Amazon has a fairly famous practice of writing press releases before launching new products. The name they have for this is the ‘Working Backwards process’ and the primary artefact to come out of that process is something called a ‘PR/FAQ’ — so named because the one-page Press Release is usually accompanied by a long FAQ section, covering most, if not all, of the commonly asked questions about the proposed product, feature, or initiative.
I’m working on one of these for a product on my team that faces in store associates but also impacts customers to our stores. The primary benefit is for the store associates, so I think writing it as an “internal” press release makes the most sense. Does that fit within what you know about writing these @cedric?
Yes, absolutely. Amazon has been known to write PR/FAQs for internal services, hell, they’ve also been known to write FAQs (without the PR piece) for certain simpler internal services.
Actually I linked to the template resource because I didn’t highlight the fact that there is a template in this piece, so imagine my surprise when I read a sample PR/FAQ that a friend wrote for his startup, only to realise he had left out whole chunks (like a sample quote from a customer). Then I realised I should’ve been more clear — most Amazon PR/FAQs actually follow a fairly strict template, at least for the ‘PR’ portion.
Just a quick question I wanna jot down and ask for everyone’s inputs. How do you reconcile the relationships between PR/FAQ (Working Backwards) and Effectuation - the process by which entrepreneurs make decisions.
It seems, on the surface, that these two approaches oppose each other? cc @cedric
Caveat: my understanding of this is built around talking to Colin about these questions.
People often talk about Bezos being ‘relentless’ and ‘wanting to get things done yesterday’. They talk less about his role as ‘chief slowdown officer’ — a name he gave himself.
I believe that you can see this with lower skilled vs more skilled entrepreneurs. Lower skilled entrepreneurs are a frenzy of activity, and throw everything at the wall hoping that something sticks. More skilled / experienced entrepreneurs do do a bit of that, but they’re more deliberate about it. (They might not tell you that they’re being deliberate; if you ask them they’ll look at you funny and go “that’s dumb, why would I want to make that bet without doing some thinking beforehand?”)
The PR/FAQ process is used for big, one-way door type bets. Most new product attempts are costly, and can lock up company resources for months if not years. You’re not getting that time back. The more costly the bet, the more rigorous the PR/FAQ process. The less costly the bet, the more likely the executives would say something to the effect of “Bias for Action” — just go and do it.
My understanding is that the concepts of ‘one-way vs two-way doors’ was invented to illustrate this dynamic … amongst other things.
To add a concrete example of my application of these ideas:
I’m currently working out a sustainable and repeatable way to hire case writers. Hiring writers in the context of a summer internship and getting it wrong is cheap, so I just went ahead and hired a bunch without writing a PR/FAQ.
We know from our WBR that one thing that results in exceptional variation across a number of metrics we care about is getting a link from a sizeable newsletter / Substack. But we need to run a set of experiments to figure out what types of Substacks are best (size? topic? familiarity?). Running these experiments require purchasing newsletter ads, that can (and has!) cost us thousands of dollars per ad. We have a full 6-pager for that.
