This is a pre-chapter with a concrete, yet fictional,example of a PRFAQ. I’m giving you a model to hang on to while you read thebook. I was reluctant to include this chapter for three reasons: First, Ididn’t want to limit your view of what type of project and scope a PRFAQ covers.Second, more than half of the value of the PRFAQ is the method to create one,and by delivering the result, some people will miss the point. Finally, withoutknowing what to look for, we miss important aspects of this artifact.
For the example PRFAQ, I picked an idea that’s easy to graspby all professionals. I avoided anything that required domain knowledge or thatrepresented a breakthrough idea. This helps you focus on how the content ispresented instead of questioning the validity of the idea.
The PRFAQ document has specific guidelines about style andformatting—that you’ll learn about in Chapter 5—which we cannot capture in abook. Download this and the bonus PRFAQ examples, using proper style andformatting, on www.theprfaq.com/resources.
Green Light, a B2B SaaS Startup
In one startup I worked at, employees traveled to meet withcustomers, for trade shows, and to go to our other office locations. This is acommon scenario in the corporate world. We grew to a size and adopted a policyof executive approval for each trip. There were no tools in place, and wetracked it via email. Emails were also used to approve new job posts, new hireoffers, IT purchases, and other operational tasks. It was challenging to keeptabs, generate reports, or establish consistent procedures for these.
The Fictional Setting
You and your co-founder left a startup that grew to fivehundred employees in six years. You joined when the company was thirty-fivepeople, and everyone knew each other. You’ve seen firsthand what happens whencompanies grow, and the operational debt that catches up to it. The company gotan SOC-II certification. You were involved in thecompliance project and learned how lacking an audit trail made it challengingto get the certification. It’s difficult to have consistency across teams andpeople in the procedures to follow. Talking to friends, you learned thisproblem is not unique to tech companies. Many organizations rely on emailchains to track who asked for what and who approved it. You and your co-founderleft to start Green Light to solve this problem for medium and large-sizecompanies. You wrote the PRFAQ with your co-founder to share with advisors,future team members, and pre-seed investors, and to apply to the Y Combinator and the Techstars startup acceleratorprograms.
Green Light brings autonomy, efficiency, and auditabilityto corporate approval processes.
Employees create and use approval flows for travel,expenses, hiring, IT, facilities, and much more.
Business Wire—Seattle, October 26, 2025—Green Light, aSeattle-based startup, launched a new service to manage approval processes.Teams set up approval flows based on their policies, and employees have aconsolidated and easy experience requesting approvals.
Organizations rely on email to request, track, and approveemployees’ requests. When people need an approval for travel, to open a newposition, or for ordering a device, they don’t know whom to ask. It's not clearwhat information to provide and what the right procedure is. They learn theymust email a person in another department, which creates a growing chain ofemails. It includes the team responsible for carrying out the request, themanagement chain, those that need to be informed, the approvers, and others.Emails get stuck in someone’s inbox because they didn’t see it or wereunavailable. In larger organizations, functions like HR, Procurement, IT,Travel, or InfoSec have disjointed tools and procedures, making it challengingfor employees to remember where to go and how to ask for an approval.
Green Light changes the game by providing a system that isconfigured by each team on how the approval chain works. It integrates into thecompany HR system to gather the organization structure and roles, and it'seasily set up for any use case that requires one or more approvals. Teamseasily convert company policies into approval flows that can handle employees’availability and when team members join or leave the company.
“Companies find themselves in a messy situation complyingwith their policies,” said Heidi Hernandez, founder and CEO of Green Light.“Green Light makes it simple to codify policies in clear programmatic rules foreveryone involved to focus on what we hired them to do instead of dealing withprocess overhead,” she continued.
Teams create new approval flows using simple drag-and-dropand AI chat interfaces to describe them. They define who can request anapproval, what information they need to provide, who needs to approve it and inwhich order, and who will be notified. For example, a travel request mightrequire the approval of the manager of the person requesting it, the travelteam, and the VP of the division. Green Light supports automatic approvals andautomations and integrates directly with other services, like a travel vendor.
“Our company worked in healthcare, and we had to authorizeand keep track of data access requests by our data scientists,” said DavidMills, a Senior Director of Engineering at PressHealth. He continued, “I had tobe checking my emails to avoid blocking someone from doing their job. It wasawful when we had to go through quarterly certification audits, and I had tochase the data that were needed. Green Light made this problem go away for us.”
Customers go to www.getgreenlight.co to get started and tolearn more about the use cases and integrations currently supported. GreenLight offers a 90-day free trial.
Customer FAQs
Q1: How much does it cost?
Green Light has a free three-month self-service trial forup to 50 users. The basic plan costs $4.00 per employee per month. It includessingle sign-on (SSO) and integration with Google Work Suite, Microsoft Entra,and several Human Capital Management Systems (like BambooHR, Rippling, etc.).The Premium plan includes integration with services such as Concur, Jira, andGitHub and access to the Green Light API. The Premium plan also includesAI-based anomaly detection and alerts and advanced escalation and auto-approvalfeatures.
Q2: Do I need to migrate data or integrate withexisting systems?
There is no need to migrate existing data to Green Light.It requires employee information, which you enter manually or use via one ofthe built-in integrations.
Q3: How long does it take to deploy the service in myorganization?
Deployment can be gradual and can start with one or twoapproval processes. Authorization to open new positions and publish job postsis a good place to start. Other typical use cases include travel approval, newhardware orders, or access to data or IT systems. It takes less than a day tointegrate with existing authentication and employee data systems and a fewhours to set up an approval flow.
Q4: What products does it integrate with?
For employee and organization data, Green Light currentlyintegrates with Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Entra, BambooHR,Workday, Rippling, and Zoho People. For request and approval automation, GreenLight integrates with GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, SAP Concur, AWS, Azure, GoogleCloud, Coupe, SAP Ariba, and IronClad. We are adding new integrations everymonth.
