Main idea

Writing a product's press release and frequently asked questions before building it is not an exercise in anticipated communication. It is a shift of point of view: you stop asking what each function wants to say, and you ask what the customer is supposed to understand, believe, do or feel.

That shift makes visible inconsistencies no internal discussion surfaces, because the internal point of view permits them. Two functions can describe the product differently without ever crossing paths; a single press release does not allow it. An over-broad target defends itself very well in a plan and is immediately legible in a sentence addressed to someone. A promise the product does not keep stays plausible as long as it is phrased internally, and becomes untenable as soon as it has to be written as an announcement. The frequently asked questions add the second half of the test: you have to anticipate the objections, the misunderstandings, the limits and the ambiguous cases — that is, to write what the product will not do.

The exit criterion is sharp and requires no judgement: if the organization cannot produce a single voice, an arbitration is still outstanding, and the exercise has just said which one.

Why it matters

This gives a coherence test that does not depend on the participants' goodwill: a text addressed to the customer does not accept two versions, where a meeting tolerates five.

It also reorients how to read the exercise for those who take it for storytelling: what counts is not the quality of the press release produced, it is what had to be settled in order to write it.

Nuances and limits

Exteriority can be simulated. A press release written by the marketing function alone reproduces the internal point of view of a single function, with the customer's vocabulary on the surface.

And the test assumes an identified target: on a product still looking for whom it addresses, the impossibility of writing a single voice does not signal an avoided arbitration but an exploration under way.

Open questions

• Who should hold the pen so that the written point of view is the customer's, and not that of the function doing the writing?