Putting Amazon’s PR/FAQ to Practice

I’m convinced that customer-centricity is the main benefit of the PR/FAQ. Sure, you may accomplish many of the same goals with a more conventional Product Requirements Document (PRD). Or you may write a free-form, technical spec — which was what I commonly did in previous roles. But I’ve learnt that the ‘press release’ portion of the PR/FAQ format ... See more

One useful way to reason about the discomfort in writing a PR/FAQ is that it serves as a signalling mechanism: if you feel like you’re pulling teeth while writing it, it means that you’ve not done the work necessary to answer the five questions in a plausible manner.

It becomes a syncing mechanism for various stakeholders to gain conviction together, before putting too much capital at risk.

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 ... See more

The most difficult aspect of writing a PR/FAQ is emotional. If you find yourself attempting do a PR/FAQ, it’s likely that you’re writing to concretise some new idea you have in your head. The dominant feeling that you’ll experience when you attempt to write one is that you will discover just how shitty your new idea really is.

Writing a press release from the perspective of a consumer front-loads the discomfort: who is this for, really? Why would they even care?

It forces the execution team to grapple with the proposed customer value, from the perspective of the customer.