The PRFAQ Framework with Marcelo Calbucci

In this engaging episode of "Definitely Maybe Agile," hosts Peter Maddison and David Sharrock welcome Marcelo Calbucci, author of "The PR FAQ Framework." Marcelo shares his expertise from 25+ years at companies like Amazon and Microsoft, plus his extensive startup experience.

The conversation explores the Press Release and Frequently Asked Questions (PR FAQ) framework developed at Amazon around 2004. This approach helps teams clarify vision and strategy before jumping into execution, addressing a common problem in software projects. Unlike PowerPoint presentations that can create an "illusion of clarity," the PR FAQ document promotes alignment and ownership through collaborative creation.

This week´s takeaways:

• Why most PR FAQs actually lead to "no" decisions (which is valuable)
• How the framework balances strategic thinking with practical considerations
• The importance of involving multiple stakeholders (sometimes 20+ people)
• How PR FAQs can be used at different product lifecycle stages

The hosts draw parallels to lean startup methodology, while Marcelo explains why PR FAQ encourages "thinking before shooting" rather than the "build first, learn later" approach. The discussion highlights how clear, collaborative documentation can prevent misalignment and create shared ownership of initiatives.

Chapters

• 5:15 Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile
• 12:57 Introduction of Marcelo Colbucci
• 40:35 Marcelo's Experience in Tech and Startups
• 1:43:33 Understanding the PR FAQ Framework
• 4:01:27 Discussing Project Viability and Quality Inputs
• 12:40:17 Key Successes and Learnings from PR FAQs

Transcript

Peter: 0:04

Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and David Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Hello, dave, it's good to see you again and it's a pleasure to introduce Marcelo, who is joining us today. Marcelo, would you like to give a quick introduction? Hi?

Marcelo Calbucci: 0:22

Thank you, peter and Dave, for having me here. I'm Marcelo . I'm the author of the PR FAQ Framework, a book I just published, and I have over 25 years of experience at large tech companies like Amazon and Microsoft, and also almost 20 years of startups. I founded and ran many startups in Seattle and in London and I have quite a bit of expertise in leading product engineering, data and UX.

Dave: 0:49

That's an incredibly varied background. Is there something that you look back on and you go? If I was to try and describe my area of passion, is there one area out of the areas that you described?

Marcelo Calbucci: 1:03

Yeah, absolutely. What I'm really passionate about is solving people's problems through software. I'm a tech guy. I love software. I think it can solve so many problems in the world when used correctly. So that's what I'm really. The thread of my career has been.

Dave: 1:19

And I have to say, like, in looking through the PRFAQ book that you mentioned and just kind of getting a little bit of a feel for it, there's a really strong theme of what I consider, you know, the classic lean startup, product-centric, client-centric components in there. You chose, also within that book, to choose one piece of it, which is the PR FAQ part of it. So can you talk a little bit, maybe, where it comes from, because I think there's a great history there, but also why, of all of the different elements of customer product-centric thinking and artifacts that you could be looking at, why did you choose that one?

Marcelo Calbucci: 1:57

Yeah, absolutely, and this speaks to some of your previous podcast episodes as well, so you're going to appreciate that. So let me give a quick introduction of PR FAQ. It stands for Press Release and Frequently Asked Questions was a framework invented by Amazon around 2004 or so to help them make better decisions, right, like. As Amazon was growing, it was considering many different things to launch, like Kindle and Alexa and AWS and everything, and it became somewhat overwhelming for the leadership team to decide how to evaluate what to invest and what not to invest, and they tried many different things and then, after a few years, they created the PR FAQ framework.

Marcelo Calbucci: 2:42

The reason I decided to write about this particular topic and not the many other topics in technology, process and product is because a lot of the problems that we see today, you know, in software projects arise from the fact that there wasn't clarity on vision and strategy. Like people jumped right into doing things. And you mentioned Lean Startup. I love Lean Startup, I think it's great, but the problem is Lean Startup has the mentality of like build first and then learn, and I think that's the equivalent of like shooting and then aiming right. Like you want to think a little bit, not a lot. You want to think a little bit about what you're going to do, what you're not going to do, why you're doing, which direction you're going. So the team, at least, is aligned to a certain level, and that's why I thought that PR FAQ was brilliant when I was working at Amazon and that I need to tell the world about it. So I wrote a book.

