a famous Ranked 1st Consumer Goods company (i'll let you guess which one) all team memos to management are only allowed to be of a single page. This is really hard to adapt to it at the beginning but decision making is so much faster.

> This is really hard to adapt to it at the beginning but decision making is so much faster. Yeah. God forbid that anyone making decisions should have to deal with actual details; in the worst case, this would actually make them have to think.

One page suffices to give an immediate “yes” or “no” for the vast majority of decisions. If more details are required, you could just ask for them, or even call a meeting.

Re: Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”

#99

Post by xaritas »

jasoncrawford wrote: post #15
pshc wrote: post #6

Oh hey! This is exactly what Edward Tufte taught us at his course the other week. Now I'm curious as to who originated this practice...?

Yeah, I think this practice originated at Amazon not long after Edward Tufte's article “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint” was published. I think I heard that Bezos read that article and was influenced by it.

Probably true. The reason I was introduced to Tufte is when he was invited to give a talk at an Amazon Fishbowl (informal, internal lecture/music series). This had a strong stamp of Jeff-approval. I don't think that this particular practice was adopted immediately but Bezos plays a long game and this was probably an opening move.

Re: Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”

#100

Post by Pfhreak »

raphman wrote: post #65
denrober wrote: post #24

Amazon, when I worked there, had the worst meeting discipline of all the companies I have worked for. Meetings normally started 10 minutes late and most people didn't show up until 5 minutes after the start time. Being punctual it drove me up the wall.

How does this relate to the 'reading group' concept? Did people who arrived late just sit down quietly and start reading?

This is pretty accurate. Most of the meetings start with reading, and if people arrive a few minutes late, they grab a memo and get to marking it up silently without disrupting everyone.
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