1.2.1. Working Backwards from Business Outcomes
💡 First Principle: If you start from the technology, every problem looks like a fit for it; if you start from the outcome, you can judge which technology, if any, is the cheapest reliable path to it. Working backwards forces the questions that technology-first thinking skips: Who is the customer? What exactly changes for them? How will we measure it?
Amazon popularized a discipline called working backwards: before building anything, write the press release and the frequently asked questions as if the product had launched. If you cannot describe the customer benefit clearly, you are not ready to build. Applied to AI, it produces a simple sequence:
- Define the outcome. "Reduce average claim-processing time from 9 days to 3 days without increasing error rates."
- Identify the decision or task that drives the outcome. "Adjusters spend 60% of their time reading and summarizing documents."
- Ask what capability would change that task. "Automatic extraction and summarization of claim documents for adjuster review."
- Determine what data, process, and people changes are needed. "Access to scanned claims, a review step, adjuster training."
- Only now, choose the solution type and sourcing. "A managed generative AI service with document understanding, purchased rather than built."
Notice where AI first appears: step 3, and only as a capability. A specific model or platform appears at step 5. Teams that start at step 5 ("We have a generative AI license; what can we do with it?") produce demos. Teams that start at step 1 produce results, and they sometimes discover that the answer is a process fix rather than AI at all.
⚠️ Exam Trap: Options such as "select a foundation model and run a proof of concept to discover use cases" sound proactive but invert the sequence. When the question asks what to do first, prefer the option that defines the business problem, outcome metric, or stakeholder need.
Reflection Question: A marketing director says, "Competitors are using generative AI, so we need a generative AI project this quarter." How would you reframe that request using the working-backwards sequence before agreeing to any project?