Peter: 3:41

It is an interesting concept, isn't it? I spent some time recently with one of my clients going through a very long list of things that people wanted to do to help improve SDLC, and it was interesting the differences in quality of the inputs to those. So there was a wide variety of ideas and concepts and some of them were very well articulated, very well written, and others looked like someone scribbled a couple of lines on the back of a napkin and hadn't really put an awful lot of thought into constructing what the idea was, and it made it very difficult to understand what was it they were trying to do and why did it matter. Should this be something we invest in?

Marcelo Calbucci: 4:28

Yeah, exactly, the why it matters is such an important question, right? Like sometimes we get so deep into doing and shipping faster and doing more that we forgot to ask like why again are we doing this? And sometimes people come up with excuses about like well, more revenue, more users, or like more velocity days or more velocity, you still need to take a step back. And about like well, more revenue, more users, or like more velocity days or more velocity, you still need to take a step back and say like wait a second, what are we doing for the customers here? Like are we creating value or just like creating work?

Dave: 4:54

And I love the way that press release exercise, so I've certainly used that in a number of product workshops as a way of articulating what it is, what the end goal is and what the value is that's created, because so many times organizations or product teams are looking for the Uber 4X, where X is whatever they're doing, and they're trying to draw inspiration from some of the other successful products out there. But the reality is, I need to know my customers significantly, like really in depth, to be able to write something that resonates with them. Can you maybe draw a little bit of a difference between what a vision statement is versus what that press release and the FAQ, how they operate in a similar manner or how they really differentiate from one from the other?

Marcelo Calbucci: 5:46

Yeah. So I believe the PR FAQ is a great document to capture vision, but not in the format of a vision statement. I don't know who came up with vision and mission statements a long time ago maybe 30, 40 years but people that spend way too much time on vision and mission. They use their energy to think about how to craft a clever statement and I'm not sure that is delivering value right. I think vision can be a paragraph and it's totally fine. It doesn't have to be super brief and super short. I think what the press release part of the PR FAQ does is it paints a picture of the future that people can kind of like understand. It's not so clear that you know exactly what to build, because that's the roadmap and the plan and what comes after that, but it gives a very strong inspiration and aspiration for the team to go and execute that.

Dave: 6:39

Now you mentioned it as being prior to the planning and the sort of roadmapping product roadmap piece of it. How does budgeting come into it? So, a lot of the time you're describing in the Amazon ecosystem that this is the beginning of how do we kind of strategically decide we want to go after this. Where does money come in in terms of how much money is allocated to a particular strategic idea, or is that a different place in the conversation?

Marcelo Calbucci: 7:08

I think it is the same place. I think it is a strategy. Without the conversation about timelines and without money, it's just like wishful thinking, right, like sure, we'll have to build this amazing thing, but we don't have the resources and it needs to be done by 12 months from now. So, like you need to incorporate some elements of that, like what kind of resources do you need? Sometimes you need access to data or APIs that you don't even know if they're viable or not. That should be incorporated in the document. What you don't want to do is say, like on week two, we're going to do this. On week four, we're going to do that. On week six, we're going to do this. On week four, we're going to do that on week six. We're going to do that because that's a plan. But some of the elements of the constraints that are on Triangle are part of the PR FAQ not in a very high level of detail, because you still want to have a strategic conversation, not a tactical one, but you need to consider that as well.

Peter: 8:01

So would you say that's one of the common mistakes you see when people try to create these PR FAQs. Are there any of those?

Marcelo Calbucci: 8:08

Yeah, I think the mistakes are on the spectrum of, like, how much detail you put into it, right. Some people write PR FAQs that are so abstract that you don't even know what you're talking about. Like, wait a second, but like how we're going to do this, right. And some people write PR FAQs that have way too much detail, which is not useful. Also, like, what you're discussing really is like, is this a mission and a vision that is worth pursuing or not? And if it is worth pursuing, are we addressing a real problem for the customer, uh, and do we believe that our solution actually, you know, uh is gonna deal with that or not?

