prfaq-working-backwardslisted

# PR-FAQ and working backwards Amazon's PR-FAQ makes you write the launch announcement first, before any code, so the idea has to survive contact with a customer who never read your roadmap. Working backwards from that press release exposes the products that sparkle in a planning deck but have no sentence a real person would care about. If the release is boring to write, the product will be boring to use. ## Method 1. **Draft the press release as if you ship today.** One page, dated at launch, written in past tense. Lead with the customer and their problem, then the solution, then a quote from someone relieved it exists. Ban internal jargon: if an outside reader cannot follow it, the pitch is not ready. 2. **Load the value into the headline and subhead.** The headline names the product; the subhead states who it serves and the benefit in one line. If you cannot compress the value into that subhead, the idea is unfocused, and no amount of body copy will rescue it. 3. **Write the customer FAQ in the customer's voice.** What it costs, what it replaces, what it will not do, how their data is handled. Answer plainly. This is where "delightful experience" phrasing dies and concrete commitments take its place. 4. **Write the internal FAQ so it hurts.** The questions leadership will actually ask: unit economics, the riskiest assumption, why now, why us, what breaks at scale, what you will cut. A PR-FAQ that ducks its hardest question is marketin