It's not enough just to tell your product team to write a press release and expect them to automatically start thinking about the customer. The reason why the "working backwards" approach has been so successful for Amazon is that they've sewn customercentricity into the fabric of the entire company.

Deep product habits have to be built up over time, through small triggers and reminders that motivate action.

Working backwards isn't a silver bullet that guarantees you success on the scale of AWS. It simply forces you, and everyone in the company, to build around the customer.

Here are a couple proven tactics for building better product habits that can help get your team on board:

• Give the customer a chair in the meeting.
  At Amazon, every meeting that Jeff Bezos attends has an empty chair representing the customer-the "most important person in the room." This is a strong reminder to everyone at the highest level of the food chain that the customer holds the throne.
• Consider scrapping your product roadmap.
  Product roadmaps never actually hold up past the first month or so. Often, product roadmaps represent commitments that shouldn't be kept. Instead of working forward on a product roadmap, work backwards from the customer.
• Force customer-centricity into the code.
  Back in 2002, Jeff Bezos issued a 6-point memo to engineers at Amazon. One of his key points was that "all service interfaces, without exception, need to be externalizable." This meant that everything engineers at Amazon built internally needed to be built as if the customer would use it. These constraints forced Amazon engineers and developers to think of the customer as they wrote code. Today this mentality is hardwired into the company.