Marcelo Calbucci: 8:48

So you keep discussing on that aspect and it should be a week or two to do this. It's not a long time. You don't want to spend a long time on this document, on this process, and then, once you get to a point of confidence, right, that you feel like, yeah, we agree on this. One way that I describe PR FAQs is a great document for you to discover, debate and decide on a vision and strategy. So it's not like you're pitching or proposing something, like you're working with people to figure out what is the right way to go about this problem.

Dave: 9:19

And I know in the book you talk about how many people are involved. It's not like one person writes the PR FAQ in the corner and then presents it back to a group of stakeholders, but there's actually quite a significant. I mean you talked about 20 plus people in some cases being involved in that process. So can you describe a little bit like what does involve? Mean, is it really it feels, when you describe that, that it's really a lot of work from those, that group of 20 odd people?

Marcelo Calbucci: 9:50

Yeah, you want to have, like the author, right, the main person that's going to be writing the document. It's like the person holding the pen, let's put it this way right, and this person starts with the first draft of the document. It might be full of errors and full of mistakes. Then what you do with that is this person schedule like a review session with the first group of people Usually it's going to be, you know, the team that's going to be working on this or with a few project or program managers or engineers, to get their first round of feedback.

Marcelo Calbucci: 10:20

And then you go from function to function in your organization, depending on the set of organization If you're a startup of two people, like you're not going to do that, it's just you and your co-founder environment you might have a different meeting with the UX team, a different meeting with the legal team, a different meeting with the sales team to incorporate their expertise into this document, and you're going to be refining and adjusting as you need. It's not like a committee system where, like, everyone gets a vote, but you do want to make sure that everyone is listened to right and their concerns are least considered. And, at the end, one of the benefits of the PR FAQ is at the end. There was no buy-in, like you don't need to go around selling what you created because they were part of that right. So they were very involved and they have a sense of ownership on it as well.

Peter: 11:11

Talk a little bit about the other part, the FAQ. At what point, as you're going around, you're collecting all of this information. How does the piece which is the FAQ part get incorporated in with the press release and come together as a whole?

Marcelo Calbucci: 11:25

Yeah.

Marcelo Calbucci: 11:26

So the FAQ is actually the most important part and it is where you should start your PR FAQ.

Marcelo Calbucci: 11:31

So I recommend that everyone starts with the FAQ, which are some questions that you're gonna answer in the document about the problem, about the customer, about how customers are solving it today, how customers are finding this solution today, and you write a few questions about that.

Marcelo Calbucci: 11:48

Then you write questions about the solution and how we're gonna approach this problem and what needs do you have, like data, need, api, need, access, need technology, need proof of concepts, whatever you need. So when you're having a review session of a PR FAQ, most of the time it's not going to be on the press release. Most of the time you're going to be spending on the FAQs because people are going to be raising concerns about I don't think this is feasible or I don't think this is viable. It's going to be spending on the FAQs because people are going to be raising concerns about I don't think this is feasible or I don't think this is viable. It's going to be too costly for us to do. Or you might have even if there is a user interface. You might have discussions about usability and the user experience there.

Dave: 12:27

So it sounds to me I mean you've had lots of and Peter and I were talking a little bit as well before, but there's so much here that we kind of is completely in line with so many of the conversations that we've had in the past. Can you talk about, maybe the results that you've seen of using the PRFAQ process? I mean, at the end of the day, we're really about anything that's going to move organizations quicker towards some sort of successful path that they're exploring. What have you seen? What's the kind of jewel in the crown that you go? Look at this. This was just turned around and it was fantastic.

Marcelo Calbucci: 13:04

Yeah, I'm going to say something that's going to surprise you. The decision of most PR FAQs is that the project is not worth pursuing. It is a decision too right. And if you start developing a PR FAQ and you start to find that it's really hard to write a coherent narrative that like ties the solution to the problem or that makes the problem seems important enough for the customer like if you can't do that, that's the signal that you probably should not pursue this project. That that's the signal that you probably should not pursue this project, right?

Marcelo Calbucci: 13:37

The second aspect of a PR FAQ is when you validate everything. You know there is a problem for the customer. You know your solution. We will address that problem. The problem might be even meaningful and for a large number of customers. But you have to prioritize against everything else the organization is doing right, so you're stack ranking all the opportunities that you're going to use it for. And the third layer is really, when you write a PR FAQ, everything fits and the organization decides let's do this right. So I think that use both at startups to actually decide to found the startups. I have a friend of mine who spent a year writing PR FAQs and testing ideas and reviewing with people until they found one startup that was worth pursuing. So, as a document, a PR FAQ is a great way to think through and to get feedback from other people about it, which is much better than a slide deck or a PowerPoint presentation, because you don't have enough there that people are going to be able to provide like critical feedback on it.