Q5: Can approvals be automated, re-routed, orescalated?
Yes. Approval flow forms can include data to be used toautomatically approve requests based on any rule. For example, rules mayinclude that people of a certain seniority request an expense below a thresholdto get an automatic approval, while others require a manager's approval.
Q6: Does it require training to use it?
The employees requesting approvals don’t need anytraining, and the product will guide them on what they need to provide.Approval flow owners must understand the creator interface and learn how toconvert company policies and procedures into it. Each approval flow has a formbuilder, a routing system, rules for the approval, and several configurablesettings (e.g., notifications).
Internal FAQs
Q1: Who’s the customer, and what problem are we solvingfor them?
Our core customers are HR, IT, facilities, and otherdepartments in companies with 250 and 2,500 employees with many manualprocesses in approving or tracking approvals for operations and compliance. Ourinitial entry market is organizations in enterprise software, healthcare, andthe financial industries. These organizations have challenges enforcing,tracking, and reporting for ISO 27001, SOC-II, and other regulatoryrequirements. They have elaborate policies and non-tech teams searching forsolutions such as ours.
Q2: How are customers solving this problem today?
Companies have in-house procedures for each department.With IT and software teams, project management tools play the role of approvalworkflow using tickets and custom workflows (e.g., Jira). No-code and low-codesolutions for workflow automation are used to solve some of the problems weidentified. However, teams such as HR or finance don't have the skill set orthe license to use these tools. These products are difficult to set up giventhe complexity of policies, since these tools weren't designed for it. Evenwhen the procedures are “automated,” they still require a lot of humanintervention, making it costly and slow for the employees and the organization.They also don't offer a robust reporting mechanism.
Q3: What progress have you made so far?
We’ve built an MVP with eight integrations, and we’ve beenrunning a pilot with four customers for the last two months, varying from 95 to550 employees. Our MVP allows teams to set up flows with a drag-and-dropinterface with role-based approvers to create approval request forms, includingallowing the uploading of documents or pictures. We've built an email and SMSnotification system for users, and a rule-based engine for auto-approvals orauto-escalations.
Q4: Who is the team behind it?
Heidi Hernandez is the co-founder and CEO. She was theSr. Director of Technology at CloudFirstTech, leading a team of 45 softwareengineers and product managers. Previously, she worked at Microsoft for nineyears. She has a B.S. in Computer Science from the National University ofColombia.
David Corbett is the co-founder and CTO. He was thePrincipal Software Engineer at CloudFirstTech. Previously, he worked at Zillowfor seven years as a software engineer. He has a B.S. in Computer Science fromthe University of British Columbia.
The team also has a senior software engineer and a UXdesigner.
Q5: How’s the project being funded so far?
We raised a $250K pre-seed round from Heidi, David,former co-workers, and angel investors in Seattle.
Q6: How many customers have you interviewed, and whathave you learned?
We spoke to the head of HR, Technology, or Operations at17 companies so far, ranging from 95 to 1,200 employees. Twelve of thesecompanies were in the Seattle area, three in California, one in New York, andone in Austin. We learned that three companies have IT departments that builtinternal solutions. Although they aren't as complete as ours, it's challengingfor us to displace them with our current offering. We identified two companiesthat don’t consider approvals to be a problem they need to deal with. One was aretailer with three stores, and the other was an energy company. Seven of thecompanies we talked to had grown their employee base by 10 to 70 percent in thelast year, and they were interested in what we offer. Five companies didn’thave employment growth—they had layoffs in the last year. They were intriguedbecause they are currently spending too many resources on compliance reportingand saw this as an efficiency gain opportunity.
Q7: Does the product work for companies with employeesin multiple countries?
Yes. Each approval flow can be customized by anyattribute of an employee, including their country, city, type of employment,tenure, etc. Approval routing, delegation, escalations, and even approval formsare customizable for those scenarios. For example, an employee requestingapproval to access a data set of European customers may have different flows ifthey are based in Europe or if they are based in the US. The user interface iscurrently only available in English, and the approval forms don't supportlanguage customization. We intend to add these capabilities in two years.
Q8: What’s the business model?
We’ll use a standard SaaS subscription model for theforeseeable future, using a per-user pricing scheme with two tiers of price: basic andpremium. The high-water mark system is used to calculate the number of users,so organizations don’t feel like they are paying for a service their employeesare not using. This mechanism also aligns incentives between Green Light andour customers.
Q9: Who’s the buyer persona?
We have identified the head of IT and the head of HR asthe two key buyers. HR doesn’t have access to software engineering resourcesand prefers turnkey solutions. IT teams are overwhelmed with a backlog ofprojects, and they are resource constrained. Both functions are considered costcenters, so they are always seeking human capital efficiency. Once we penetrateone part of the business, it becomes straightforward to expand into otherteams.
An advantage of our solutions is that we democratize thecreation of approval flows by anyone in the organization. This means even smallteams may set up their approval flow use cases. Software engineers are alreadyfamiliar with approval flows when they use GitHub pull requests. We areextending this approach to all kinds of uses. We have identified more than 170use cases in HR, IT, finance, facilities, legal, procurement, marketing, sales,business development, data science, product, UX, software engineering, etc.
Q10: What’s the distribution strategy?
In the near term, we’ll continue to sell directly tocustomers via self-service on our website. We found 17,000 organizations in theUS that fit our ideal customer profile (ICP). We are building a small directsales team and developing a tool to identify and prioritize organizations andentry points based on our network.
Q11: What resources do you need to launch this productand acquire customers?
We are seeking to join an accelerator to help usstrengthen our product, build our customer pipeline through its network, andhelp us raise $2-3M in the next six months. Our goal is to add two engineers, amarketing manager, and one salesperson and start experimenting with customeracquisition.
Q12: When do you expect to break even?
