Product Development as Iterated Taste

Another one of the biggest benefits of a written PR/FAQ is that it enables the team to truly understand the specific constraints and problems that would prevent a new product idea from being viable and aligning on them.

Most PR/FAQs are rejected, and the ones that pass often generate further questions that need to be answered. This is a feature, not a bug. Spending time up front to think through all the details of a product preserves your company's resources to build products that will yield the highest impact for customers and the business.

Side benefit of this method: by forcing multiple iterations on a PR/FAQ, you implicitly gain the approval of everyone who reviews it, demands iterations on it, and subsequently approves it. This then means that when a product passes the PR/FAQ process but subsequently fails in the market, people are more likely to take collective responsibility.

The Lean Startup model has pretty much become the orthodoxy for launching a new product or company today: build an extremely rough version one, launch it, find some users, and then iterate on the product as quickly as you can (pivoting).

The PR/FAQ process merely increases the odds that your product would succeed; it doesn’t guarantee it.

Amazon’s ‘working backwards process’ is a pretty fascinating example of an alternative to Lean Startup that works . It's simple to describe, but difficult to do. Amazon’s method for  betting on new products is to start from the customer experience and working backwards from that by writing a press release that literally announces the product a... See more