Dave: 14:37

I mean, I love that because when you get into and we see pitch decks all the time, everyone's seen them, they're all over the internet in some form or other. And what I always find interesting is that these big gaps that I have to bring my own interpretation to and of course that's the information you actually want to get out into the conversation and yet in so many times it's inferred but not coming out directly. And what resonates with me is that idea of calmly reading. Something like methodically reading through gets the brain working in a different way to you know, visual representations and everything else that we often see.

Marcelo Calbucci: 15:16

Uh, when we're trying to kind of infer something from that, yeah, a peer figure is only six pages, so you know, at most you're talking about 20 minutes reading here.

Peter: 15:26

Um, and your brain is really going to get activated by it which is different if you think from a your average powerpoint, as you say, a lot of that becomes open to interpretation. So it doesn't matter how good your graphics are or whatever piece you have there, so much of it is how you interpret it If there isn't somebody presenting it along with it. So it's, the way the information is provided to you is quite different.

Marcelo Calbucci: 15:49

Yeah, PowerPoint is very dangerous. It creates an illusion of clarity when people leave the meeting and then five minutes later you already start seeing the misalignments of interpretation, because it was the stuff that wasn't there that people interpret in the way that it fits them.

Peter: 16:03

Now take it and go and show it to somebody else, but their version of how they repeat the messaging back along with this PowerPoint is not the same.

Marcelo Calbucci: 16:10

There we go, there we go.

Dave: 16:12

Yeah, delivery means yeah adds a lot of color to things. I just wanted to kind of expand on that a bit. You talked about the six pages and it is not necessarily dense, but it is the written word. It's not got a business model behind the scenes, for example. Now how do you get the conversation around value created by the ideas when it's FAQs and a press release, to have a conversation about, say, stack ranking this particular initiative versus another initiative?

Marcelo Calbucci: 16:45

Yeah, so the FAQs come in many different forms, right? So an FAQ and I usually advise people to start with the first FAQ being what problem are you trying to solve for the customer? You want to have clarity on that, but many of the FAQs are about the solution what are we doing and why are we doing that? The other aspect that you capture as well is what are we not doing? So if you're going to have a website but not a mobile app, you probably want to call that out. If you're going to have a website but not a mobile app, you probably want to call that out, right. If you're going to launch on iOS but not on Android, you probably want to call that out. If you're only going to launch in Toronto but not in Vancouver, you want to call that out, right, so people understand what exactly are you building and when things are happening.

Marcelo Calbucci: 17:28

The PR FAQ itself is a self-contained document, so comparing one PR FAQ against another is not like it's part of the framework itself, but like you can use things about how we're going to measure success as a question. You know to quantify the impact, so you can. It could be revenue, it could be number of users, it could be. You can even think about OKRs right that you would incorporate there, like what is important in this PR FAQ. And another question might be what resources do we need and how long it's going to take and how much it's going to cost, so you can use those metrics to compare and stack rank multiple PR FAQs.

Peter: 18:05

Yeah, I can see where this fits in, and we lost time. Dave and I were chatting. We were talking about the value of different methods to start to be able to say no to different pieces of work. So, in addition to the efficiency that always get measured, the effectiveness of our system being able to intake work, understand which things should proceed and which things we can put to one side I think that is a very critical and key idea. How does something like PRFAQ avoid things, though, like confirmation bias and groupthink and problems that occur, because we often end up in this situation where we look at these documents but then everybody all sort of agrees with the highest paid person's opinion?

Marcelo Calbucci: 18:51

Yeah, that's a dangerous thing for sure, and I've been on many meetings that that was the case. Right, like the most important person in the room is the most right person, which is not true. We know that. So the method of like writing a PRPQ and reviewing with people, it's natural, fits that mode of avoiding confirmation bias. Right, because what you're doing is when you're reviewing with the engineer and you're asking them about a feasibility of a solution, you know you can focus on that and incorporate that in the document. Versus you know some more senior person that has an intuition about something, and even that most senior person, you want to incorporate that opinion. But by the time you get to them, you want to make sure that you have a lot of the feedback from the people that understand that are closer to the truth about what is in there and what's you know is still to be decided or assumption-based.

