Do you have an idea for a new startup but struggle to tellthe story that resonates with investors or co-founders? Have you pitched anidea at a meeting on how to improve a product or process at work, but it didn'tgain traction? Have you been unsuccessful in getting funding or approval foryour research or initiative? Do you think the team lacks alignment with theproject? Have you discovered a critical piece of information halfway through aproject because you forgot to consult with a key person? Or were you the keyperson left out of a major decision because people forgot to ask for yourinput? If any of these situations sound familiar, this book is for you.
This book is about helping innovators think through,articulate, and inspire people to act.More specifically, it’s a book about making ordinary ideas into great ideas andbringing them to life. I wish I had this book when I became a manager, foundedmy first startup, started leading product teams, or joined Amazon. It would have accelerated mycareer, improved the products I worked on, and delivered faster and boldervisions for my customers.
This book is for innovators like you. It’s for when you havean idea for a business, a product, a program, or a change to something thatexists already. It’s for:
1. Pre-founders who are considering founding a startup.
2. Founders who are in the early stage of building theirstartup.
3. Product and program leaders who want to delivervaluable and viable solutions.
4. Leaders and executives seeking better cohesion and strategicalignment across people and teams.
5. Researchers, scientists, and scholars seeking fundingand support for their projects.
6. Entrepreneurship and innovation professors engagingstudents in ideation, business concepts, strategy,and pitching.
7. Leaders in incubators, accelerators, and startup studios aiming to improve their selection process.
8. Pre-seed and seed-stage Venture Capitalists who want to get more clarity from foundersseeking funding or their portfolio founders’ directions.
For seven years, I was a software engineer and a manager atMicrosoft. I was dissatisfied with thebreadth of my role and the pace of innovation. I spent my nights and weekendsbuilding side projects, mostly to learn technologies. During my time atMicrosoft, I’ve built more than a handful of websites for family members, mostlysmall businesses. It wasn’t easy to build anything on the Web, and it requiredtechnical knowledge that even a tech-savvy person such as myself struggledwith. I realized that an easy-to-use website builder would be valuable. Thereweren’t tools such as WordPress, Squarespace, or Webflow. I spent a yearconvincing the leaders at Microsoft this was a viable (and enormous) businessopportunity. The story didn’t stick. I left and founded a startup for anyone tobuild a website for business or personal use without knowing coding.
My mother worked in public relations, and when I was ateenager, she became an entrepreneur and founded a PR agency. As a geekyteenager, I was fascinated with computers and software and helped her withtech. Before I went to college to study computer science, I had exposure to theworld of public relations, journalism, and marketing. I had read dozens ofpress releases and seen firsthand which landed on the frontpage of a newspaper or were featured in a weekly magazine. The successfulpieces had an emotional people story (good or bad), related to the reader, orbroke the narrative the reader expected to encounter.
In 2005, months before I launched my first startup product,I wrote a press release (PR). It wasn’t a press releaseto send to any journalist or publish anywhere. Rather, it was an internaldocument to help guide the vision. In it, I talked about this revolutionaryproduct that allowed anyone to build a website. It included information aboutthe features, the ease of use of the experience, and the pricing.
I shared that document with advisors and investors. Itbackfired! People stared at me, trying to understand what this “fiction” wasabout. One person said I was misleading them because what was in the pressrelease wasn’t true (yet), but the way I wrote it madeit look like it was. A decade before I heard the term for the first time, Iconsider that my first experiment in writing a PRFAQ (Press Release +Frequently Asked Questions)—the document invented by Amazon as the basis for debating strategic decisions and defining a vision.
My second attempt was six years later. I was the co-founderof a fitness/health startup with fifteen employees. Instead of painting theaspirational picture as a press release, I adopted a narrative of a“Manifesto.” We had raised a round of funding, we were growing, and I wanted toensure we aligned our team on our strategy and our “why.” The document wasn’t apivot from what we were doing; it was a mechanism to bring clarity. This time,it was a hit! Not only did it bring clarity to our team, but it also inspiredand motivated us. It cemented the idea in my brain that you need to start fromthe end and articulate the vision in writing.
I can’t recall the exact time I learned about Amazon’s PRFAQ, but it was around2015. Over the years, I learned about the company and its writing culture. Therewasn’t much written about how the company operated, much less about PRFAQs.There was a mystique about the Amazon magic and how a six-page document led tothe creation of AWS, Alexa, and other multi-billion-dollar initiatives. Theoutside world did not know what happened within the company. People admiredAmazon and were in awe of the no-PowerPoint ethos.
