Empty chair in the meeting room
At Amazon, a meeting room often has an empty chair to represent the customer.
This connects with another of Amazon’s distinctive peculiarism: Working Backwards.
Instead of starting with features, teams start with the customer’s ideal outcome.
The first deliverable is not a prototype or a design document. It is a "future dated" press release written as if the product has already launched.
I like the concept of Working Backwards because it focuses on outcomes not outputs.