The Amazon 6-Pager: A Deep Thinking Document

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Working Backwards" by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.

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What is the Amazon 6-pager? How do Amazon employees use the 6-pager to present ideas?

The Amazon 6-pager is a Deep Thinking Document (DTD) used to communicate complex ideas in place of a traditional PowerPoint presentation. The details of how these documents work can improve many business processes.

Learn how the Amazon 6-pager works and how it has contributed to the company’s success.

Whenever an Amazon employee wants to propose any course of action, they’re expected to write a detailed argument in a Deep Thinking Document (DTD), what they call a 6-pager at Amazon, rather than present it in a slideshow presentation. The Amazon 6-pager serves as the central focus of group meetings. However, Amazon employees use a 6-pager in practically every meeting about anything in the company, not just product development—for example, proposed process improvements or budget changes.

Amazon uses this tool to implement another one of its guiding principles in all business meetings: Everyone in the company should do higher-quality work than anyone would reasonably expect and push others to do the same.

(Shortform note: Although setting high standards for yourself and others can produce good work, it’s important not to expect perfection. In The Gifts of Imperfection, Brené Brown argues that everyone makes mistakes, and pretending that it’s possible to always do perfect work sets people up to feel ashamed of themselves when they fail. In Dare to Lead, she elaborates that such shame in the workplace can cause people to use a number of unhealthy and unproductive defensive behaviors, such as habitual cynicism or criticizing others. If your DTDs start reinforcing this kind of perfectionism—for instance, if employees get taunted by their coworkers for writing weak documents—you may want to retire it for some time.)

Over time, Amazon employees discovered that traditional slideshow presentations made it difficult for meeting participants to understand and accurately judge the ideas being presented. As a medium, slideshows can only convey very basic ideas. Slides lack the space necessary to convey complex ideas via text, and the linear presentation of slides makes it difficult to illustrate how a web of ideas connect.

The 6-pager solves the problems with slideshows: Detailed text documents give presenters the space they need to fully explain complex concepts. Additionally, Amazon employees dedicate the first several minutes of any meeting to a silent read-through of the presenter’s 6-pager. This allows all meeting participants to engage with the presenter’s ideas nonlinearly, flipping through the document at their own pace—which enhances their understanding—rather than passively listening to the ideas just once from beginning to end.

After all participants finish reading the 6-pager, the meeting can begin in earnest. Open discussion of the presenter’s ideas is vastly more productive after everyone has a chance to digest them.

Deep Thinking With Asynchronous Discussion

In It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson also seek to replace traditional in-person presentations with a meeting format more suitable for deep thinking. However, they conclude that the best format for such thinking is asynchronous discussion.

Like Bryar and Carr, Fried and Hansson recommend that employees distill everything they would put in a presentation into a detailed text document. However, rather than call a meeting to discuss this document, they recommend just posting it somewhere everyone can see it, like a shared workplace server. Then, allow the team to read and consider the document over several days before posting feedback.

Fried and Hansson find that workers discover their best insights when they can consider a set of ideas nonlinearly over several days. For instance, an employee might re-read the document five times in its entirety or keep referring back to a single page of data while developing their response.

If these documents empower presenters to pose complex ideas, their audience arguably needs more time to digest those ideas. Amazon allows meeting participants to engage with the document nonlinearly at their own pace but only within certain time limits—they just have the beginning of the meeting to digest the presenter’s ideas. According to Fried and Hansson, such time-sensitive meetings lead to knee-jerk reactions from the audience, which result in poorer business decisions.

The Amazon 6-Pager: A Deep Thinking Document