We don’t have a complete financial model to determinewhen we will break even. There are an estimated 39M corporate employees in theUS in 900,000 companies that have between 250 and 2,500 employees. Thatexcludes contractors, interns, and in-house vendors. We estimate that 70percent of those organizations don’t have a satisfactory solution. They are ourtarget customer, which means our total addressable market to be 630,000organizations and 27M employees. That's a total addressable market of $1.3B/year.
PRFAQ: Hebe
Type: B2B2C Mobile App.
Origin: I was ata health conference at a university, and a researcher studying the impact ofheart rate variance (HRV) on longevity, quality of life, and biomarkers did ademo of their mobile app. Although the research was sound and the app worked, Ididn’t believe people would download and pay for the app. It made me wonder howmany researchers in the health industry have discovered or invented effectivediagnostic tools but don’t know how to productize, distribute, and monetizetheir inventions.
Setting: You holda degree in biomedical engineering. After college, you worked four years in amedical device manufacturer, and you ended up specializing in software forthese devices. Afterward, you worked for three years in a lab supporting lifesciences researchers until you realized innovations and products took over adecade to get any meaningful adoption, even the ones that were lifesavingdiagnostic innovations. You found that over 850 apps were published in mobilestores by small research teams without traction. Furthermore, you found thatthere are over 2,300 researchers who have published breakthrough medicaldiagnostic papers that can be incorporated into mobile apps or off-the-shelfdevices. You joined forces with a software engineer from your first job and apsychologist turned UX designer you met at the lab to build a new company,Hebe. You’ve been working on this startup for 15 months. The plan is to launchthe app in the US in three months. The time is right for you to raiseinvestor's money to fund more engineering, marketing, and partnerships withinventors. You wrote the PRFAQ to align the team, find gaps in the story, andprepare to fundraise your seed round.
Hebe Launches the Most ComprehensiveSmartphone Medical Diagnostics Tools for Parents
It provides over 100 different tests parents do athome to put their minds at ease.
Business Wire—Boston, May 17, 2025—A new mobile applaunched by Hebe, a Boston-based startup, has over 100 certified medical testsfor children. Parents use the tests in the app to diagnose medical conditionsand monitor cognitive development and their child's health.
Currently, parents rely on over-the-counter tools likethermometers, oximeters, heart rate monitors, and “Dr. Google” for medicaldiagnostics when their child is sick or injured or when they have a concern.They find it difficult to search for the apps to help them, and they find theapps they've used to have a poor and confusing experience. Researchers andinstitutions who invent diagnostic tests that run on mobile apps are notexperts in how to build, market, and sell those tools. They spend hundreds of thousandsof dollars to bring their apps to market and generate a fraction of that inannual revenue.
Hebe is an integrated medical diagnostic app that providesdiagnostic tests for over 100 conditions simply using a mobile device. Itpartnered with the top medical researchers, clinics, and inventors to licensetheir technology and make it available on the Hebe app. With over 35FDA-approved diagnostic tests and 70 certified by its medical panel, Hebe isthe most comprehensive collection of tests available today. In the next ninemonths, the app will add 140 more tests.
“It was painful to see how scientifically validateddiagnostic tests were not finding their way to the people who need them,” saidHelen Cohen, the CEO and Co-founder of Hebe. She continued, “Hebe is the bridgebetween the people inventing diagnostic tests and the parents and children thatbenefit from them.”
Hebe is a medical diagnostic store. People search andbrowse through the conditions they want to diagnose, create a profile for eachchild in their family, and run the tests they want. Many tests are free, andparents can use it anytime they want. The app uses the sensors alreadyavailable on mobile phones, such as the camera, microphone, screen (hapticsensors), and accelerometers for diagnostics.
“My three-year-old was being lethargic, coughing, and wethought he had a cold or flu, so we were giving him cold medicine. ThroughHebe, we found a test that he’d breathe into the microphone, and it showed hemight have bronchitis,” said Joan Soman, a mother and Hebe user. “Because ofthat, we took him to see his pediatrician and learned the cause was springallergies.”
Parents can go to the App Store or the Play Store todownload and start using Hebe today. The company has also partnered withWellGuard Health, the second largest health insurance company in the US, tooffer Hebe diagnostic tests fully covered for those in the Platinum plan.Parents can visit www.gethebe.com to learn more.
Customer FAQs
Q1: How much does it cost?
Hebe has a library of over 100 medically certifieddiagnostic tests. We offer over 25 tests that are completely free to use anytime you want. Our paid tests range from $2.99 to $19.99 per month. Your healthinsurance might cover a portion or the full price of the test. There are noadditional devices or purchases necessary. For $29.99 per month, you haveaccess to the full library of tests.
Q2: How safe and accurate are the tests?
Tests are 100 percent safe, and they won’t cause any harmto your child. Researchers and our Clinical Advisory Board have validated theaccuracy and efficacy of the research behind each test. The app lists detailsabout each certification, the accuracy, and the precision of each test.
Q3: Where is my data stored?
We safely store your data encrypted on your device andour servers. We don’t share your personal or medical information with any otherbusiness or entity. You can share the test data without your personalinformation with the research team to help improve accuracy for other children.
Q4: Can I use it for more than one child?
Yes, you can have up to six children registered on thedevice.
Q5: Does the app provide medical advice or access to adoctor?
We don’t provide any medical advice, and you should seeka doctor if needed. The app doesn’t recommend or connect you with doctors.
Q6: Does it integrate with my Smartwatch?
Hebe doesn’t use your Smartwatch sensors.
Q7: Can I share the diagnostic with a doctor?
Yes, we make it simple to email, fax, or print diagnosticresults. We include the underlying data and research information to help yourdoctor or medical professional.
Internal FAQs
Q1: What problem are you solving for the customer?
