Former Amazon principal engineer Steve Huynh recently reminisced about his time at Amazon on The Pragmatic Engineer podcast, praising the company’s “6-page memos” as a form of “reading culture” and a “secret sauce.”
According to Huynh, Amazon employees were required to frequently draft these memos and share them with other employees to provide updates and present new projects. Huynh himself spent “1 to 4 hours” each day writing and reading these memos.
These memos, whether on business strategies, system designs, or press releases, had to strictly adhere to the memo format, including page length, font size, and type.
Huynh started working at Amazon in 2006 when the company was just beginning to make a profit, with Jeff Bezos at the helm. Bezos strongly promoted the culture of writing these “6-page memos” throughout the company, which became well-known.
In a letter to shareholders in 2017, Bezos stated, “We don’t do PowerPoint, we write memos of 6 pages, even though the quality of these memos is obviously uneven.” Before every company meeting, employees would read these memos together, rather than in advance.
Bezos explained on the Lex Fridman Podcast in 2023 why he didn’t require employees to read the memos in advance, stating, “The problem is that people don’t have time to read carefully, they just skim the memos quickly before the meeting, or maybe they don’t read at all… They pretend to have read the memo, just like some college students.”
Employees were asked to read these memos in 10-point font during meetings, which had to be precise, concise, easily understandable, detailed, and required the listeners to focus and pay attention.
Huynh mentioned on the podcast, “I later became very good at reading these documents, able to quickly understand the situation.” Reading the 6-page memos taught him to express himself in the same format. He told Business Insider last year that he left Amazon to focus full-time on creating content for YouTube, but still admires Amazon’s reading culture.
He specifically pointed out that replicating this culture may be challenging, stating, “The difficulty lies in the need to be disciplined, principled, and for senior executives to lead by example.”
Andy Jassy, Amazon’s current CEO, has been with the company since 1997, starting to write memos from that time. He described during a speech at the University of Washington in 2017 his experience of presenting what would later become Amazon Web Services.
He recalled, “This document, which we later called a vision doc, could only be 6 pages long… I was very nervous at the time, I went through 30 drafts, and Jeff (refusing to give in on the requirement) didn’t even blink.”
(Reference: Business Insider)