Colin Bryar and Bill Carr published Working Backwards in 2021, an excellent book that offers ahigh-level overview of the Amazon ways. It included references to PRFAQ and evena sample one. As someone who appreciated the power of writing to influencepeople, I was hooked. Bryar and Carr did a wonderful job explaining the originof the frameworks, practices, and how they evolved.
I knew Amazon was onto something big with its culture ofwriting. It’s difficult to hide bad ideas behind writing because writing iseverything there is when you share a document with someone. If you need to bethere to present the document—like you must do when you give a PowerPoint presentation—the content is incomplete. Ourbrains also process reading content differently than listening to or watchingit. Except in the rare cases where people have exceptional presentation anddata visualization skills, for the audience, reading text provides the space tothink more carefully about what’s being shared.
A year later, I joined Amazon to experience it from the inside. The writing(and reading) culture is true. PRFAQs are true. Narratives and unique writingartifacts are genuinely part of the company’s operations. They have over twodozen standard document frameworks. Some are forward-looking, like PRFAQs; someare backward-looking, like Weekly Business Reviews (WBR); and some are both,like the Correction of Error (CoE). We didn’t use PowerPoint in meetings.
Leaders use PRFAQs broadly across Amazon. Every new business idea, newproduct or program idea, big impact or high-risk product feature, experiment,operational or process change, cost-saving initiative, and InformationTechnology (IT) or Human Resources (HR) policy change starts with aPRFAQ. A single-threaded leader (STL) is responsible for thePRFAQ, and anywhere from five to twenty-five people collaborate with the STL toevolve the document until it can be presented to a director or vice presidentfor approval. We use these documents widely as the execution guardrails. As anexecutive, I read and collaborated on anywhere from two to five PRFAQs a week,and during the annual planning period, twice as many.
The Leap
Many frameworks, methods, and concepts made the jump fromcompanies like Microsoft, Intel, Google, Toyota, Netflix, and Apple into the tech and business world. Microsoftinvented the Product Manager role (called Program Manager at the time; whilethe Product Manager title was what we call Product Marketing Manager now).Netflix inventedChaos Engineering (a process to build reliable services). Intel inventedObjectives and Key Results (OKRs), popularized by Google,which invented the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) role. Apple invented theconcept of a Direct Responsible Individual (DRI). And Toyota invented theToyota Production System (TPS), which has arguably had the biggest impact onhow we build technology than any other company. It includes concepts like Lean, Kanban, Five Whys, Continuous Improvement, andmore.
For these frameworks, methods, and concepts to be adopted byother companies, they must be stripped down to their core principles. Whatworks in one company needs adjustments to work outside that company. Forexample, OKRs have enjoyed widespread adoption across bigand small companies, but the framework is not exactly what Google or Intel uses.
Halfway through my journey at Amazon, I questioned why PRFAQ hadn’tmade the jump yet. Tens of thousands of people who worked at Amazon moved to othercompanies, which is how frameworks and methods spread. But the PRFAQ didn’tcatch on, at least not widely.
I interviewed dozens of people who worked at Amazon and non-Amazonians who heard about PRFAQs.Throughout this process, I heard good arguments about why it wouldn’t work forstartups because of the speed at which they move. I heard that people don’tenjoy reading, which is why executives and investors prefer MicrosoftPowerPoint. I heard, point blank, from asuccessful founder who sold two companies to big tech, why PRFAQ is notsomething others will adopt outside of Amazon because it’s designed for theirculture.
These were excellent arguments, and they were right! At itsface value, the way Amazonians write and use a PRFAQ doesn’t work (well)outside of Amazon. The framework and methodsbehind it are too strict in a few ways and too loose in others.
I gathered this data, reflected on it, and decided that fora PRFAQ to work outside of Amazon, it needed an adaptation. Iextracted the core principles behind a PRFAQ and the problems it solves. Then,I rebuilt the framework and added a method to compose a PRFAQ that addressesthe needs of non-Amazonians. In Chapter 1, you’ll understand the principlesbehind a PRFAQ, what it is, and why it exists.
Throughout this book, you’ll learn why PRFAQs will help youfind the truth in your ideas, become better at articulating them, and inspirepeople to act. You’ll learn when to use (and not to use) the PRFAQ framework,what it is, and how to create one. You’ll also learn how to use it to gatherfeedback to iterate and evolve an initiative before you or your organizationmake big investments of time or money.