We are building a two-sided marketplace for consumers(parents) to find diagnostic tests developed by universities, research labs,and health organizations. Parents are anxious about their children's health,particularly first-time parents of young children. Using the Internet toresearch symptoms or conditions induces more anxiety, and it rarely givesaccurate answers. 93 percent of parents say they rely on search engines andLLMs to diagnose a medical concern at least once amonth. Of those, 79 percent of those said it’s frustrating to understand how todiagnose and interpret the results, which elevates their anxiety level.
Diagnostic tests inventors don’t have a straightforwardway to get their discovery or invention distributed effectively. They mustparade their invention at conventions and find industry partners for thefunding and the resources to build a solution. They don’t have expertise insoftware engineering or mobile app development, making commercializing theirdiscovery or invention challenging.
Q2: What’s the big vision?
We are building the first store of medical diagnostictests for consumers to use directly from their mobile phones. We are startingwith parents of young children in the US and intend to expand it to all agegroups in more countries. In addition to software-based diagnostic services, wesee the growth of hardware-based diagnostic tools, which we'll use to enhancethe robustness of the tests we offer.
Q3: What customer research have you done so far?
We’ve done user research with 27 families in fourdifferent cities. They represent a diverse group of consumers across familycomposition (opposite- and same-sex couples, single parents, age groups from 25to 45 years old, different races, ethnicities, etc.). We focused this researchon understanding the frequency with which parents use the resources availabletoday, including the Web, LLMs, mobile apps, virtual doctors, doctor visits,and over-the-counter devices. We identified three key patterns that helped usdefine our product and narrow our customer segment. (1) First-time parents ofchildren ages two to five are the ones with the most pain points aroundhome-based diagnostics. (2) Parents get motivated to diagnose a condition whenthey see or read something in the news or social media. (3) Parents feel guiltywhen they observe a symptom or behavior in their child and postpone acting onit because of their hectic everyday life.
Q4: What’s the expected utilization of the product?
We did a survey last month with 1,100 parents in the US.Based on the results, we estimate that on average they will use three freediagnostics in their first month and at least one paid diagnostic. Parentsengage with the app when browsing or searching for diagnostics, when using atest, and when revisiting previous test results. We plan to maintain a rate oftwo diagnostics per child per month (in the two to five age range). Our currentearly adopters have done twice as much in the first month (eight tests) andthree times as much in month two (six tests) as compared to our model.
Q5: What’s the total addressable market?
For our core initial market, there are 16.3 millionchildren ages two to five in the US. Based on the requirement of a smartphone,cost, and discovery, we estimate that 8M children, or 3.7M parents, are withinour total addressable market. Our adoption model assumes we achieve a 30percent market share in five years and generate $3.00 per family per month inrevenue, which is $40M of annual revenue. There are another 37M children, 12and younger, outside that group that could bring up to $183M of annual revenue.Finally, once we expand across all age groups and increase the number of testsavailable, we estimate the total addressable market to be 45M families in theUS and $1.6B in annual revenue.
Q6: How are you going to partner with researchers andinvention owners?
We have reached out and had conversations with 19institutions, including universities, research labs, and health organizations.Currently, we have a distribution contract signed with five institutions,representing 87 unique diagnostic tests. We are in final negotiations with twomore, bringing the total of tests for launch to 103.
We worked with them in three ways: (1) We do the softwareengineering based on their research. (2) We do the front-end engineering andrely on back-end services provided by them. (3) We incorporate their codewritten to our SDK specification. Currently, our team has built 60 percent ofthe tests (including using contract software engineering). For 35 percent, webuilt a front-end, and for 5 percent (six tests from one partner), they areusing our SDK design, and we integrate with their library after they go throughour quality certification process.
Q7: What’s the business model?
Consumers pay $2.99 to $19.99 for access to a diagnostictest for a month. We’ll also provide them with a $29.99 monthly plan thatincludes all tests for their children. We have discounted rates for healthinsurance and employers who want to offer Hebe free of cost or subsidized totheir members/employees. Some tests we are administering are covered in certainhealth plans. We’ll provide users with the documents to file a claim, but wewon’t integrate directly with health insurers. We have not done extensive priceelasticity research yet.
Q8: What’s the revenue share with diagnostics testowners?
Test owners receive a percentage of the revenue based onthe price and utilization of their diagnostic tests. For tests purchasedindividually, they will receive 30 percent to 70 percent of the net revenue(after App Store and Play Store fees), depending on who wrote the software andbuilt the technology. For the monthly plan, the revenue will be proportional tothe tests used that month, with each test owner receiving up to apre-negotiated ceiling per unit.
Q9: How are customers going to find this product?
We’ll use online advertising, content marketing, and AppStore optimization to help customers discover our product. We are creating apediatric clinic outreach plan to educate, evangelize, and build trust withdoctors. The goal is to have them recommend Hebe to families. Last, we willalso build a referral program since new parents are one of the most viralgroups of people.
Q10: What are the biggest risks?
We are engaging with legal counsel to understand thelanguage we must use in the app and marketing materials. We are alsodetermining the disclosures and consent to make sure we meet regulations andminimize liability risks. However, we’ll need a sizable insurance coverage toprotect us. Our contract with the diagnostic inventors includes indemnificationclauses based on the type of integration we’ve built with them. We started aconversation with two medical malpractice insurance companies, and we’ll have acoverage policy completed in the next month. However, we consider our biggestrisk to success the awareness of our app among customers. There are too manyapps and services online for children's medical needs, which makes itchallenging to break through the noise.
Q11: Does the product need FDA approval? Is itconsidered a medical device?
The FDA classifies mobile apps for diagnostics as amedical device. However, not all services need to be regulated by the FDA. Theagency uses a risk-based approach to determine which apps require its approval.In our case, we’ll seek to compartmentalize each individual test and work withthe FDA to apply appropriate labels to each. We are working with the diagnosticowners to determine the requirements. Diagnostic tests that require FDAapproval won’t prevent us from launching the app but won’t be available to thepublic. Through feature-flags, we’ll be able to enlist trial participants fornew tests.
