You don’t need to wait for the perfect idea before starting your PRFAQ. The biggest mistake founders and product leaders make is believing they must have every answer figured out before putting pen to paper. Writing a PRFAQ is about discovering clarity through the process itself, not presenting a fully formed vision on your first attempt. The PRFAQ Framework, invented by Amazon as part of their Working Backwards practice, provides you with a method to discover, debate, and decide on vision and strategy before creating detailed plans or building anything.

A common misunderstanding is that you need to be a brilliant writer to create an effective PRFAQ. What you actually need is clarity of thought, and the PRFAQ process helps you develop that clarity through iteration and collaboration. Whether you’re solving a simple, complicated, or complex problem, your writing should remain simple, clear, and concise using plain language. The framework works because it forces you to think critically about customer problems, proposed solutions, and strategic decisions before committing resources to execution.

Before jumping into writing, you collect information about your idea through a storyboard process (see Chapter 11). Just as movie studios plan their films with storyboards, interior designers use mood boards, and designers follow design thinking processes, you need to gather and organize information before drafting your document. This preliminary work involves collecting everything you know about the customer, their problems, the market, potential solutions, pricing considerations, distribution channels, and competitive landscape. You organize this information with labels and group it into themes, creating a foundation for your writing.

When you’re ready to write, follow a three-step approach that starts from the middle rather than working linearly. Step one focuses on writing Internal FAQs that capture the current state of the world. These five to ten questions should address who the customer is, what problem they have and why, the current state of the market, and the value customers get from solving this problem. If you can’t clearly state these fundamentals, you either haven’t done enough research or you don’t have a real opportunity. Make clear what you know versus what you’re assuming, because assumptions are hypotheses that need testing through review sessions.

Step two is where Working Backwards becomes important as you imagine a future where customers solve their problems for the first time, or do so cheaper, better, or faster than before. You select five to ten additional Internal FAQ questions that represent your strategy and vision, covering topics like pricing, how the solution works for customers, and distribution methods. You also write five to eight Customer FAQs that bring clarity from the customer perspective. Here’s the critical insight from the framework: you don’t need all the answers yet. As you host review sessions, experts from engineering, UX, legal, marketing, finance, and sales will challenge and help refine your thinking. The PRFAQ is a tool for that collaborative discovery process.

Step three involves writing the press release, which paradoxically is where people get stuck despite being the most prescriptive part. Don’t obsess about making it perfect or worrying about grammar and style on your first pass. The press release follows a specific seven-paragraph structure described in the PRFAQ 101 article: the lead paragraph, problem paragraph, solution paragraph, internal quote paragraph, how it works paragraph, customer quote paragraph, and how to get started paragraph. Each paragraph has clear guidelines about what to include. After finishing your first draft, let it rest for an hour or a day, then return to edit it.

Understanding what a PRFAQ is and isn’t proves crucial to using it effectively. As explained in the article “A PRFAQ is not a plan“, PRFAQs come before plans and roadmaps. They are aspirational documents that help you discover, debate, and decide on strategy and vision before anyone creates detailed plans. Just as you decide where you’re traveling and why before choosing Delta, Amtrak, or Royal Caribbean, you establish vision and strategy before selecting specific features, technologies, or timelines. Injecting a narrative before you build helps you use the large amount of learning you and your team already have to better guide your minimum viable product and identify critical assumptions.

The process of creating a PRFAQ might feel like it slows down a project initially, but it’s an investment that pays off by helping you move faster and deliver better results. Starting a project with a PRFAQ ensures you find agreement on outcomes and the “why we are doing this” before anyone commits resources. The framework makes product development faster, cheaper, and more malleable than building prototypes because words on paper give you immense feedback in the shortest possible time. Many experienced product managers struggle to find the right prototype balance between doing too much and too little, but a PRFAQ bypasses this challenge entirely.

Your first PRFAQ won’t be perfect, and that’s precisely the point. Reviewers will point out issues in your thinking, language, and assumptions. That’s the process working as intended. The document evolves through multiple review sessions where different stakeholders challenge assumptions, identify gaps, and help refine the strategy. If during planning or execution, your team discovers that assumptions or data were incorrect, you refresh your PRFAQ or start a new one to capture the pivoted strategy. This iterative approach prevents the misalignment and prioritization issues that plague teams who skip vision and strategy work and jump straight into building.

The systematic approach to writing a PRFAQ transforms how you think about new products and initiatives. You collect data, organize it into themes, write Internal FAQs representing both the current state and the proposed future state, add Customer FAQs for clarity, and finally write your press release following the prescriptive format. Once complete, you have a document ready for collaborative review that helps your entire team align on what matters most before anyone writes a line of code or creates a detailed project plan.

Read the comprehensive PRFAQ 101 article or The PRFAQ Framework book to dive deeper into the complete methodology, including precise writing techniques, review session structures, and real-world examples that will transform how you approach product development.

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