Dave: 19:45

It sounds to me, Marcelo, that that could be the situation where, say, several people on the technology side have reviewed it and given insight into the PRFAQ document, but they're not in the room for that final conversation. How many of the people who are contributing to that document are actually involved in the decision that is being created by the document?

Marcelo Calbucci: 20:13

Yeah, so in our organization, what you're going to have is anywhere from three to ten review sessions. We have different stakeholders, different functions, and then you're going to have a final decision session, which is with whoever holds the budget to approve this to go ahead. By the time you get to the decision session, you want to make sure that everyone in that room already seen at least one version of the PR FAQ, including you know, your executive or leadership or whomever was there, because you also want to make sure that their thoughts and understanding of the market and the strategy of war incorporated in the document right. So that is part of the process. Now I think it's going to depend really in which type of organization you're working at. You know, in some organizations, only the senior people are going to be in the final meeting. In other organizations, you're going to have lots of people. There is not really a recommendation that I make in the book about this, and I think it depends on the culture.

Dave: 21:15

One of the things that we've, peter and I've talked about a few times one realization I'd say sort of midway through last year, if you like, or within the last 12 months is the value of socializing ideas. So in many contexts you often look at the idea that you know, if the right people have come together to put the idea forward, then socialization isn't necessarily important. There's a lot more trust or some sort of yes, go ahead and take this away with it with you and go and act on it. And a great example is the product owner making the decision as to where a product is going to go. And yet one of the things is the value of creating and understanding through that socialization and the continuous involvement and feedback. And I think what I hear you describing is how big of a component of that PR FAQ it is Like if you create one with very little input from others, it feels to me like it's not serving its purpose. Would that be right?

Marcelo Calbucci: 22:11

Yes, I think you're right Like so. The old style of doing project is you go to a dark room, you spend weeks creating the perfect project and you come out and you go, ta-da, here's the perfect project. Now you're in the phase of persuading and selling people on that project. I think that it doesn't work well, right Like. People are not going to feel committed to it. They're not going to feel ownership. Your leadership might feel like well, I wasn't asked anything about this. Right Like you didn't ask for my input and this might be strategically misaligned with some other initiative that I asked someone else to start. I think those days are kind of gone. Right Like now. You want people to be part of the creation process. It doesn't matter if it is a PR, faq or PRD. You know the user stories that you're going to put on Jira or other tracking system. Like you want people help create along the way. Not that they need to be the one responsible for the creation, but at least you want to get their input.

Peter: 23:10

Yeah, so you the IKEA confirmation bias. We always attach more value to things that we built ourselves, so people are more invested and so they want to come along for the journey.

Marcelo Calbucci: 23:21

Yes, that's right.

Peter: 23:22

I think I can definitely see the value of this and, as you were saying at the beginning, this was something that you took and I think it's in the intro to your book as well from sort of the Amazon model of looking at different products and pieces. What are some of the differences that you took to sort of generalize that model, to make it consumable for others?

Marcelo Calbucci: 23:44

Yeah, this has been, you know, working at Amazon for so long nearly 20 years that I think the people at Amazon like they just know how to do it right. So there is no method behind off, like how do you create, how do you reveal? There was no process established. It's like tribal knowledge, like it goes from employee to employee and your employee joins and like learns how to do it.

Marcelo Calbucci: 24:04

So one of the things that I did on the book I create a more like prescriptive way to create a PR FAQ, to review a PR FAQ and to make decisions based on a PR FAQ right. The other aspect that I did as well, that incorporated in the book, is to make sure that you are capturing the four elements of product risk or project risk, which is the viability, the feasibility, the usability and the value for the customer. We don't at Amazon, we didn't speak like that, but those are like fundamentally what we should be incorporating in the PR FAQ. Like, once you have an understanding of those, you can't guarantee the product's going to work, but you eliminate a lot of the issues that usually happen. You know halfway through projects or when you are done with the project and you realize, well, customers didn't want this, yeah.