Q12: Is there a plan to integrate with other diagnosticdevices?
Yes, but we won't do it in the first two years after theapp launches. Basic diagnostic devices like oximeters, thermometers, heart ratemonitors, blood pressure, and other devices provide excellent diagnostic data.There are also advanced devices like ECG/EKG (including Apple Watch), continuous glucose monitor (CGM),digital ophthalmoscope, and respiratory monitors. We see a growing trend of“consumerization” of medical devices that attach to or communicate with mobiledevices in the coming years. However, current adoption by consumers iscomparatively low and not worth our attention at this point.
Q13: Who’s on the team?
Helen Cohen, Co-founder & CEO—Master in BiomedicalEngineering at the Boston University. Helen has built software for medicaldiagnostic devices and mobile apps for the last seven years. She led a team ofsoftware engineers, data scientists, and UX designers in building mobile appsfor the medical field.
Ricardo Freitas, Co-founder & CTO—B.S. in ComputerScience from the University of Montevideo, in Uruguay. Ricardo has over 15years of experience building full-stack apps, ten in the medical and diagnosticfields. He was the Principal Engineer at MedLab.
Trisha Brown, Co-founder & Lead Designer—B.S. inPsychology from the University of North Carolina and an M.S. in Human ComputerInteraction from Savannah College of Art and Design. Trisha has worked foreight years as a UX designer and researcher for digital interfaces for medicalproducts, including mobile apps.
Q14: How much funding is required to achieve the nextstage of this project, and how will you use it?
We have raised $250K from government grant research andanother $250K in a pre-seed SAFE round. We are looking to raise an additional$2.5M in the next six months. With the funds, we'll add four people to our team(two software engineers, a marketing manager, and a customer supportspecialist) for seven employees, including the three founders. We also havecontractors working on finance, legal, software engineering, and projectmanagement, and a program manager focused on university outreach. We projectthe funding to take us to $1.2-1.8M ARR in 18 months, at which point we’llraise our Series A.
PRFAQ: Project Sail
Type: Internal Technology Update Project.
Origin: In onecompany a friend worked at, innovation was being held back or slowed to a crawlby an outdated piece of technology. There were massive challenges withmigrating the systems and the data. However, the greatest challenge was thehundreds of internal services and procedures that used the existing system.These were not owned by the team that owned the system. They were using APIs,file exports, dashboards, or interfaces exposed by the system.
Setting: You arethe principal product manager for a clothing retail chain (Armoso) with overten thousand employees, a hundred physical stores in six countries, and anonline store with millions of shoppers. You own the customer database known asAcropolis, built over 25 years ago. It hasn’t kept up with the times. Youworked with the director of engineering and two staff engineers to propose amodernization of the system. The team has not explored the details yet, butthere is a sufficient conviction this change is necessary. You wrote the PRFAQto discover the vision and strategy, gather support, and inspire folks. The CTOwill review the PRFAQ, and she's responsible for deciding if this project getsfunding.
PRFAQ
From: SandraPlyar (CTO)
To: All GlobalCorporate Employees
Subject:Launching [Sail], our new customer system.
Date: March 5,2026
I’m excited to announce that [Sail] is in production, andwe have deprecated Acropolis. [Sail] is our new unified solution for managingour customer profile data and how they authenticate on our website andin-store, and it provides a centralized mechanism to store customer data. Weworked intensely over the last nine months to complete this migration withminimal disruption to existing systems. Go to [Sail].armoso.dev to see foryourself.
We built [Sail] with modern cloud services, enabling us tospeed up the pace of innovation within Armoso. We’ve experienced delays andhiccups in report generation, customer support calls because of datasynchronization issues, and the frustration of teams that had to wait months tobuild and deploy features and campaigns.
[Sail] uses a flexible schema system, allowing multipleteams to store data for their use cases without having to wait for approvalsand reviews, while maintaining the integrity of the system. It uses adistributed architecture, providing exceptional reliability and availability.Gone are the days of data synchronization issues. We also provide a built-inmechanism for data history, making it simpler to audit and revert any changesapplied to customer information. Finally, we built [Sail] to be “privacy-aware,”limiting access to user records and even field-level access control. This makes[Sail] GDPR and CCPA compliant and allows us the flexibility to handle futureregulations without having to rebuild or re-architect our services.
This was a team effort with 18 engineering teams working toidentify, collect requirements, and replace the old Acropolis database. Wedeprecated nine services and 12 tools, and we’ll reduce our infrastructurespend by more than $6.5 million a year. You can visit [Sail].armoso.dev toaccess user data and reports and find the documentation for tech teams to use[Sail]'s APIs and data dictionary.
Sandra Plyar
Chief Technology Officer
Internal FAQs
Q1: What discussion are we having today?
We are seeking executive approval and budget funding toreplace the existing Acropolis database system with a modern architecture.
Q2: What problem are you solving, and who’s thecustomer?
Our primary customer is Armoso’s customers. They’ve had asubpar experience with our systems because of an outdated architecture. It’snot unusual for updates to passwords and email addresses to be unintentionallyreverted. Last year, 17.3 percent of customer support inquiries related tocustomers failing to log in to the website. We had 0.27 percent of ordersdelivered to the wrong address because of synchronization issues aftercustomers made an update to their shipping address. Our customers see a 2.7s additionallatency (p99) for each page that requires access to the customer data (inAcropolis). Our product design teams limit their ideas on mobile and the Web toavoid accessing this information, leading to unpersonalized experiences.
Besides our primary customers, we have 25 teams who built117 services on top of Acropolis to support our operations, from accounting tomarketing, from customer support to fraud detection. The current architectureis brittle and requires changes to go through a 12-week review processinvolving eight teams. These stakeholders must plan nine to 12 months ahead ifthey need any change to Acropolis. Finally, our compliance and legal teams havebeen concerned about the lack of access control on the Acropolis database sinceit doesn’t support granular field and row access control. Today, engineers haveaccess to whole database tables, even though it’s not a business need.