I’ve divided this journey into three parts. The first partis about narratives, storytelling, and writing, which are prerequisites for youto create a great PRFAQ. The second part focuses on the artifact itself—thedocument—what you should and should not include and how to format it. The thirdpart is about a method to create the document and how to use it. To makeeverything concrete, I’ve also included a bonus section with three examples offictional PRFAQs, in addition to the one in the next chapter.
Let me give important definitions of terminology that I usein the book.
I’ll use the word customerto mean the primary customer of the product, program, or service. This customerwill be a consumer or a professional. They are the people you are serving. Inthis book, a customer rarely means the business or entity into which you areselling. It also doesn’t mean the stakeholders, which are internal teams, orexternal partners, who’ll also benefit from your innovation. In thisdefinition, if you are building an internal tool or program for your employeesor a subset of employees, most likely, the employees are your customers.
The words innovationand innovator are used to mean anykind of innovation, invention, or idea for a new product, program, process, orservice or for improving existing ones. Innovators are everywhere. If you arereading this book, you are one. No matter how narrow your scope ofresponsibility or stagnant your organization is, you can innovate within it orpropose innovations related to it.
I will extend the definition of the word product to mean any kind of product(digital or physical), program, process, or service. This isn’t simply asemantic choice. In Chapter 12, you’ll understand the importance of using theword product and thinking about thethings you are creating as a product (spoiler: it includes thinking of thePRFAQ document as a product).
The concept of customer problem should be extended tomean any customer need, pain point, or desire.
Finally, the word project refers to the project tocompose a PRFAQ and the project to deliver the initiative. They are one and thesame. A PRFAQ is just a subproject within the bigger project, just like aproof-of-concept is a subproject. I’ll call out the “PRFAQproject” or the “product project” if I need the distinction.
Book Corrections & Feedback
Get a highlighter. I’m walking the talk, and I want you tosend me feedback on mistakes (from spelling to coherence), oversights, and yourinsights on this book to improve future revisions and editions. You can visit www.theprfaq.com/feedbackto find corrections, commentary, and thoughtful discussions about the book andthe PRFAQ Framework.
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 PRFAQcovers. Second, more than half of the value of the PRFAQ is the method tocreate one, and by delivering the result, some people will miss the point.Finally, without knowing what to look for, we miss important aspects of thisartifact.
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.
Part I
The Purpose
We will consider multiple purposes in the first part of thisbook. First, I’ll tell you why you should read this book and how it canrevitalize your innovation skills and take them to the next level. Second, Iwill talk about narratives and why they are an effective tool in yourprofessional toolbelt. Finally, I’ll dive into helping you find the purpose forthe project you are working on.
A PRFAQ is a framework, method, and artifact for people tothink critically and deeply to develop their innovations, to learn how toarticulate them clearly, and to inspire people to action.It’s a strategic decision-making tool that works across all organization sizesand functions. At the center, it’s a six-page narrative divided into threesections: (1) A press release, (2) a customer FAQ, and (3)an internal FAQ.
In this chapter, you’ll get an introduction to the Amazon PRFAQ and its adaptation through firstprinciples, why it’s growing in adoption, when to use it, and the types ofPRFAQs that you can use through the lifecycle of your business, product,program, or service.
Amazon adopted the PRFAQ format in the mid-2000s aspart of a set of frameworks for decision-making, building, and operating itsbusiness. These are part of the Working Backwards method. Startups and other organizations havenot adopted Amazon’s PRFAQs and other Working Backwards mechanisms (Tenets, Correction of Errors, Page 0, Operating Plan, etc.) because they arenontransferable Amazon processes and artifacts. They’re interwoven into theother aspects of the Amazon PeculiarWay, how the company calls theset of principles, practices, and cultural norms that define how it operates,from its leadership principles to its annual planning, from the internal toolsto its monthly business reviews. Even the job role guidelines, onboardingtraining, and promotions are part of one engine. You can’t take a single gearfrom that engine and expect it to fit into another organization’s engine (waysof working).
