PR/FAQs format is used in Amazon for starting new initiatives. This document is written by product managers/owners with the help of directors+VPs and evaluated by the C-level team. Below I have copy-pasted a few pages from the book "Working Backwards" in which the authors breakdown the PR/FAQs format.
What are PR/FAQs and why are they useful?
The primary point of the process is to shift from an internal/company perspective to a customer perspective. Customers are pitched new products constantly. Why will this new product be compelling enough for customers to take action and buy it? A common question asked by executives when reviewing the product features in the PR is “so what?” If the press release doesn’t describe a product that is meaningfully better (faster, easier, cheaper) than what is already out there, or results in some stepwise change in customer experience, then it isn’t worth building. The PR gives the reader the highlights of the customer experience. The FAQ provides all the salient details of the customer experience as well as a clear-eyed and thorough assessment of how expensive and challenging it will be for the company to build the product or create the service. That’s why it’s not unusual for an Amazon team to write ten drafts of the PR/FAQ or more, and to meet with their senior leaders five times or more to iterate, debate, and refine the idea.
The PR/FAQ process creates a framework for rapidly iterating and incorporating feedback and reinforces a detailed, data-oriented, and fact-based method of decision-making. We found that it can be used to develop ideas and initiatives—a new compensation policy, for example—as well as products and services. Once your organization learns how to use this valuable tool, it is addicting. People start to use it for everything. Over time, we refined and normalized the specifications for the PR/FAQ. The press release (PR) portion is a few paragraphs, always less than one page. The frequently asked questions (FAQ) should be five pages or less. There are no awards for extra pages or more words. The goal isn’t to explain all the excellent work you have done but rather to share the distilled thinking that has come from that work.
People who write press releases for a living, or indeed anyone who has been professionally edited, knows the importance of boiling things down as much as possible, but the people in product development don’t always understand this. In the early days of the PR/FAQ, a common mistake people made was to assume that more means better. They’d produce long documents, attach page after page of narrative, insert charts and tables in an appendix. The virtue of this approach, at least from the perspective of the writer, is that it shows all their work and allows them to avoid hard decisions about what’s important and what’s not— leaving those for the group. However, restricting the length of the document is, to use a term that came up when describing the narratives, a forcing function—we have seen that it develops better thinkers and communicators.
The creation of the PR/FAQ starts with the person who originated either the idea or the project writing a draft. When it’s in shareable condition, that person sets up a one-hour meeting with stakeholders to review the document and get feedback. At the meeting, they distribute the PR/FAQ in either soft or hard copy, and everyone reads it to themselves. When they have finished, the writer asks for general feedback. The most senior attendees tend to speak last, to avoid influencing others.
Once everyone has given their high-level responses, the writer asks for specific comments, line by line, paragraph by paragraph. This discussion of the details is the critical part of the meeting. People ask hard questions. They engage in intense debate and discussion of the key ideas and the way they are expressed. They point out things that should be omitted or things that are missing.
After the meeting, the writer distributes meeting minutes to all the attendees, including notes on the feedback. Then they get to work on the revision, incorporating responses to the feedback. When it is polished, they present it to the executive leaders in the company. There will be more feedback and discussion. More revision and more meetings may be required. The PR/FAQ review process can be stressful, no matter how constructive and unbiased the feedback. Gaps will be found! A PR/FAQ under serious consideration for implementation will typically require multiple drafts and meetings with the leadership. Senior managers, directors, and executive leaders who oversee the authors of PR/FAQs become skilled evaluators and contributors to the process.
The more PR/FAQs they read, and the more products they build and launch using the PR/FAQ process, the more capable they become at identifying the omissions and flaws in the author’s thinking. And so the process itself creates a tier of master evaluators as it vets and strengthens the idea and aligns everyone involved in the project, from individual contributor to CEO. It also increases the likelihood that a project will be approved and funded. You should plan on making many revisions to the PR/FAQ document, even after the project has formally started, to reflect changes and new elements
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