In my time at Amazon, I’ve observed the way we use documents is incredibly unique. A lot has been written about the six-pager and PR/FAQ so I’m not going focus on document formats, but I wanted to share how our process benefits from document-based meetings. I also have identified some areas for improvement if you are looking to adopt document-based meetings for your workplace.

I’ve been wanting to write this blog post for a while and Jaana’s tweet finally gave me the inspiration to share my thoughts.

My role is a Sr. Developer Advocate within AWS Container Services so my experience may be different from other areas and roles at Amazon. A majority of my meetings start with reading a document. This takes “this meeting could have been…” and flips it upside down. Most of the time, if there isn’t a doc there isn’t a meeting.

Depending on the meeting, the document could be a six-pager, a PR/FAQ, a one-pager about an idea, a narrative to help find a solution to a problem, or even a service review full of charts, graphs and bullet points. The document adapts to fit the audience and purpose of the meeting.

Reading documents is so ingrained in our culture and process that our scheduling tools have check boxes to automatically create a document. If I’m catching up on a new service or feature launch, I will find the document rather than emailing or calling the product manager.

The interesting part to me isn’t in the format of the document, but how it is used. Meetings start with reading. Depending on the length of the document, we’ll read anywhere from ten minutes to half an hour. If the meeting has a long document (six-pagers are the longest) and many attendees, the meeting will be scheduled for enough time to read and discuss.

Reading the doc is part of the scheduled time. I’ve worked at plenty of places that I’ve tried to document everything for a meeting ahead of time. I’ve written well thought-out emails, shared links to documents, and written detailed wiki pages. In all of my meetings outside of Amazon I had one of three outcomes:

• No one read the email/document and I had to explain everything in the meeting
• Some people read the document but forgot what it said because they read it days or hours before
• At least one person had a question that I could have answered via email

Before I started at Amazon these were some of the expected benefits to reading in meetings.

• All of the information for the meeting is contained in the doc
• People are not expected to find their own time to read
• The document is fresh in everyone’s mind

Some other benefits I’ve found while putting it in practice are:

• Presenters, including myself, don’t have to feel nervous about presenting in front of people.
• Documents help eliminate many biases, for or against, the person who wrote the document.
• You read everything in your own voice and vocal communication barriers such as accents, vocal ticks, or handicaps (e.g. stuttering or hearing loss) are not present in the document.