The secret to defining and communicating a strong strategy

In this post, Marcelo Calbucci pulls back the curtain on Amazon's PRFAQ process, one of the best tools for crafting strategy.

In a popular article from 2021, Zainab Ghandiyali and I introduced the concept of the Product Strategy Stack. We started from the premise that teams deal with many issues during execution because of the lack of mission and strategy—a problem compounded because “strategy” has been stretched to mean whatever people want it to be. The Product Strategy Stack precisely defines the various concepts swirling around strategy, and breaks those concepts into a working model teams can use to define their strategy.

Since we published that article, people have asked me about the mechanics of developing a strong strategy. In Strategic Thinking for Product Managers, I discuss the premise that strategy is a series of decisions, and I provide a framework on how to make those decisions with a long-term, strategic perspective.

Those decisions provide the raw material for cooking up a strategy. But what does a strong strategy look like? When I worked at Facebook’s Seattle office, I met several product leaders who cut their teeth at Amazon. They all had a remarkably good understanding of how to define and communicate strategy.

I found out their secret—they drew from their experience writing PRFAQ’s, part of Amazon’s Working Backwards process. Over the years, I learned more about PRFAQs by talking to Amazonians, but I never found a good resource on how to master the process… until a few months ago.

Marcelo Calbucci recently released The PRFAQ Framework, the best book I’ve found on the PRFAQ process and how to use Working Backwards to define, communicate, and deliver strategy. In this guest post, Marcelo shares why the PRFAQ is such an important tool for innovators and how to use it to create a concise, sharp, and effective strategy artifact.

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As a founder and product leader, I'm fascinated with strategy. What is it? What makes an excellent strategy? How do you discover it? I've used countless artifacts and frameworks over the years to build new products. The artifacts for strategy felt too academic or not practical. They are not deep enough to have substance on them, leaving gaps, or it felt that we were doing “innovation by Excel.” That was until I joined Amazon. It wasn't a week into my Amazon journey and I ran into a PRFAQ. A new world opened up in my mind.

Amazon has developed over a dozen narrative frameworks for business use cases. There are frameworks for discussing the state of a product, business, or program (e.g., Weekly Business Review, WBR), to discuss what went wrong for a customer (Correction of Error, CoE), for its annual planning process (Operating Plan 1, OP1), to define a team charter, to promote an employee, and more.

The Press Release + Frequently Asked Questions (PRFAQ) is the framework used within the company to decide what opportunities or changes to pursue, from a vision, mission, and strategy point of view. I'm not exaggerating when I say that Amazonians use PRFAQs widely. Do you have a new business or product idea? Start with a PRFAQ. Do you want to add (or remove) features to a product? Write a PRFAQ! Should you launch a new customer program? You guessed it, write a PRFAQ. Even internal teams, such as IT, HR, and Finance, use PRFAQ for their programs, policies, and products. As an executive, my typical week included reading two or three PRFAQs, helping debate and discover gaps, and, when within my area of ownership, deciding on what to pursue now, later, or never.

Seeing a new color

The first time I read a PRFAQ, its quirky characteristics took me away from the content being discussed. I've seen nothing like it–the line numbers on the left margin, the lack of bullet points and diagrams, and the fictitious press release. You can download and read four PRFAQ Examples I included in the book to get a sense of the style and format. Then I had the strangest meeting of my life. People sat silently for twenty minutes, reading the document, taking notes, and leaving comments. Only after everyone read the document, the discussions started. The first two or three PRFAQs felt foreign to me. Then it clicked!

I observed how much vision and strategy teams packed in a six-page document that led to deep and meaningful conversations. People on Amazon don't even think about it since they are so used to doing it that way; I'm not sure they fully appreciate PRFAQs. As someone who had worked in other large companies and done a handful of startups, it was like seeing a whole new color in the spectrum. I observed things I wasn't able to see before.

A recap of the Product Strategy Stack

As defined by Ravi and Zainab, there are five parts for the Product Strategy Stack:

1. Company Mission. The world your company sees and the change it wants to bring to that world.

2. Company Strategy. The logical plan you have to bring your company’s mission into being.

3. Product Strategy. The logical plan for how the product will drive its part of the company's strategy.

4. Product Roadmap. The sequence of features that implement the Product Strategy.

5. Product Goals. The quarterly and day-to-day outcomes of the Product Roadmap that measure progress against the Product Strategy.