Amazon’s PRFAQs are not alightweight process—on purpose! Amazon uses PRFAQs in strategic decisions, and they must accommodate its financial andoperational planning cycle. A single PRFAQ can translate to millions orbillions of dollars of impact on its bottom line. The PRFAQ owners work formonths, with dozens of iterations and dozens of people triggering all kinds ofresearch (data science, market research, customer discovery, UX research, feasibility studies, financial modeling, legal, etc.) before thePRFAQ is in a presentable state for executives. It’s common to have ten ortwenty people collaborating to bring a PRFAQ to completion. At a startup and inmost organizations, you don’t have those kinds of resources or even theappetite to put so much research into a document. That’s a steep hill for itsadoption.
PRFAQ is the crown jewel of the Amazon Working Backwards process. This book adapts the framework,develops a method to create and use it, and removes friction for adoption byyou and your organization. It empowers you to discover a vision and a strategyand make decisions without having to become “Amazonian.”
This isn’t a reinvention of the PRFAQ Framework or theWorking Backwards process. I interviewed people who left Amazon and joined other companies or started theirown to understand what parts they brought with them, what worked, and whatdidn’t work. I interviewed others who use writing for vision and strategy.Likewise, I reviewed dozens of templates used by organizations, universities,and venture capitalists for pitching, planning, proposals, vision,etc. Based on this research, I stripped the PRFAQ down to the core principlesand rebuilt the framework and a method that fits those principles.
Until a few years ago, if you’d ask founders, productmanagers, or executives outside of Amazon, most of them would not have heard aboutPRFAQs. Nowadays, I see more people not only understanding what they are butusing them themselves based on information they gathered online or fromex-Amazonians.
For those who are former or current Amazonians, what Idescribe in the rest of this book resembles parts of Amazon’s PRFAQ, but it’s not thesame. If you are studying how Amazon works or considering joining the company, therewill be differences that I don’t explicitly call it out.
The five principles of the PRFAQ are:
1. Customer-centric:It starts from the customer, and it captures their needs, pain points, ordesires. It captures how customers are being (under)served today, who they are,and what matters to them.
2. Aspirational:It’s an aspirational vision that is feasible, viable, usable, and valuable.
3. Clear, concise,and coherent: It presents the project in its best possible light. It's easyto understand by the people involved in the project, and it’s logical.
4. Truth-seeking:It is a mechanism to learn and discover. It’s not a way to manipulate opinionsor force ideas onto people. It evolves at each round of review, improving itsaccuracy.
5. A strategicdecision-making tool: It’s a tool to decide if theteam should pursue a project, why, and when.
Every idea starts in one of three ways. I call these the “sparks.”
1. People learn about a technology or a tool and explorewhat problems it can solve.
2. People observe a problem and the lack of satisfactorysolutions and wonder if they could do better.
3. People pick a customer segment and try to understandthe problems they have.
Regardless of where the spark came from, you can’t skipvalidating the problem and the solution with the customer.
In the corporate world, or when you have a post product-market-fit startup, you are inundated with problems. Theexercise is more about prioritization, effort (cost/time to market), andimpact. You should validate that the problem is a real problem, but theevidence is typically abundant. You’ll focus more on the solution. Forstartups, it’s the opposite. You don’t know if the problem really exists,regardless of whether people tell you it does. Even if the problem exists, youneed to validate how meaningful is that problem for the customer and how theyare handling it today. We will cover this in more detail in Chapter 7.
Here’s the simplified description of the steps to build astartup after a spark:
1. Ideation or Quantitative Research
2. Customer Discovery
3. Solution Experimentation (e.g., Prototyping or MVP)
4. Fundraising
5. Product-Market Fit Iteration
5.1. Build
5.2. Measure
5.3. Learn
6. Scale-up
Here are the steps for launching a new product, service, orprogram within a company:
1. Problem/Need identification
2. Solution identification (Prototyping)
3. Prioritization
4. Resource allocation
5. Execution
6. Delivery / Launch
7. Operation
In both cases, a PRFAQ will be the most effective method tostate a problem, the customer, and a solution to get feedback from the keypeople involved in the project. In the case of a startup, the people involvedare the founders, early employees, investors, and advisors. For a product orprogram in an organization, it’s the management chain up to the decision-maker, the stakeholders, and thepeople who will execute, launch, and operate that initiative.
A PRFAQ works well to identify early issues with an ideabefore significant investments are made. It gives you and the people reviewingit the flexibility to “experiment” without building prototypes or full products or programs. Because a PRFAQis a structured narrative, it’s easy to change and iterate. It’s also“unfinished” enough that the full solution is left to people’s imagination. Itallows people to speak more candidly about their views without feeling they arecriticizing the color scheme or the registration flow.
