A planning discipline, originally documented at Amazon, where teams start by writing the press release and FAQ for a feature as if it had already launched, then work backwards to figure out what to build. The exercise forces the team to answer the hardest product questions first — who is this for, what does it do, why does it matter — before any code is written. The artifact is usually a one-to-six-page narrative document, read silently at the start of the meeting, followed by structured discussion. Working backwards pairs naturally with async-first cultures: the document does the heavy lifting; the meeting refines the edges. The most common failure is teams that write the doc but never actually use it to make trade-offs once development starts.