We have developed frameworks and systems over the years for roadmap, goal planning, and execution–from Gantt Charts to OKRs, from PRDs to Sprints. Yet, we lack tried-and-true systems for strategy and mission/vision. Again, you'll find plenty of academic papers and books with “formulas” for vision, mission, or strategy. Yet, you never hear how companies have adopted these formulas and have used them widely and consistently over long periods of time. This is where PRFAQs come into play, a battle tested framework with twenty years on its back.

A crash course in PRFAQ

If you read anything about a PRFAQ online, you associate it with a six-page document that has a press release on the first page, and five pages of FAQs. That's only a part of what a PRFAQ is. The way you write the content of a PRFAQ, using Precise Writing, is crucial as well. However, the document is just the artifact that teams use to discover, debate, and decide on a strategy and a vision. I like to think of the PRFAQ document as the “architectural model” for a strategy and a vision that you put at the center of the table, and use it to evoke meaningful debates.

The PRFAQ document is the “architectural model” for a strategy and a vision that you put at the center of the table, and use it to evoke meaningful debates.

The document: Yes, the PRFAQ is six pages long. The first page is a Press Release, written as a visionary statement of a product, program, or business launch announcement. There are exactly seven paragraphs on this press release. I won't detail them here but you can read more about it on the book's website. The second page is the Customer FAQs, a series of questions and answers as if the product, program, or business already existed, and the customer wants to learn more about it (e.g., How much does it cost? Do I need to import my data? Can I connect it to my Google Calendar?). Finally, the other four pages are the Internal FAQs. These are the bulk of the document, where the team captures hard strategic choices, and where they spend the bulk of their time. Optionally, and commonly, PRFAQs have an appendix with a light amount of supporting materials such as a simplified financial model, a summary of user research, or a wireframe or two.

The person responsible for the PRFAQ–typically the product leader or an executive–is in charge of chasing the information about the problem they want to solve, the customer pain points, needs, or desires. They work with the team on a hypothesis for a solution (ideation), to set the boundaries of what it's being considered and what's not (the strategic choices), and to capture it into the document. Once they have their first complete draft, they start a series of Review Sessions. That's where the real value of a PRFAQ comes to life. Each review session will be with a subset of team members, typically split by function, team, or relation to the project. At these meetings, they ask questions about the vision and strategy to discover the truth. The goal is not to get so excited about a project that you put your blinds on, or to make the document owner sweat over the details. It's to collaborate to identify the best possible opportunity available that will deliver the maximum impact for the business and the maximum value for the customer. I call these truth-seeking exercises.

Often, the result of a PRFAQ is a “no-go” decision. That happens when a team can't discover a coherent strategy or the opportunity isn't valuable. For example, the problem isn't as important or as severe as initially thought, the existing solutions are satisfactory and difficult to displace, or the business isn't financially viable. Other times, the decision is to put that initiative on the back-burner because other projects have a higher return-on-investment (ROI) for the organization. Then, you have PRFAQs that turn into approved initiatives–they get the go ahead, the resources, or the funding. Let's get into the details of when and how to use a PRFAQ.

What's a PRFAQ good for?

As I briefly explained, a PRFAQ is a system for product leaders, founders, and innovators to discover, debate, and decide on a strategy and a vision/mission. It applies to a business, a product, a program, a service, a policy, and even to a research initiative. You use it when you are proposing something new, changing something that already exists–as adding new features to a product–or when you are discussing the strategy of shutting down something. It has a prescriptive format and style, so people think critically and focus on the substance of what matters.

The articles about PRFAQs (or Working Backwards) are just a re-hashing of each other. They fundamentally misunderstand what a PRFAQ is and what's good for. The biggest mistake is to think of a PRFAQ as a document, and not as a method. The consequence is that people who try to adopt PRFAQs in their organization might fail miserably. It's the equivalent of giving a person who has never played tennis, a ball and a racquet and telling them to have fun with it. They'll do something, but it won't be playing tennis.

Let me elaborate on what makes the PRFAQ an effective tool to discover, debate, and decide on vision and strategy.

PRFAQ as a Discovery Tool

I have written over a dozen PRFAQs, many after I left Amazon. For every project I'm considering starting, be it a startup, accelerator/fund, side projects, or book, I write a PRFAQ. The reason I do it is that if I can't write a compelling PRFAQ for myself to get started, I don't want to pursue it. There are three reasons PRFAQs are powerful when you are in the discovery phase.

