Presentation culture at Amazon

“Amazon banned PowerPoint presentations” — it's hard to believe when you first hear it, as in many companies PowerPoint presentations are a fundamental work process. Working for Amazon for years, I can assure you this is the absolute truth. Instead, we use documents as a dominant way of communication. It is believed, that reading and discussing written and well-structured documents is a more efficient way to persuade and appeal to an audience.

Why Amazon banned PowerPoint presentations

Quoting Jeff Bezos, “PowerPoint is designed to persuade, it’s kind of a sales tool”. He believes, that a PowerPoint presentation doesn’t give clarity, a real understanding of a matter. Instead of seeing bullet points, that hide all complexity or sloppy thinking, he prefers to read a complete, narrative text with well-thought-out sentences, that conduct an idea and discuss it when everyone is on the same page.

A lyrical digression: If you know where Amazon started, then you probably understand where this idea came from. Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos as an online marketplace for books.

How to work without presentations

A usual meeting at Amazon (a presentation of a new design, an idea, a research, etc) happens in 2 steps:

1. Reading a prepared document. A person, who presents a proposal has to prepare a well-structured, polished, and most importantly, concise document. At the beginning of the meeting, 25–45 minutes are reserved for reading the document and making notes by reviewers in complete silence.
2. Discussing it all together, answering questions for 25–45 minutes. When time is up, colleagues begin discussing the proposed idea, starting from overall comments and remarks, and going down to tiny details. At this point, everyone is familiar with the document and has a context to discuss and make an impact, thus, the meeting runs efficiently.

Reading in silence at the beginning of meetings takes place on purpose. No one (especially top-tier managers) has time to read a document offline, as their schedule is full of back-to-back meetings. Dedicating 30 minutes to go through a document at the start of a meeting serves this purpose to ensure, that everyone is on the same page before the discussion.

My opinion about the innovation

Once I joined Amazon, I was amazed to have this culture of presenting ideas. The more I worked, the more I understood the benefits of such activity, and in the end, I look favorably at it now.

Although, drafting and writing the document is tough and requires a lot of edits, consumes an enormous amount of time, in the end, it pays off by the involvement of all meeting participants. During the second half of the meeting, discussions take on a tone of polemic, with recommendations and additions from peers, which is opposite from presenting PowerPoint slides.

At first, being the person who formed the document, I felt uncomfortable receiving so much feedback. At the end of a PowerPoint presentation, you usually receive 2–3 additional questions, for which you have already prepared, but with the Amazon way, every paragraph is criticized and debated. You feel humiliated as if you are wrong about everything. The more you attend meetings, the more you learn. Over time you get used to this format and start to see, that people don’t criticize you, since making comments and forming a review, they intend to make sure that the proposal is indeed working and it is thought out to the smallest detail, as by reading the document, they share its ownership.

Another purpose of introducing the format is to have polished documentation, that can be referenced later. Amazon is huge, people come and go and from time to time organizations are being restructured. Having a well-written document instead of slides with bullet points helps the future not only to grasp a high-level concept but also the reasoning, capturing the smallest details behind it.

However don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t mean, that at Amazon, we don’t have presentations at all. They are held in case of organizational changes or to convey information (for example, the Year-over-Year changes) by the management team to a wide audience of employees.

Will it work for your company?

From everything said above, you might get the impression that I idolize the format. In reality, there is no such one-size-fits-all approach. Amazon is a leader and to still be it, the company cannot afford to fail customer expectations. The document is hard and time-consuming to write and can take days, even weeks, but it pays off in the size of Amazon since even a small success or failure is noticeable to the whole world.

Furthermore, Amazon has a strong writing culture and consistently improves it. There are meetings and workshops on how to work with documentation and be more successful and concise. Any new concept requires time to be adopted by a company. Decades of Amazon history produced templates and best practices for writing documentation.

I’ll end with a simple truth: making a change in a workflow just because some big company does it is always not a good idea, but having a mechanism in mind, and considering it as an alternative in case something is not working for years is a way to go.

Links

1. Jeff Bezos on banning PowerPoint in meetings at Amazon (a 6-minute fragment, where Jeff Bezos himself explains the culture of presentations at Amazon)