Q3: What’s the solution being proposed?
We’ve evaluated and prototyped five different technicalproof-of-concepts based on assumptions of the requirements. Wefound several viable solutions, and our choice is to use Azure Cosmos Db as thecentral repository, Azure Data Lake, and Azure Cache for Redis as the coreservices. Cosmos Db is pricier than alternatives. However, it provides a levelof global distribution, API, and store flexibility, auto-scalability, and it'sfully managed. We are also adding a database access layer through REST andGraphQL APIs, and a new distributed caching system for any services that don’trequire real-time data. We estimated that query latency will be less than 0.09s(p99) for real-time services like our mobile app, website, and customer supportagent portal.
We’ll build a schema taxonomy that allows separate teamsto own their pieces of the data, like customer orders, payment data, andmessage tracking. Teams decide the data they expose to other services, whichtransformers apply to which data, and the syntax and semantics of their datadictionary. Each team will keep an up-to-date schema description at[Sail].amoroso.dev, making it easier for other engineers to understand what’savailable.
We are also building an integrated history, audit, andlogging layer so every update to any field in the database is tracked andstored for a period, configurable per field.
Q4: What are the migration plan and risks?
Migration will be the most complicated aspect of thisproject. We’ve done an inventory of the 117 services using Acropolis tounderstand how they are accessing the data, what data they are using, and howwe can minimize disruption to the teams that own those services. We intend tolaunch two temporary services to support our migration plan. First, we’llcreate a shim layer on top of Acropolis using our new API design. We estimatethis project will take four months to complete. Teams will then have ten monthsto move their services to the new API design. Second, we’ll build a datamigration tool that will use Acropolis as the source of truth but sync the datato [Sail] in near real-time. Then, we’ll move the read-only API requests to thenew [Sail] database, and at the cut-off date, we’ll move the read-writeoperations and turn off Acropolis.
We’ll be able to simulate these updates in our prod-testenvironment with customer data that is a day old. We will inventory tables andfields to understand if there are redundancies, or fields that weredeprecated but we never cleaned up. For example, we currently store customeraddresses in three different tables (orders, profile, and payments). We’ll beable to normalize these data without disrupting the services that use it.
We also have a risk around our team’s skill set. We’llneed to provide proper training and certification for our engineers, and wehave negotiated with PlusSight, a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner, for aseries of trainings over a two-month period. Our Microsoft Customer SuccessAccount Manager (CSAM) has connected us with a Cloud Solution Architect (CSA)who will advise us and validate our architecture.
Q5: What are the stakeholders’ concerns?
Our tech organization is 1,100 engineers, TPMs, PMs, datascientists, and designers. Leaders are worried about prioritizing the worktheir team needs to do against the other items on the team’s backlog. For thisproject to be successful, we expect the executive leadership to get buy-in fromall executives in the company. We will slow down work on new features while wecomplete this project. In Appendix A, we list the 117 services using Acropolis,a brief description of what they do, the migration needs, and a rough estimateof the effort.
We have also spoken to teams in marketing, customersupport, billing, returns, compliance, and operations. Their concerns arearound the impact on their processes and tools. They want to know what's goingto change and how to prepare for it. They are enthusiastic and supportive ofthis project, given how much pain they currently experience with Acropolis.
Q6: How much does it cost to launch this project?
This is not a cheap project compared to other initiativesover the last three years. We expect the core team working on [Sail] to needsix engineers full-time, a dedicated product manager, and a TPM. We have threeengineers and a TPM dedicated to Acropolis today. We will allocate 60 percentof their time to work on [Sail], so we will need to hire another four engineersand borrow TPM from another team. Each of the 18 engineering teams involved inthe migration projects will require 1-2 full-time engineers allocated to thisproject for 12-15 months. Appendix B includes additional costs for training,travel, and third-party vendors that this project will affect. We’ll need torenegotiate or cancel some vendor services. Today, we estimate it costs $16million per year in infrastructure to support Acropolis, including personnel,and that moving to the cloud will cost $9.5 million per year, saving us $6.5Mper year starting in year three. Appendix B contains the financial model.
Q7: What happens if we don’t do this now?
The existing system is working, even though it has theproblems described above. It has become challenging to innovate and launch newfeatures, affecting our business’s ability to keep up with other retailers andbetter serve our customers. Our systems are near the limit of theirscalability, and it’s possible that if we double our customer base, theperformance issues will become unbearable.
Q8: What have you done so far?
So far, we have done five things: (1) Customer discovery research with the 25 teams currently usingAcropolis, including an analysis of 10,000 customer support contacts, (2)Customer discovery interviews with business stakeholders, (3)Proof-of-concepts for five solutions, (4) Discussion withPlusSight and Microsoft CSAM/CSA, and (5) Wrote this PRFAQ and created a draftproject plan.
Q9: What are the technical risks?
We have identified two major risks. First, it’s possiblethat we have not surfaced all the services that rely on Acropolis today, and atdeprecation time, we may break a service or a team's procedure. Second, we won’tknow the full performance limitations of this implementation until we aregetting near the launch. We need the data available in [Sail] and most servicesusing it.
For the first risk, we plan to migrate services to usethe shim layer. We'll turn off direct access to Acropolis for a 72-hour periodwhile monitoring for increased error rates. For the second risk, we’ll be ableto identify any performance bottleneck when we have the full implementation onthe prod-test environment and are simulating full customer traffic.
Q10: Are there regulations that apply to this projectthat we need to be cautious?
Yes, privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA apply to thisproject. Our SOC-II and ISO-27001 certifications also play a keyrole in our new architecture. Finally, we need to maintain our PCI compliancewith credit card and billing information.
