Putting Amazon’s PR/FAQ to Practice

What is the working backwards of PR/FAQ process?

Amazon has a fairly famous practice of writing press releases before launching new products. The name they have for this is the ‘Working Backwards process’ and the primary artefact to come out of that process is something called a ‘PR/FAQ’ — so named because the one-page Press Release is usually accompanied by a long FAQ section, covering most, if not all, the commonly asked questions about the proposed product, feature, or initiative.

Why go through the trouble of writing a press release before building a product?

Spending time up front to think through all the details of a product, and to determine—without committing precious software development resources—which products not to build, preserves your company’s resources to build products that will yield the highest impact for customers and your business.

Customer view

the ‘press release’ portion of the PR/FAQ format ruthlessly forces you to reason from the perspective of a customer — especially one who does not give a shit about your buzzwords, your technology stack, or whatever other sweet lie you tell yourself that makes your idea a good one.

What are the benefits of the PR/FAQ process?

It becomes a syncing mechanism for various stakeholders to gain conviction together, before putting too much capital at risk… It allows leadership to keep abreast on a large number of new product iterations and initiatives, at a sufficient level of clarity and detail.

Format of the PR/FAQ

The basic idea is that it consists of: A 1-page press release. An internal FAQ, which addresses questions that internal stakeholders might ask… An external FAQ, which addresses questions that customers and other external stakeholders might ask

Other questions:

• Who is the customer?
• What’s the problem you’re trying to solve?
• What’s the solution (and you need to explain to the customer, not to yourself).
• Would they reasonably adopt this solution, because you’re asking for a behaviour change?
• What’s the Total Addressable Market (TAM), and is it big enough to be worth doing?

The offerrings and the customer are not clear in the early days

In the early days of a new product or feature or service offering, it’s often not clear what you’re building, much less who the customer is. To make things worse, your initial idea of the customer is often mistaken.

Luck vs strategy

Getting lucky is not a coherent strategy. We should aim to do better than “flail around until we get lucky”.

2 sets of PR/FAQ documents might be needed for a marketplace

And for some ideas, you may need two sets of PR/FAQ documents. A marketplace with sellers and buyers is a great example here.

How to get better at this?

Typically, competent operators expand their understanding of such concepts through lived experience, or by reading case studies, books, news articles and other information sources.