The Anatomy of an Amazon 6-pager

In the halls of power at Amazon, busy executives have no time for PowerPoints. At the start of a meeting, everyone gets a printed 6-page memo, and spends 20-25 minutes reading it silently and marking it up. After the discussion, the printouts (typically with detailed hand-written comments) are handed back to the person who called the meeting, whose job it is to incorporate all the feedback (written and oral) and revise the document.

These memos take days to write, but that’s by design. They protect the time of busy executives who don’t need to hear corny jokes and see clip art of people shaking hands. 

The Amazon 6-pagers follow a formula, and include appendices that are packed with data. The narrative in the memo makes frequent references to the data in the appendix, but doesn’t bother to insert and comment on charts. The assumption is that anyone important enough to be invited the meeting knows how to jump from the narrative to the appendix and interpret the data for themselves.

Former Amazon employee Jesse Freeman notes that there doesn’t seem to be a copy of a real 6-page Amazon memo out in the wild, so he constructed a sample Amazon 6-pager focusing on his hobby project, in order to show the outside world the strengths of the Amazon format.

Everything about this document was designed by experts, for experts, so this particular format isn’t really useful for me to introduce in my teaching, but I think it’s significant to note that attendees are expected to read a printout in silence, and though some members do attend remotely, using laptops during the reading phase is “frowned upon.”

Due to changes in the way students use technology, every humanities professor I know is shifting to having students do more in-class work, because we want to assess work that we know the students actually completed themselves. Sadly, that means less time for the free-flowing class discussions where I feel the real learning happens, so I’m thinking about ways to adapt this format — students come to class and put away their technology. They spend 25 minutes reading a document, 25 minutes discussing it with their peers, and 25 minutes writing about it. 

I would spend every class period that way, of course. There’s still a place for lecture and open-ended workshops, but students who don’t trust their ability to learn without having ChatGPT do the summarizing and analyzing and synthesizing for them, so I’m looking for ways to give them practice doing that. 

In my Shakespeare class, I do occasionally ask students to put away their technology, hand them a sonnet I expect they’ve never seen before, and ask them to write about it, but the Amazon memo assumes the readers know quite a lot. I think this could work as a mechanism for peer-reviewing student term paper drafts. 

Perhaps the most challenging part of working at Amazon comes down to being able to write a 6-pager. While there are several types of documents you may need to write at Amazon, such as the backward press-release or the 2-pager, your ability to write a 6-pager will directly impact your status at the table and your ability to move up in the company.

[…]

Each group in Amazon has its way of writing 6-pagers. While they may look or read a bit differently, they all share the same structure. Also, there are different approaches based on the goal of the document. The example I am going to share is from what we call an operational plan document. These are 6-month plans that outline the current state of the business, the historical data from the last period, the goals for this period, and how you plan on achieving them. –Jesse Freeman, The Anatomy of an Amazon 6-pager