Where our approach comes from
Our method is not invented. It is assembled from ideas that have proven themselves over decades, and adapted for one purpose: to lead the delivery of products customers actually value, not to teach a framework from the outside.
Every consultancy claims to put the customer first. Most say it on a values page, then hold meetings optimising for quarterly numbers and design products around what the team already knows how to build. The gap between the claim and the practice is where most product effort is lost.
What follows is the lineage of how we close that gap, credited honestly, because understanding where an idea comes from is part of using it well.
It starts with human-centred design
The foundational idea is older than any of the methods built on it: start from the human need, understand the problem from the perspective of the person who has it, and work back to the solution. Human-centred design predates the technology industry. It is the discipline underneath everything we do, and the reason we never begin with a feature.
Amazon operationalised it
What Amazon did, and did exceptionally well, was turn that philosophy into a repeatable mechanism. Rather than trusting teams to "be customer-obsessed" as an aspiration, they built a process that forces it. Before anything significant is built, the team writes the press release and FAQ for the finished product, the PRFAQ, from the customer's point of view. It defines the customer, the problem, the solution, and how success will be measured, before a line of code exists. Ideas that do not hold up are killed on paper, which is cheap, rather than in code, which is not.
This is the Working Backwards method, documented in detail by two long-serving Amazon executives, Colin Bryar and Bill Carr, and reflected in the collected writings of Jeff Bezos. It is resource-intensive by design. As Bezos put it, the process is not meant to be easy; it is meant to save a great deal of work later by making sure you build the right thing.
The flywheel: value that compounds
Alongside Working Backwards sits a second idea we draw on: the customer flywheel. It too is an adaptation, Jeff Bezos applied Jim Collins's "flywheel effect" from Good to Great, the principle that consistent effort in the right direction compounds into momentum, each turn building on the last. Applied to product, it means that solving real customer problems is not a one-time event. Done consistently, it builds a self-reinforcing loop: better customer understanding leads to better products, which deepen trust, which reveal the next problem worth solving.
What we added
We lead the delivery. The best-known names in product teach the method through books, courses, and workshops. That work is valuable, and we have learned from it. But teaching is not the same as doing. We embed, find the customer problem worth solving, lead your team to build against it, and only then transfer the capability, by doing the work together on real decisions, until your team can run it without us.
We have adapted these ideas for growth-stage and enterprise organisations that do not have the luxury of a fully-built product function, and that need the work led, not just described. The lineage is theirs. The delivery is ours.