Peter: 24:52

I usually call the last one desirability, just so you have all ilities all the way down.

Marcelo Calbucci: 24:56

Oh yeah, I should have done that Next edition.

Dave: 24:59

So I was just picking up on that and probably this is covered by the desirability piece in there. Product market fit versus the PRFAQ when does product market fit come in? Because I think it I'm probably answering my own question and that Peter's hinted at. Maybe it's the next step, but product market fit is one of those concepts that everybody chases and I'm just wanting to understand where you see that fitting into the conversation that you started with a PR FAQ.

Marcelo Calbucci: 25:27

Yeah, and I'm probably going to write an article about this A PR FAQ you can use on multiple stages of your project or program or product, right?

Marcelo Calbucci: 25:36

So if you have nothing and all that you are working off is the customer problem, what you're actually doing is having a hypothesis about a solution, right?

Marcelo Calbucci: 25:48

So you're going to write a PR FAQ that has a lot of data and facts about the customer and their problem, but a lot of hypotheses and assumptions about the solution. When you actually have a product in the market and it's working and you're considering expanding the feature set or the geographical regions or the segments of your customers, then you can write another PR FAQ where the hypotheses and assumptions are not so much about the solution but about expansion right, and why that would create value. If you continue on that journey, you realize that later on what you're doing is you already prove efficiency I'm sorry, efficacy. Now you're going to prove efficiency, so you're going to write a PR FAQ that is more about like how can we operate this better, cheaper, faster, you know, deliver more value to the customer, scale more, both on the technology but also on the sales, marketing and customer support and other aspects of it. So you might write different PR FAQs for different stages of your product program business project.

Peter: 26:54

Makes an awful lot of sense to me, I think, as we're getting towards the end of our time now. We always like to sort of wrap this up and thank you so much for all of the information you shared, michelle, but we always like to go with what's the one thing that you've taken away from it, and usually when it's Dave and I, we come up with three of them. So with three of us, we'll go for three.

Dave: 27:16

So Dave would you like to go first. Okay, I've still got so many questions. Marcelo, you've probably noticed we've both of us really enjoyed reading the book and kind of picking away some things and had some questions coming in. Here's one of the things in our conversation that really hit home, because it resonates so much with many of the conversations Peter and I have had, and that's the fact that most PR FAQs lead to a no decision.

Dave: 27:47

This isn't going to work, and the reason I pull that out is A it's so difficult for organizations to say no. Once something starts on that pathway, it often continues and there's so much lost by not having a mechanism to say no. But the other side of it is it's a realization of the people creating the PR FAQ, maybe as much as it's bringing it to a final conversation where somebody says we're not going to move forward. It's much more of something that we learn ourselves on the journey. Which is the best kind of nose, because now there's none of that sort of you know, they said or they didn't say they approved or they didn't approve. It's much more a realization we come to ourselves. So that stuck out in my mind.

Peter: 28:32

Marcelo, what point would you like to leave our listeners with?

Marcelo Calbucci: 28:35

Yeah, I think this conversation, you know, remind me that if you're gonna adopt PR FAQ in your organization, you might start small. You know, don't try to take a big bite out of the apple to begin with to see how it works on your environment, because each organization is so different from each other, even teams within the same organization. So, like scope, a smaller project that you can use and see how it works.

Peter: 29:02

I think for me. I think the piece I would take away is the importance of moving from PowerPoint to something that people read and the value that that adds as you collaborate on a document. That creates much greater understanding as to what the the opportunity potentially is, because those organizations as people we often don't spend enough time on that and PowerPoint quite often lead to a sort of broken telephone problem where nobody quite sure I said it sounded great when the first person presented it. But what else gets disseminated into the organization is pretty much anybody's guess.

Dave: 29:37

So with that I'd love to thank both you, dave and Marcelo.

Peter: 29:41

It was wonderful to have you both here, as always and for our listeners. You can reach us at feedback at definitelymaybeagilecom, and until next time. Thank you, dave, and thank you, marcelo. Thanks, feedback at definitely maybe agilecom, and, uh, until next time. Thank you, dave, and thank you. Thanks again. You've been listening to definitely maybe agile, the podcast where your hosts, Peter Maddison and David Sharrock, focus on the art and science of digital agile and devops at scale.