Amazon has a few superpowers. One is writing, but the other is so many metrics. I worked at AWS and saw how the weekly metrics meeting was ran, with execs questioning why some metric, out of 10s of thousands, was behaving in a certain way. A good product manager had a good reason, an acceptable one found a reason quickly after the meeting. Without an understanding of the business writing is worthless, and one of the ways Amazon creates this understanding is comprehensive metrics gathering.
It is the combination of business understanding and writing
that is Amazon's superpower.
Agreed that understanding the business is critical. Writing is one of the best ways for someone to develop a better understanding of the business - e.g., what metric are we tracking and why?
Overall, I'm not saying that there aren't a bunch of other important things to running a business, just that great writing makes running a business far easier.
On a side note – implementing performance management gets crazy gains without requiring process changes. I used to get an immediate 30%+ productivity bump when I'd implement performance management (e.g., metrics, daily huddles) in a place that had little of it.
It is the combination of business understanding and writing that is Amazon's superpower.