What’s the difference between a PRFAQ for a new startup idea, one with customers, and one expanding their product line? Or, in the corporate world, what’s the difference between a PRFAQ for a new product, for a product expansion, or for a product optimization? I found a neat way to explain the difference, and I even included it in the book manuscript. After eleven rounds of editing, we had to remove it. Lucky you, I’m writing about it today!
There isn’t a commonly accepted Product Lifecycle pattern. You’ll find different diagrams to describe it depending on what you search for. In PRFAQ, I found that it’s worth to split them in four stages, based on what you know and what you are validating next. The stages are:
- Problem
- Solution
- Scale
- Performance
Problem Stage: In this stage, your PRFAQ will have assumptions and hunches about a problem and a solution. It won't include information about strategy for scaling or how to be efficient across any dimension. Your PRFAQ will focus on establishing hypotheses on strategy and a clear vision for the team to pursue. Although I labeled it the “Problem Stage,” you are exploring problem discovery through experimentation of solutions.
Solution Stage: You have validated a problem and you have a prototype or Minimum Viable Product. In this stage, you have a product but you aren’t sure you have product-market fit (PMF) yet. Your PRFAQ will have facts about the customer and their problem, what the team has learned, and what strategy the team is going to execute next. Your hypothesis is about finding PMF.
Scale Up Stage: You know you have PMF and your biggest obstacle is to scale the team, the technology, the distribution, the operations, customer value, etc. You’ll have multiple PRFAQs to cover different initiatives. One PRFAQ will be about building a product-let growth initiative, another about changing the direct sales, and, potentially, a third about opening up new partnerships to speed up distribution. You might have a PRFAQ about replacing a vendor with an in-house solution for whatever is creating growth friction (HR, CRM, cloud, etc.). This stage is important, because it involves maturing operations and ensuring customers are getting great value.
Performance: This is the last stage for this product (or line-of-product). You are at or close to market saturation. Your goal is to be the best at retaining customer (defending your turf), extracting value, and operating efficiently. PRFAQs will be about improving the performance of an activity by a few percentage points, how to save a few million dollars on an internal process, or how to upsell customers into more expensive plans or add-ons.
For a startup, this roughly translates into:
- Bootstrap / pre-seed → Problem Stage
- Seed → Solution Stage
- Series A/B → Scale Up
- Series C+ → Performance
For an internal product, program, or project, it translates to:
- New opportunity/challenge identified → Problem Stage
- New product → Solution Stage
- Product Expansion → Scale Up Stage
- Optimization → Performance Stage
Understanding the distinction is important to avoid you spending time to figure out strategy prematurely. How important it’s having a fine-tuned customer success organization if you have no customers? Right-sizing your PRFAQ to the right stage helps focus the team’s energy into the next mountain to climb and max out the lessons from that stage.
In the book, I included four fictional PRFAQ Examples that you can download for free, three of them are in the Problem Stage and one in the Optimization Stage.