Great Ideas Can Start On A Scrap Of Paper

Why full specifications aren't always needed to set the vision

The picture below is the very first whiteboard drawing that Jeff Bezos made about Alexa, the ubiquitous virtual assistant from Amazon.

It doesn’t look like much does it, but from this, half a billion Alexa-enabled devices have been sold.

As you can see the first “design” isn’t in-depth.

It consists of a badly drawn cube, a few arrows saying mike, wi-fi, speaker, and (I’m not sure why) kill. It also has a short note about the potential challenge of initially connecting the device to the Wi-Fi. That’s it.

It’s not a full-on, full-spec design. It’s the manifestation of an idea, and sometimes that’s all the first step needs to be.

Why are simple sketches the place to start? Read on …