Q11: When will we launch, and what are the keydeadlines or milestones?
The key milestones of this project include:
M1 (3 months): Requirements collection, architecture, anddesign reviews
M2 (2 months): Provisioning and implementation of [Sail]
M3 (2 months): Acropolis-[Sail] Sync tool & shimlayer for Acropolis
M4 (6-8 months): Service migration to Shim layer andlaunch of [Sail].amoroso.dev
M5 (2 months): Full prod-test load on [Sail] andoptimizations
M6 (1 month): Launch
PRFAQ: Rising Spaces
Type: A non-profit physical space & technologyproject.
Origin: The UShas an age and social class separation in public and private spaces that’s notas common in other countries. It is one factor in the epidemic of loneliness,as well as a lack of cross-generation interactions that are crucial to buildingbetter communities.
Setting: You’veworked at a big tech company for fifteen years in consumer products. In thepast four years, you worked on a social app that grew to tens of millions ofusers and led the team responsible for improving connections among users. Foryears, you volunteered in non-profits helping teenagers and older adults. Youobserved the lack of meaningful connections between the same generations andacross generations, both in the virtual and physical world, and you startedresearching the topic. You noticed the lack of common spaces in the US thatwere cross-generational and multipurpose. A former colleague and you tinkeredwith an idea for a non-profit experiment to create a space and measure theimpact on the community. Another friend, an architect with a passion forurbanism, joined this project. You wrote a PRFAQ to think through this problemand find non-profits and philanthropists with the appetite for a long-termexperiment.
Rising opens a modern socialspace in [Kirkland] for people to meet, connect, and relax.
The new space includes restaurants, a coffee shop,event spaces, a gym, and a drop-in daycare.
PR Newswire—[Kirkland, WA], May 26, 2027—Rising is a newsocial space built by a non-profit organization to create and strengthen theconnections between the members of a community. It’s a first-of-a-kindcross-generation space designed with a science-based approach to itsarchitecture and experiences to make it inviting and to create a serendipityzone.
The US has suffered a decline in third spaces, leading to agrowing number of individuals who feel lonely across all generations. There hasbeen a segmentation of spaces not only by generation but also by social class.Many claim the proliferation of mobile devices and apps has caused people tostay longer at home, but data suggests the lack of safe and welcoming spaces isthe primary reason people go home in the first place. Teenagers and olderadults are the groups that expressed the most desire to go out and hang outoutside their homes.
Rising in [Kirkland, WA] is a three-story building with arooftop space designed to serve individuals. It has an open concept with retailstores and event spaces facing inward, a large open atrium with shared tablesand a playground for young children, and daily events and activities. Rising isfour blocks from Lake Washington High School and two blocks from the TransitCenter. It has five restaurants, a coffee shop, a boba shop, and an ice cream shop.It has a fitness studio offering yoga and dance classes and a drop-in hourlydaycare for children ages two to 11. There are four conference rooms for fourto 12 people each, a lecture space that fits 60 people seated for classes andseminars, and the rooftop has two spaces open to the public or for event organizersto book. It has daily activities, from meetups to classes, and from live musicto book signing events.
“Rising represents what I wanted when I was a teenager andthe place I want to take my kids and my mom today,” said Claire Doerr, founder& CEO of Rising Spaces. “People in the US migrated to urban and suburbancenters over the last fifty years, and we didn’t reimagine communities in thissetting.”
Rising is a non-profit that partners with national andlocal businesses to serve its community. It’s a space that is open to thepublic from 7:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m., Monday to Saturday, and 9:00 a.m. to 5:00p.m. on Sundays. Local high school students and people 65 or over have a 20percent discount at food shops. Professionals and event organizers can reservespaces for private events or work with our program director for communityevents.
“Our family has been going to Rising for the last fewFridays, and it has been a fantastic experience,” said Melanie Case, a SalesEngineer at Google. “I leave work at 3:00, pick up my 11-year-old at herschool, and we spend time together at Rising, which has live music at thattime. My older daughter also hangs out with her friends there, and we havedinner at one of the restaurants.”
People can experience Rising in[Kirkland] at [517 Kirkland Way] and check our website at www.gotorising.org tosee our events and activities calendar.
Customer FAQ
Q1: Is there a membership?
No membership or fee is required to enter the space anduse the retail shops. For the event and meeting spaces, an account must becreated on our mobile app. People register for free on the mobile app to learnabout upcoming events and activities and receive news about the space.
Q2: What events and activities happen at Rising?
We have various events and activities throughout the dayand the week. They include: Live music; young kids’ entertainment; book cluband book signing; yoga, dance, and strength training classes; speaker series oncollege, personal finance, real estate, gardening, technology, parenting, andmore; community meetups in tech, design, marketing, real estate, and others.
Q3: Can I drop my kid off for the entire day at thedaycare?
Our drop-in daycare is open from 8:00 a.m. until 6:00p.m., and children stay up to four hours in a single day and up to three timesa week. It costs $20 per child per hour, and parents must register on ourmobile app ahead of time to check for availability.
Q4: Are kids allowed without parents to be in thespace?
Yes, children 11 and older can be without an adult. Werequest that children ten or younger be accompanied by a family teenager oradult.
Q5: How safe is Rising if anyone can get in?
We designed the space to be safe. There is only oneentrance for visitors, with security cameras and an information host at theentrance. We trained the staff at Rising and the retail stores in first-aid,CPR, and many safety protocols.
Q6: Can I use the space without buying anything?
Yes. Rising is a space where you can hang out and relax.
Q7: What do you offer in the mobile app?
Our mobile app allows you to see what’s happening atRising, book event spaces and daycare, and see the list of businesses. You’llalso find a member directory of trusted service providers who engage ininformation sessions at Rising. They are available for free open office hoursaround personal finance, applying to a college, retirement planning, realestate, and much more.
