Ellen Cowan (03:04):
When we first started working together, we shared a bit about our culture of innovation at Amazon, and we looked at our Working Backwards mechanism where we reframe problems through the lens of what the customers might want or need, not thinking so much about organizational goals, but more thinking about our customers. And then we work to define the most important problem to solve for those customers, and start with something quite specific as an invention that we can then test and iterate upon in order to bring a solution to life quickly. What was that process like for you, moving away from your goal to scale to a million?
Eric Rice (03:42):
Working Backwards made us completely rethink how we would scale our programs. For years, we were for everybody and anyone, but we couldn't just build bigger. We had to build smarter. And so through Working Backwards, we identified several personas. People with emotions and families and jobs, and all these things that rounded them out. And then we looked at the intersection of what do they have in common? And we found the workplace — struggles in the workplace, struggles connecting, struggles with trust. And also coming out of the pandemic, hybrid was taking over and it was a lot.
Matt Kaplan (04:18):
And we dove into this work right in the throes of the pandemic. So for us as an organization, it was actually our first opportunity to use virtual platforms. We were doing Zoom workshops, we were doing our trainings via Teams. It was our first experience of not being with people and holding people and hugging people. It was really, really different for us, and it didn't always feel great. And I think that really helped us as we got into the Working Backwards is like, "We better stretch our comfort zones here." And especially where we landed with digital first.
Ellen Cowan (05:32):
Now, I know we looked at many potential solutions, so then how do you decide what's the right thing to build once you know what the problem is?
Eric Rice (05:44):
Working Backwards really helped us define exactly the person that we wanted to serve. And then we put that idea out to all sorts of different friends, companies, partners, asking for ideas. And what we got back we were able to take a look at, reflect on, iterate on, and really refine for that segment what would be the best product to put out there.
Ellen Cowan (06:03):
What did you end up with?
Matt Kaplan (06:54):
We actually landed on something that I think we were really comfortable with, which was an analog game that would bring people together, help people connect. And that game, as much as we loved it, we're going through this exercise and we're like, "Are we going to sell a million board games? Who sells a million board games?"
Ellen Cowan (07:19):
How do we lose the scale? We've got something people love to do, everybody who sits down and does this feels great. How do we bring it into the workplace, and will it scale to a million? What's the process there?
Eric Rice (07:37):
The one nice part about the analog game is it really helped us identify the core of our modality. We ask people or we give them space to be creative, and tell us a story. And it worked as an analog game. And so when we decided to pivot into the digital game, I think we weren't as scared to approach technology like we had been in the past.
Matt Kaplan (07:57):
But it was also like there was an aha moment when, you were there, there were 20 of us around a table playing a game. And we all kind of looked at each other and I think it was Sanju said, "Well, why don't we just do this digital first?" And that sounded great. We've never done anything digital in our life. I think over the course of the next two hours, we whiteboarded how we would take an analog game and convert it to a digital product. It was fun. And we ended up selecting that as our pilot product. And we set out to build that MLP right from there.