A single project might have multiple PRFAQs as itprogresses. You might start with a strong hunch of a problem and a hypothesisfor a solution. You’ll evolve and review this PRFAQ until it gets to a pointwhere you decide that customer research and proof-of-concept are needed. The purpose of this PRFAQ is toget approval to do the research and the proof-of-concept. It’s a “research”type of PRFAQ.
Once the team learns about the actual problems and thefeasibility of the solutions, the goal is to find a viablesolution. This is a “solution discovery” type of PRFAQ. You are seeking fundingor approval to prove the solution solves the customer problem. In the startupworld, this would be your seed stage.
A third type of PRFAQ is a “scale” PRFAQ. You know theproblem and the solution (you proved the efficacy), and you want to bet it all.The main questions you seek to answer are about the scalability and operationsof the product and distribution (marketing and sales). Finally, you might havea “performance” PRFAQ, where you are fine-tuning the product to improve it. Youare seeking efficiency and optimization.
Writing a first draft of a PRFAQ can take anywhere from afew hours to a few weeks. It’s not as simple as writing a vision statement oran OKR, and it should precede both.There are several common use cases for a PRFAQ within the types describedabove.
For founders:
1. Decide whether you should start a new startup.
2. Pitch investors.
3. Apply to an accelerator, incubator, or startup studio.
4. Align your company on a vision and direction.
5. Realign your company after a pivot.
6. Launch a new line of business or new product.
7. Prepare to articulate your vision and mission better (to talk to thepress, customers, or candidates).
8. Inspire co-founders and early employees.
9. Consider a market or product expansion.
For product, engineering, or program leaders:
1. Discuss the merits of a new product, program, orproject.
2. Bring clarity to the vision and direction.
3. Discuss a change of direction in a product or programstrategy, including proposing shutting it down.
4. Align (or realign) the team.
5. Propose an optimization in the product, internalprocesses, or other operational optimizations.
For marketing, sales, and business development:
1. Propose a new campaign or program.
2. Adopt a new tool or vendor.
3. Rebrand a product, service, or the business.
4. Decide on a (risky) strategic partnership.
For IT, HR, facilities, and G&Afunctions:
1. Propose new or change to internal programs or policies.
2. Adopt a new tool or vendor.
3. Evaluate a cost-cutting initiative.
For researchers, scientists, and scholars:
1. Decide on a new line of research.
2. Get clarity before applying for a grant.
3. Align the research team on a vision and direction.
4. Get feedback on the commercial viability of an invention.
5. Propose the commercialization of an invention (toinvestors or partners).
Other use cases:
1. Apply for a business plan or startup competition.
2. Articulate a project in an entrepreneurship, strategy,or innovation class.
3. Propose a new or change to a company policy or program.
4. Kick off a marketing campaign or brand change.
5. Propose a change to an existing process or system.
A PRFAQ is a forward-looking strategic document. The processof writing a PRFAQ is a process of discovery and collaboration. Once a PRFAQ isdone, it becomes the source of truth for the vision and the strategy, a.k.a.the North Star for the team. This is where Jeff Bezos's quote comes into play: “Be stubborn on vision,and flexible on details.” You are basically locking in place a version of thestory that everyone is committed to. For that reason, PRFAQs are not dynamicdocuments that change every month.
A PRFAQ is not a plan. It doesn’t have product requirements,specifications, architecture diagrams, or a launch and go-to-market strategy. The PRFAQ is the document that givespermission for these other artifacts to happen. It mostly stays in thestrategic zone, and it only touches tactical details when necessary to aid inthe strategic and vision conversations.
PRFAQ is not a framework that tells the story of what hashappened. It tells the story of what will happen months or years from now,depending on the size and scope of the project. It’s not used for businessretrospective or to reflect what we have built and how it’s performing.
Last, a PRFAQ is not something that’s done in a day. If youneed something like that, you might prefer a one-pager or fall for thePowerPoint trap at your own risk (more on that topic inthe next chapter). It’s possible to write a first draft version of a PRFAQ in aday, but it takes several days to iterate and find the truth, as you’ll see in PartIII.
To recap, PRFAQ is an innovation framework, method, andartifact to think critically, articulate clearly, and inspire people to act. There arefive core principles for this system:
1. Customer-centric
2. Aspirational
3. Clear, concise, and coherent
4. Truth-seeking
5. Strategic decision-making
There are several use cases for a PRFAQ, and they arefuture-oriented. PRFAQs are not used for retrospective.