First, the written narrative format is a scientifically proven thinking mechanism. I call this the first superpower that PRFAQs evokes–thinking critically. It's difficult for a person to write an incoherent narrative and not feel angst. The dissonance forces us to keep going back and rewriting the story, even a business story, until it's coherent. In contrast, it's easy to slap together a slide deck and feel great about it, regardless of the gaps, and dissonance.

The interesting aspect of writing is that people believe they need clarity before they write. What I have learned over the years is that writing leads to clarity. Here's a quote from an essay Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, wrote that captures this well:

Writing about something, even something you know well, usually shows you that you didn’t know it as well as you thought. Putting ideas into words is a severe test. The first words you choose are usually wrong; you have to rewrite sentences over and over to get them exactly right. And your ideas won’t just be imprecise, but incomplete too. Half the ideas that end up in an essay will be those you thought of while writing it.

The second thing that makes a PRFAQ an effective discovery tool is to help you identify gaps in your opportunity space. What do you know or don't know about the customer, the problem, the solution, the market, the feasibility, the viability, and more? The ideas that “feel right” are the dangerous ones because we put our blinders on and focus on what excites us. These are often the “solution in search of a problem.” PRFAQs forces us to answer important questions about an initiative. Better than that, it forces you to answer uncomfortable questions (Rude FAQs). Adopting PRFAQs means that you will kill ideas because they are incomplete or they will lead to poor outcomes. They don't pass the “severe test.”

The third element of a PRFAQ as a discovery tool is that you have to confront your uncertainty matrix around what you know and don't know. PRFAQs use a style of writing called Precise Writing. The articles you read about PRFAQ or Working Backwards don't cover this topic, but that's a critical piece to make a PRFAQ effective. You must write using data and clear language. When you don't have data, you go find it or research it. When neither is possible, you call it out as an assumption or hypothesis. Your ordinary strategy document contains a sentence such as “most users prefer to start their vacations on a weekend.” That's unacceptable when using Precise Writing because that statement is devoid of data and insights, and it's an opinion disguised as fact. A better sentence is “According to NHTS data, 41.6% [data] of travelers start their trip on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. A number that hasn't changed over the last twenty years [insight]. However, post-pandemic, 7.8% [data] of travellers shifted their start travel date from Friday to Saturday [insight].”

PRFAQ as a Debate Tool

I mentioned above how people—and thought leaders writing about PRFAQs—focus on the document format and structure. That's an incomplete view of PRFAQs. The value of a PRFAQ happens during Review Sessions. The PRFAQ is the artifact at the center of the table that people are critiquing. One crucial element of a PRFAQ is that the author's name does not appear in the document. This is a small but powerful choice to show to the participants that they are debating the merits of the initiative, not the author's authority, seniority, or presentation skills. Let me give you three reasons PRFAQs make for a fantastic debate tool.

Together with critical thinking, I consider the second superpower of a PRFAQ, the ability of the participants to learn how to articulate the vision and the strategy. For the author, the ability to articulate the idea clearly comes naturally from writing (and re-writing) it. They articulate the elements of the problem, and solution space, as proposed on the PRFAQ, but also the twists and turns the idea took to get to this point. This translates into better PRDs, user stories, and OKRs. Contrary to a presentation, a diagram, or mock wireframes, the author doesn't need to force memorize and rehearse the story. The second is the ability of the participants to internalize the vision and strategy. Reading is an effective way to retain and recall information, regardless if we live in a low attention span society. Each person is unique, and reading gives the participants control over the flow of information. People re-read, jump back a paragraph to connect the dots, pause, sneeze, and go back to read without missing a bit. You don't get that when you are listening to a presentation, much less if you are flipping through a slide deck with bullet points.

The second aspect that makes PRFAQs great as a debate tool is that it puts the focus on vision/mission and strategy. (Side note: like Ravi, I don't see value in separating mission and vision, and people spend too much time wordsmithing instead of the substance of the initiative). The six pages of a PRFAQ don't present an execution or tactical plan. It squarely focuses on the customer, their problems, the solutions in the market, your solution, and the answer questions around feasibility, viability, usability, and value. You only include a tactical detail that is a critical piece of information for a strategic discussion. The reason you avoid including plans, wireframes, branding, feature lists, tables, or other elements is that people can't help themselves and start commenting on items that are not relevant for vision or strategy. Does a logo or color palette really matter to make a strategy?

