You’ve just finished the first draft of your PRFAQ. You’re excited about the vision and confident in the strategy. But before you share it, ask yourself: have you confused building a plan with developing a strategy? Did you write it from top to bottom like filling out a template? And did you try to perfect it in isolation? If you answered yes to any of these, you’ve fallen into the traps that undermine even the best ideas.
The PRFAQ framework helps teams think critically, articulate ideas, and inspire action. But it only works when you avoid these fundamental errors.
Mistake #1: Thinking It’s a Plan, Not a Strategy
The most dangerous mistake is treating your PRFAQ as a detailed tactical plan rather than a strategic vision document. This happens when you fill your FAQs or appendix with elaborate roadmaps, feature lists, user stories, and implementation timelines. While this feels reassuring, it undermines the core purpose of the PRFAQ.
When you mix planning with strategy, the plan becomes a bright light that attracts everyone’s attention. It’s easier to evaluate deadlines and critique wireframes than to debate strategic choices. As outlined in A PRFAQ is not a plan article, strategy is challenging because the right answer isn’t obvious until you discover it.
The PRFAQ framework forces teams to focus on strategy and vision only, deliberately keeping out tactical plans. High-performance teams have a bias toward action and can’t help discussing implementation details even before establishing the desired outcome. When you confuse your PRFAQ with a project plan, you rob your team of the opportunity to debate what matters most: are we solving the right problem for the right customer in the right way?
Strategy answers questions about which opportunities to pursue, which customer segments to serve first, and what tradeoffs you’ll make. Plans answer when, how, and who will execute. Keep your PRFAQ focused on the former.
Mistake #2: Writing from Top to Bottom
Many people approach writing a PRFAQ like filling out a template, starting with the press release headline and working down through each section. This linear approach misunderstands how strategic thinking develops.
Effective PRFAQs emerge from gathering insights, organizing them into themes, and writing sections in an order that reflects how strategic clarity builds. Collect as much data as possible before writing. Conduct customer discovery, review research, examine competitive data, and talk with domain experts. Once you have enough information, organize it using labels and group those labels into themes.
The recommended writing sequence starts with the Internal FAQs representing the current state of the world, then moves to the Internal FAQs describing what you’re proposing and the Customer FAQs bringing clarity from the customer point of view. Only after working through these sections should you write your press release. This approach, detailed in the PRFAQ starting guide, ensures your press release reflects a fully formed strategy.
Writing from top to bottom often results in a press release that makes grand claims your FAQs can’t support. The Internal FAQs should drive your thinking about what’s possible and valuable. The Customer FAQs should reveal how customers will experience your solution. The press release should be the natural conclusion, not the starting point.
Mistake #3: Trying to Perfect It Without Reviewing with Others
The most damaging mistake is treating your PRFAQ like a school assignment that must be perfect before anyone sees it. This ignores a fundamental truth: feedback is the oxygen of a great PRFAQ!
The PRFAQ framework is built around the learn-write-listen loop. You’re not selling the idea described in your PRFAQ. You’re selling the idea that together with your collaborators, you can develop the draft into something better. This means putting your Minimum Viable Document in front of team members, stakeholders, and domain experts early and often.
When you wait too long to share your PRFAQ, you fall victim to the Curse of Knowledge. After reading your document many times, you become blind to obvious issues. You miss gaps in logic, assume people understand concepts without explaining them, and present hypotheses as facts.
The review process should involve multiple collaboration sessions with different groups based on their functional expertise. Product and UX leaders focus on customer value. Engineering leaders assess feasibility. Legal teams identify regulatory constraints. Each group brings domain expertise that strengthens your thinking.
Effective PRFAQ authors embrace feedback, even when it conflicts or challenges their assumptions. They run review sessions to digest and incorporate insights. The document won’t be perfect after the first draft, or even the fifth. The process itself (writing, listening, learning, and revising) is what produces breakthrough strategic thinking.
Moving Beyond These Mistakes
Avoiding these three mistakes requires a fundamental shift. Stop treating the PRFAQ as a document you write and start treating it as a collaborative discovery process. Focus on strategy, not plans. Write in the order that builds strategic clarity. Share early and often, treating feedback as essential input.
The seven common PRFAQ mistakes article provides additional pitfalls to watch for, but these three represent the foundation. Master these fundamentals, and you’ll transform your PRFAQs from ordinary documents into powerful tools for strategic alignment and customer-focused innovation.
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