Imagine spending weeks or months planning a project only to realize you are going in the wrong direction and having to start over? That’s what’s often happens in the corporate world. Building a plan is important, but it’s not the right place to start. Plans without strategy and vision will create the illusion of certainty. Plans get blamed when things go sideways or take longer than expected. That’s because, in hindsight, it’s easy to point to a plan or to the plan creator and challenge the things that went wrong or that the team should have known.

That’s a revisionist view of the problem. The problem started earlier than that. It started because the team had no vision and strategy to hang on to. That’s where PRFAQs shine.

PRFAQs are not plans

On an episode of Lenny’s Podcast, he interviewed Chandra Janakiraman, a product veteran who worked at Zynga, Headspace, Meta, and Amazon, who said:

Lenny: “What is product strategy?”

Chandra: “Strategy sits between the mission/vision and the plan. It could be at the company level or at the team level […] You can call the plan the roadmap, which is basically an ordered list of things that you want to get done […] [Strategy] forces choices to deploy scarce resources to generate maximum impact.”

Chandra nails it. Strategy is a set of choices (decisions) and a plan is a set of activities.

Ravi Mehta—another product veteran from TripAdvisor, Meta, and Tinder—mentions a similar idea on his article about the Product Strategy Stack. Plans, even if incomplete, are essential to build things. Even if the plan exists only in your head, you have a resemblance to one. But your plan won’t be any good if you don’t understand the destination, the purpose, and important choices you’ll have to make even before you get started. These are the elements of strategy.

One mistake people make when adopting PRFAQs is to infuse it with a plan. That means to have elaborate FAQs or appendix with details about the roadmap, feature lists, user stories, and more. This approach feels good because you believe with a plan, you will create trust and build confidence in the initiative. You might even be pressured by executives, your managers, or peers to have a complete plan before you kick off an initiative. That’s a crutch to avoid talking about strategy, because strategy is hard, uncomfortable (because the answer is not obvious until it is), and less tangible.

The problem of having a plan mixed in the middle of your PRFAQ is that it creates a bright light everyone will be attracted to. It’s easier to evaluate the feasibility of deadlines, activities, and resources and the usability of wireframes or user flows than to talk about the choices of strategy.

Plans without Strategy

The most common project pattern is not one that mixes strategy with execution. It’s the one where there is no strategy and no vision. There is a plan, but there is no direction for the team to follow. These often manifest themselves in OKRs that feel important in a self-referential way: add more users, increase revenue, improve retention, add feature Y, launch in city Z.

Some projects have a vision and a strategy behind them, but they aren’t captured in a structured way, and only communicated orally. You can’t reference them. The telephone game from team member to team member corrupts what was there to begin with. People's memories fade. New employees have to ask others about the “why” since what they have access to is a long list of activities. They aren’t using PRFAQ or another mechanism to capture vision and strategy.

Some teams, including the ones I manage in the past, incorporate those elements at the top of a Product Requirements Document (PRD) or a Jira ticket. That’s not sufficient for two reasons. First, if you have a debate about strategy and the activity together, the activity will suck the air and become the central focus of the conversation. Second, vision and strategy can’t be captured in isolation for a single activity/feature, and need to tie back to everything else the team or organization is doing.

✅ PRFAQs before Plans & Roadmaps

You don’t decide if you are traveling with Delta, Amtrack, or Royal Caribbean before you decide where you are going and why. You likely don’t write it down and review it with your significant other (note to self: PRFAQ for vacation), but when you are planning a trip, you start with why (vision/mission) and a strategy—the type of vacation, the budget, what you want to see/do, what you want to avoid, take the kids or not, etc.

Here’s where people conflate strategy with plans. If there are dates and destination, isn’t it a plan? Not really. A plan is a series of activities that need to take place, often with dates, resources, and descriptions attached to them. If the date only dictates when something starts or ends, it’s strategy. Open-ended strategies are not really strategies, because they don’t force you to decide. Visions are open-ended. Strategies are bounded by time, resources, and its mission.

PRFAQS sits squarely in the realm of vision, mission, and strategy. They provide the right mechanism to focus the conversation on important questions about an initiative. The only reason to include elements of a plan—such as specific features, wireframes, or technical information—is if those are crucial for the strategy discussion.

For example, the cloud provider (AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.) that you’ll use for a new product likely has no implication on the strategy because from a customer perspective, they couldn’t care less. However, if your organization has a partnership with Microsoft, they will be a large customer, or reseller of your product, that cloud provider choice becomes a strategic conversation.

PRFAQs don't take long if you or the team has the information about the customer, their problems, and a hypothesis about a solution. It’s an exercise that takes a couple of weeks, but helps immensely with alignment and to identify crucial gaps in the strategy that will mess up the execution later. Once you have decided on vision and strategy, you start the work of activity planning—building your roadmap, priority list, wireframes, resources, etc.

This is where things get interesting. Vision to strategy to plan to execution is not a straight and linear path. It’s not unusual for you to discover a piece of information during planning or even during execution that hinders part of your strategy. It could be a technical issue that wasn’t discovered earlier on. Or, a key element of the distribution is not as effective as assumed, such as the cost of acquiring a new customer. That’s the time to decide if the strategy and vision need a refresh, even a full pivot, and update your PRFAQ or write a new one.

If the plan is the starting line of a project, the PRFAQ is the decision to join the race to begin with.

Key Takeaways

  • Many misalignment and prioritization issues that arise during planning and execution wouldn’t exist with a small investment in a PRFAQ to discover, debate, and decide on a strategy and a vision.
  • Avoid including detailed plans and activities in your PRFAQ because they will draw people to discuss them, instead of a strategy.
  • Refresh your PRFAQ (or start a new one) if, during planning or execution, the team discovers assumptions or data were incorrect and you need a new strategy (and/or vision).

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