/working-backwards is an agent skill that facilitates Amazon's Working
Backwards process: drafting a PR/FAQ (press release + FAQ) for a product
or feature by starting at launch day, before anything is built. It is
portable: any agent host that supports SKILL.md frontmatter and bundled
files can run it.
You supply the product conviction; the skill supplies structure,
customer-side skepticism, and prose. It keeps an empty chair in the room —
the customer who isn't there to object — and every claim in the document has
to survive that framing. It quizzes you on the five customer questions (who is
the customer, what's their problem, what's the single benefit, what's the
evidence, what's the experience), drafts a one-page press release in customer
language, builds an FAQ that holds the hard questions instead of softballs,
then reads the causal spine back to you as IF…THEN claims for scrutiny before
persisting the document to docs/prfaq/.
When an answer is fuzzy it branches to Theory of Constraints thinking tools — Current Reality Tree, Evaporating Cloud, Future Reality Tree — and folds the results back in: surviving negative branches become hard internal FAQs. A PR/FAQ that concludes "don't build this" counts as a success.
/working-backwards is just SKILL.md plus the TEMPLATE.md it points to,
so it works with any agent host that loads skills from a directory.
The quickest way is npx skills:
npx skills add fcescob/working-backwards -g # globally, for every project
npx skills add fcescob/working-backwards # into the current project onlyYou can also install by hand: copy or clone this repo into the directory your
host scans for skills, keeping SKILL.md and TEMPLATE.md together.
Invoke it with /working-backwards, or describe the intent. It should
trigger on requests like "let's write a PR/FAQ for this", "draft a press
release for this feature", "work backwards from the customer", or
"pressure-test this product idea before we build it".
The owner decides throughout: the skill never invents customer evidence — missing evidence becomes an FAQ entry, not a gap papered over. The press release stays on one page; overflow goes to the FAQ or dies.
SKILL.md: the facilitation loop — orient, elicit, draft PR, draft FAQ, read back and scrutinize, persist.TEMPLATE.md: the one-page press release template, writing rules (launch-day tense, empty-chair test, banned words, numbers over adjectives), and external/internal FAQ question banks.
MIT.