The PRFAQ is a powerful tool for shaping early-stage product and innovation strategy. Like any powerful tool, it’s possible to misuse it. Over the years, I’ve seen these misuses, even from experienced product leaders, founders, and executives. A key attribute of the PRFAQ method is to find the truth, which means to be open to critique and feedback. The mistakes laid out below diminish the value of the framework. Keep an eye out and avoid them!

Mistake #1 — Too big of a vision

Presenting a vision that’s audacious is a great motivator to rally the organization, investors, and the community to act. In PRFAQ, you are using the vision to establish a credible strategy for execution. That’s why visions that are too far out, five or more years, or that are too big—world domination!—are not effective as mechanisms to decide on a strategy. A PRFAQ has a vision that’s a stepping stone towards a bigger vision. It’s about the next big launch or the next big item that will create an inflection in the product or company growth.

My recommendation is to have a PRFAQ that represents an announcement between three and twelve months from now, maybe 18 or 24 months for more complex projects. A good practice is to focus the entire PRFAQ in the next big launch, and have one of the FAQs that answers the question “What’s the bigger vision?”

Mistake #2 — Include a plan

Richard Rumelt, the author of Good Strategy / Bad Strategy, and a renowned professor at UCLA Anderson School of Management, explains that a strategy is not a plan. You’ll consistently read about a “strategy plan” and think of it as an execution plan. A strategy isn’t a to-do list, a collection of goals, or a roadmap. That’s why PRFAQs are not plans. The PRFAQ captures the vision and strategy.

Mistake #3 — Misaligned solution

It’s not unusual for people to write a PRFAQ for a vision and a strategy for a new product that actually doesn’t address the problem written in the PRFAQ itself. This is more common than you think because people want to present a big problem with a big Total Addressable Market (TAM), but their solution is a very small portion of that TAM or it’s even orthogonal to it—most startups in travel, real estate, and healthcare misunderstand the sandbox they are playing in.

Mistake #4 — Blind spots

We have blind spots. They come from confirmation bias, the curse of knowledge, or group thinking. If your PRFAQ was perfect, you wouldn’t need any assumption or hypothesis since it’s based on facts. But you can’t ever have the facts for a product, program, or business you haven’t built yet. It’s like expecting a three year financial projection in Excel to be perfectly accurate three years from now. The mistake is not accepting that you have blind spots. Once you adopt that mindset, you will be less likely to be surprised and more open-minded as you get feedback or when you learn new things throughout execution.

Mistake #5 — Ta-da!

Some people believe in the “ta-da” approach to innovation. They go into a secret room, spend days or weeks working on their document, product, code, design, or whatever, come out and do a big “ta-da!” They expect their team to congratulate them on the amazing achievement. That never works. Collaboration is critical to understand different perspective, identify gaps in your thinking (see mistake #4 above), and to have a short feedback loop to evolve ideas quickly. Writing a PRFAQ and expecting a standing ovation in the first review is a misguided expectation. As the author, you own writing the first draft, but you want to get input early and often, bounce ideas off your team, and think through different perspectives. When you present the first draft, you are not expecting applause, you are expecting crucial feedback.

Mistake #6 — PRFAQ perfection

The goal is not to have a perfect PRFAQ. It’s have a great product. There is no value for your customer if you wrote the perfect PRFAQ but weren’t able to execute and deliver results. The PRFAQ is like a prototype, a stepping stone towards the end product. Celebrate getting a PRFAQ to the finish line, but keep an eye on the prize—value for the customer and for the business.

Mistake #7 — Writing it too late

The best time to write a PRFAQ is before you commit to a project. PRFAQ is the optimal tool to discover, debate, and decide on a vision and a strategy. The outcome of the PRFAQ process is a go or no-go decision. Many times, project starts before a PRFAQ. The team used other (inadequate) process to decide what to build (maybe OKRs, “gut feelings,” or a weird voting system). Soon, the signs of misalignment on vision and strategy show up. Late working nights, long email threads, meetings back-to-back, etc. The second best time to write a PRFAQ is when you realize the team needs to get clarity because things were dysfunctional. The worst time to write a PRFAQ is just before the launch, after all, “it has a press release.” You might write a press release (and frequently asked questions) as part of your market launch, but that’s not a PRFAQ.

If you avoid these mistakes, your PRFAQ will deliver better clarity, alignment, and, ultimately, better innovation. The PRFAQ is not just a document, it’s a system. Embrace it.

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