The Benefits of Document Writing Cultures in Tech

Amazon is famous for its culture where most business ideas/proposals are written out as full sentences and paragraphs in long-form (2–6 page) narratively structured documents. It’s also the norm that these documents are reviewed “live” in meetings, either in-person or via video-conferencing. In these “doc review” meetings, people spend the first 20-minutes or so silently reading the whole document, before the group gets into the discussion for the remaining time.

It was sometimes exhausting, as you would periodically end up needing a “second putt” (meeting) if the first document reviewed was unsatisfactory in answering the questions needed to make the decision — whether that was to green-light a new initiative, to launch a product, to invest in a particular area of technology, or even to acquire a company. But these “exhausting” discussions lead to better & more thought-out conclusions that stood the test of time, more often than not. While it’s not a perfect methodology, the depth of analysis, thought, discussion & ultimately results that eminated from this document-based “review & comment live” culture has been far better than what I’ve seen in Powerpoint-based or purely asynchronous (think email, wiki pages) tech cultures.

Having seen many tech company cultures from the inside, including Amazon’s, but also Zynga & more recently VMware, I strongly believe there are significant benefits that document writing & reading have over the other forms of communication — especially PowerPoint presentations given live. This includes some aspects of accessibility & inclusion, and in reducing biases that often benefit people already in the “majority” groups. Obviously document writing/live review isn’t a perfect methodology, I don’t think any system is or can be.

First, I can of course be persuaded there are downsides of the “read for 20 minutes then discuss” portion for people that don’t read fast, or where English isn’t their native language. I recognize that I read fast and that’s definitely not the case for everyone. The reason for not relying on pre-reading is that no one ever consistently pre-reads, no matter how often you remind them to — and that it’s an imposition on people whose schedules are often already full. Neverthless, having a practice where people are expected to finish their documents at least 24 hours in advance and send them out to people who do need the extra time/prefer to pre-read, would be an improvement. Still, the absence of solving for this wouldn’t mean your next best answer is abandoning the document format.

Second, I also recognize not everyone is comfortable speaking up in the room during the Q&A portion, especially at lower levels of seniority, or where they’re from cultures where speaking up/arguing live is not the norm. I don’t have a perfect solution for this, although I’ll note in recent years even at Amazon people have embraced online document management systems (they use Workdocs & Quip, which are vaguely like Google docs) where people can add comments or suggest edits offline, which does help address some of this. I was even in meetings at Amazon where we had an interpreter for an engineering manager who was deaf, so that he could participate in the live conversation. Imperfect, I’m sure, but a better solution for a company at scale than abandoning doc based reviews/discussions. Ultimately it’s up to the more senior leaders to create an inclusive environment during the Q&A portion. For example, I would often intentionally defer to the people in my org who wrote the docs when the AWS CEO & SVPs would ask questions, rather than fielding the question myself. I’d obviously let the document writer know in advance of the meeting if I planned to do this, and field the questions myself if they weren’t comfortable. I learned this habit from one of my managers at AWS, who I happen to think is one of the best execs there, but it’s not a universal practice. So admittedly this is more of a good intention than a mechanism, and not one I think Amazon gets right at scale.

At the same time — you can make similar arguments about the downsides of freeform or presentation-based cultures, which even more greatly favor extroverts and English speakers, and where the discussion rarely stays on topic because “powerfully” positioned people dominate via interruption, and we know that means reinforcing the dominant groups. Think about how many presentations you’ve sat through where by slide 2 people are already talking about something not in the presentation, or that you plan to answer on slide 10. I think it’s endemic to the format unless you’re giving a lecture to a captive audience at a conference. I’ve seen this first hand push out women, the disabled (esp of speech/hearing) & under-represented minorities who don’t come from the types of cultures where presenting or interrupting is the norm.

You could say to me, “OK, I get the benefit of writing out full documents and commenting on them, but why don’t we just do all of that asynchronously? Why have meetings at all?” I agree that in some places async doc writing + commenting works — GitLab is famous for this, but their culture of documentation/review is as “rigid” as Amazon, so you’d have to invest very heavily to make sure everyone upholds the norm around commenting in a timely fashion, and knowing when you can declare you are “done” with the review. Personally, I would argue with purely asynchronous review cultures you lose some of the benefits of the real-time discussion, including for people from populations that often lack face time with executives. I will again note that even at Amazon, most team’s document writing & reviewing has evolved to be done asynchronously (using Workdocs or Quip) prior to the final executive review, so this was still broadly inclusive, including of reading speeds, comfort in speaking up and of time zones.

I am definitely not one of those people that think Amazon has “gotten it right” when it comes to all things, and even when it comes to this topic, there’s definitely pockets where it became “form over function” (ask me sometime about how long we’d spend on “wire ready” Press Releases), but overall I think the doc writing/review culture is broadly beneficial and generally as or more inclusive than the alternatives I’ve observed. Most companies would benefit from this level of rigor in their product management, engineering, operational and annual planning practices.