The Six-Page Narrative Memo
Replace slide decks with a written narrative that forces real thinking before any big bet
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 7
- Confidence
- 93%
Bezos banned PowerPoint at Amazon in 2004 and replaced it with a maximum six-page written narrative that opens every idea meeting. The memo has two load-bearing parts. First, a future press release, written years ahead of launch, describing what the customer will get and why they will care — this forces the customer benefit to exist before a line of code does. Second, an FAQ anticipating every question a customer, vendor, or internal stakeholder might raise, each answered twice: a short answer and a longer discussion answer that exposes the reasoning. The memo is handed out in the room, not in advance, and the first 15-20 minutes are silent reading. Because nobody can hide behind bullets and nobody interrupts, the discussion starts where a presentation would end: at what the author failed to anticipate.
Origin
Extracted from Young and Profiting
Core principles
- 01Bullet points let you hide; sentences expose gaps in thinking
- 02Writing is how you find out what you actually think
- 03Everyone must start a meeting on the same page, literally
- 04Slowing down to write speeds up everything after
- 05A good memo is edited, shared, rested, and rewritten
How to run it
- 1
Ban the deck
Remove slides from the decision meeting entirely. The constraint is the point: without bullets, the author has to construct an argument in full sentences.
Pro tip Announce the ban before the work starts, or the author will write the deck first and back-fill the prose.
Watch out Skilled presenters will resist hardest; their advantage is exactly what this removes.
- 2
Write the future press release
Date a press release at the intended launch and write it as if the product already shipped. State what the customer gets and what the benefits are, in customer language.
Pro tip Read a company's actual investor-relations press releases to copy the shape and register.
Watch out If you cannot write a compelling press release, the idea is not compelling — that is a finding, not a formatting problem.
- 3
Build the FAQ
List the questions customers, vendors, and internal teams will ask. For a sidewalk delivery robot that means things like whether it could injure a pet, who supervises it, and what it can carry.
Pro tip Ask the most skeptical person you know for five questions you would rather not answer.
Watch out An FAQ of only easy questions is marketing copy wearing an FAQ costume.
- 4
Answer each question twice
Give every question a short direct answer and a separate discussion answer that walks through the reasoning behind it.
Pro tip The discussion answer is where you discover which assumptions you cannot actually defend.
- 5
Compress to six pages and let it rest
Edit down to a maximum of six pages. Circulate to the team for input, set it aside for a couple of days, then return and revise. Expect roughly a week end to end.
Pro tip Bezos claims a good memo is distinguishable from a mediocre one on sight — the tell is the time invested.
Watch out A memo written the night before reads exactly like a memo written the night before.
- 6
Read it in the room
Hand out the physical document at the meeting and sit in silence while everyone reads. Only then open discussion.
Pro tip Sit through the discomfort of the silence; it is where the shared context gets built.
Watch out Sending it in advance guarantees a room split between those who read it and those who skimmed it.
- 7
Run the discussion on gaps, not summary
Because everyone has the same information, the conversation is about what the memo failed to cover and which questions went unanticipated.
Pro tip Log every unanticipated question — that list is the real output of the meeting.
In the wild
Anderson used the six-page memo process himself to present a new service he was building to a group of potential investors. He wrote the narrative, printed it, and — against instinct — did not send it ahead. At the meeting he handed out the physical document and let the room read in silence for the first fifteen minutes, which he described as deeply uncomfortable. Then the discussion started, and it was not the usual round of clarifying questions, because he had already answered those in the document. Instead the investors pushed on what he had not covered and asked questions he had not anticipated.
→ The discussion was materially richer than a presentation would have produced, because everyone was literally on the same page and the conversation started at the gaps rather than the basics.
Amazon Scout is a six-wheeled, cooler-sized autonomous robot that travels sidewalks to deliver packages to homes. Anderson infers a six-page memo was written for it around 2016, well before Amazon began experimenting in 2017 and announced its first suburban Washington test in 2019. That memo would have opened with a press release dated to launch, describing what a customer gets from sidewalk delivery, followed by an FAQ working through the questions the idea invites — whether the robot could injure a pet, who watches it in transit, what package sizes it handles.
→ By 2020 Scout had progressed from memo to multi-year iteration and was expanding into new areas, including Franklin, Tennessee.
Common mistakes
Sending the memo out in advance
Pre-reading looks considerate but destroys the mechanism. Half the room arrives having skimmed it, and the meeting collapses back into a summary session.
Writing prose that is really a deck
Paragraphs made of stitched-together bullets preserve every gap the format was meant to expose. The narrative has to argue, not list.
Treating the week of writing as overhead
The objection that this slows things down misreads the trade. The writing front-loads the thinking so the build phase can move fast on problems that are already identified.
Is it for you?
Best for
Leaders evaluating a genuinely new product, service, or platform where the downside of a shallow decision is large.
Not ideal for
Fast, low-stakes operational calls where a week of writing costs more than the decision is worth.
From the transcript
“bezos in 2004 banned powerpoint yep it's never used anywhere at amazon and he requires a written narrative a story a maximum of six pages…”
“he believes using bullet points or a powerpoint presentation is lazy because you can hide behind those bullet points without having to really dig deep”
“a good memo takes probably at least a week to write right because you write it you edit it you share it with others on…”
From the episode
Steven Anderson: Grow Your Business Like Amazon
Steven Anderson