Finally, the third point of using a PRFAQ as a debate tool is that in each review session, you'll include people from different teams or functions in your organization. I call this the reverse of “the blind men and the elephant” parable. You are getting each group of people to help you build an elephant by telling you what it looks like from different angles. Functions such as product, software engineering, UX, finance, legal, sales, marketing, and others will bring a slightly different perspective on the vision and strategy. These debates will help you weave the feedback into a coherent elephant. I mean, narrative. If you can't create that coherence, even after a lot of effort, it’s a signal this project will be unwise to pursue.

PRFAQ as a Decision Tool

Last, but not least, the purpose of a PRFAQ is to make a series of decisions about strategy and vision/mission, and, ultimately, a go/no-go decision.

Next to critical thinking and articulating your idea, the third leg of the PRFAQ superpower is that it's an inspiring mechanism to move people to act. This is not your typical “All Hands” meeting where an executive makes the big reveal he has been working with a designer in a secret offsite and they're ready to present the strategy for the next year to the company. The inspiration comes from having a compelling vision and strategy that people were involved in creating. It's not a committee-driven strategy. There is a person, the author, who's responsible for deciding how to incorporate the feedback—they are a product manager, a director, an executive, or whomever will lead the project. There is no phase in the PRFAQ cycle you are going around and getting “buy in” from stakeholders. These people have been collaborating with you all along, including the decision makers.

The second thing that makes PRFAQs great decision tools is that you put the good, the bad, and the ugly in the open. What Ravi called the Decision Making Time Machine. PRFAQs are not “pitches." A great strategy doc informs and aligns. You are presenting a compelling vision and strategy, created in collaboration with people, and everyone will evaluate the initiative based on a clear understanding of risk and rewards, and not because of persuasive language. You incorporate the answers around success and failure. What is the impact of failing or succeeding? How long does it take to recognize success or failure? How much does it cost to understand if the strategy is working or not?

The last element that makes PRFAQs great decision tools is that it'll be clear what's in the strategy and what's not, besides what is the vision/mission the team is pursuing. One reason I hear people saying PRFAQs are not worth it is because they take time away from building. My counter-argument is that execution will be slow and bouncing side-to-side if the team is not in agreement about strategy. That manifests itself as countless “alignment” meetings and “clarification” emails. Or worse, user experiences that feel disconnected. Projects that start from a foundation with clear strategy and vision allow for the team executing it to move faster because they need to sync less often and people understand how to prioritize their work better. Team members will have more latitude to decide and the decisions will be of higher quality.

What a PRFAQ is not good for?!

A PRFAQ is a tool. If used correctly and in the right context, it'll deliver significant results. I have seen people misusing them. The first mistake is using it lower in the Product Strategy stack, thinking of it as a tactical plan. Instead of (or besides) focusing on vision and strategy, people include feature lists, project plans, branding, or detailed specifications and wireframes. The question to ask yourself is if something applies to a decision about a product strategy. If the answer is no, then don't include it in the PRFAQ and save it for a PRD, OKR, roadmap, user story, or other artifact.

A PRFAQ is also not an ideation or a solutioning tool. The format will highlight the gaps you have in your proposal, but it won't give you the tools to figure out how to solve those. When necessary, you pair a PRFAQ with other systems such as Design Thinking, Generative Research, Sprint, Brainstorming, SWOT analysis (careful with “innovation by Excel”), Intermittent Collaboration, and more. The PRFAQ becomes the way you capture and distill what you have learned, discovered, and desire to create (or have created) into its most strategic form, removed of the tactical details.

Also, I've learned that some people use it as a launch/release tool. That issue stems from the press release being there. Folks get confused and assume this is an actual press release. Once, a product leader asked me if the marketing team is the one that writes the press release. That's a signal they are misunderstanding this tool. In most cases, the product leader or the director/VP of the division who will lead the initiative are the ones writing the PRFAQ. It's 100% an internal and confidential document (like a PRD) and it'll never be sent to the press or shared with customers.

The Outcome of a PRFAQ

The PRFAQ itself is not a product. Like PRDs or OKRs, it's fine to celebrate the effort the people put in and the lessons the team has learned, but don't confuse it with the business outcome. The true measure of a successful outcome for a PRFAQ is a project that's not engulfed in confusion, misalignment, lack of clear priorities, etc. Ultimately, you know your PRFAQ was successful if it delivered valuable business outcomes, or valuable lessons. The superpower of the PRFAQ is to help you and the team to think critically, articulate an idea, and inspire action.