Q8: Can I reserve a space for my group every week?
Our event spaces are on a first-come, first-served basis.For non-commercial use, we charge $10 to $50 per hour. For commercial use,spaces are available from $30 to $150 per hour. Event rooms are available forup to four hours at a time, and you can book up to six weeks in advance. Therooftop is also available and can be used for larger events and corporategatherings. Contact us for more information.
Internal FAQs
Q1: What’s the vision?
Rising Spaces is recreating communities with a moderntwist. We are proving a new model that’s financially sustainable and has apositive impact on people. The consequences are lower crime rates, improvedmental health, vibrant communities, and strengthened local schools andbusinesses. We intend to launch the [Kirkland] pilot and iterate in the modelover two years to build a playbook for an expansion.
Q2: What would you like to discuss today?
We’d like to discuss the merits of this proposal and thefunding required to launch and operate it for a two-year period.
Q3: Who are the customers and what problems are yousolving for them?
We are creating a space that works across generations fortheir use and care. Parents of young children or who homeschool their kids seekspaces for them to socialize with other kids. Older adult centers isolate theirmembers from other generations, while their members prefer to be in spaces thatare lively and energizing. Teenagers don’t have viable spaces to hang out afterschool that are comfortable and welcoming. We have established seven segmentsof customers and done research into their needs.
Q4: How are you going to measure success?
The first Rising space is an experiment. We’ll measuresuccess by making it financially viable with no additional funding. Inaddition, we’ll also run studies of the impact of this space in the community,including measuring crime, loneliness, school grades, and business ownersentiment.
Q5: What’s the expected utilization of this space?
Based on a preliminary model, we expect between 1,000 and1,200 people to go through the space every day. We estimate between 4,500 and8,000 individuals to use the space at least once a month and an average of 4.2visits per month. That’s enough foot traffic to make it lively and to attractretailers.
Q6: What funding are you seeking, and what’s thebusiness model?
We are seeking $7 million to run this experiment forthree and a half years. We'll deploy $4.5 million to build the space in thefirst two years. We'll use the remaining 18 months to operate until we are at abreak-even point. The revenue will come from retail space leases, corporateevents, and advertising in our venue and on the mobile app. Our goal is toachieve an 11 percent operating profit so the funds can be used to build newRising units. We’ll generate revenue from retail space leases, event space booking,and from local professionals to be part of our trusted service providernetwork.
Q7: Are you partnering with the local government?
We’ll seek tax benefits and support from the city,county, state, and federal government. We want to be cautious about how much weleverage local government to avoid undue influence on our model and to keep usflexible and agile in our experiments.
Q8: How are customers going to learn about the space?
We’ll establish a series of scrappy marketing campaignstargeting each of the seven segments of customers we have identified. AppendixC contains more information about these segments and the tactics underconsideration.
Q9: What’s the costliest factor for this organization?
The building, operations, and maintenance of the physicalspace will account for 73 percent of our costs over a four-year period. Insubsequent years, we estimate facilities will account for 41 percent of ourcosts, and personnel will account for 37 percent.
Q10: What consumer trends are you taking advantage of?
The explosion of remote and hybrid work over the last fewyears has opened new opportunities for people to get out of the house for workor relaxation. The epidemic of loneliness is also a powerful factor for peopleseeking to be around others. Finally, there is a trend around localism andsustainability that Millennials and Gen Z have embraced.
Q11: How does this compare to existing shopping malls,coffee shops, or parks?
Our biggest competitor is not shopping malls, coffeeshops, or parks. It’s the hours that people spend at home doing “nothing” ordoomscrolling social media and binge-watching short videos. Contrary tocommercial spaces with an implied rule of consumption, Rising is designed forpeople to be there, alone, but not lonely, or with others.
Q12: How long will it take to build this space?
We might be optimistic about it, but we believe once theresearch is done and our team finds the lot or building, it’ll take 20–24months to build it and be ready for operations.
Q13: Is there a technology component in this space?
Yes. We’ll build a mobile app and automation in the spaceto help streamline operations and customer experience. We believe our mobileapp can be expanded in the future to be the de facto community app for peopleto find resources, businesses, and members of the community to connect with.
Q14: What kind of customer research have you done?
We have interviewed 87 people in the streets from theages of five to 85. Our goal was to understand how they feel about thecommunity. We asked what they like and don’t like about libraries, parks,coffee shops, and other spaces and what they want in a shared space. Some ofthem were small business owners, and we asked additional business-relatedquestions. From this study, we created seven segments of customers: (1) youngchildren + parents, (2) high schoolers, (3) remote workers, (4) couples, (5)solo local professionals, (6) older adults, and (7) event/meetup organizers.
Q15: How many people will work at this location?
Most people working at the facility will be retailers’workers, and Rising won’t manage them. Our staff will include 16 people onceit’s fully operational for Rising Kirkland. That doesn’t include five peoplewho work at Rising Spaces core non-profit. We’ll also create a volunteerprogram that will include an additional 20 to 30 people.
Q16: Where did the name come from?
Rising stands for Relaxing,Social Interaction, and NeutralGround. This is based on the threepillars from the work of Ray Oldenburg, an urban sociologist who establishedthe idea of third spaces in 1989.
Q17: Who’s on the team?
Claire Doerr is the co-founder & CEO of RisingSpaces. Claire has a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Oregon andan MBA from the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington. Shehas worked on consumer and social apps for the last fifteen years and has beena community volunteer for a decade.
Sean Hao is the co-founder & COO of Rising Spaces.Sean has a B.S. in Finance from U.C. San Diego. He has worked for seven yearsat Microsoft as a Senior Analyst and five years at Redfin as a Director ofOperations.
Emily Callahan is the co-founder & Chief Architect.Emily has a B.S. in Architecture from California Polytechnic State University.She has worked for six years in two architectural firms in New York andSeattle.
