Originally written in French. Translated by AI — the meaning has been preserved, not the prose.
Short definition
A document written before building a product, made up of a press release announcing what will exist and a list of frequently asked questions handling the objections, the limits and the ambiguous cases.
Full definition
The format comes from Amazon, where it serves as the entry point to the design process: you write the announcement before the product, and the document circulates as support for the decision to commit.
In the articles on this blog, the term is retained for what its form imposes rather than for its place in a process: the press release forces you to say what exists, for whom, why it matters and what the customer can really expect; the frequently asked questions force you to write what the product will not do. The artifact is therefore filed on the side of the coherence test, not of communication.
Two degraded usages circulate under the same name. The PR/FAQ treated as a communication deliverable, judged on the quality of the text produced. And the PR/FAQ written by a single function, which reproduces an internal point of view with the customer's vocabulary on the surface.
Usage in the field
The term comes into play in discussions about a product's upstream framing, about validating a promise before commitment, and about the arrangements that bring inconsistencies between functions to the surface.
Synonyms and variants
"Press release / FAQ", "working backwards", "anticipated press release".
Not to be confused with
- One-pager — a short document consolidating problem, target, promise, priority and success criterion; it constrains from inside the organization, where the PR/FAQ constrains from the customer's point of view.
- Press release — an announcement text published after the decision to launch; it reports on an existing product, where the PR/FAQ precedes its construction.
- Specification — a description of what must be built, intended for those who build it; it describes the means, where the PR/FAQ describes the effect expected for the customer.
- Coherence tool — Coherence tool — the category of artifacts that force things to be made explicit; the PR/FAQ is the member whose constraint comes from outside the organization.
Examples
"Write the press release and the frequently asked questions before building or launching the product." — the definition by form.
"The PR/FAQ is therefore less a storytelling tool than a coherence test." — the usage in the sense retained here.
Ambiguities / debates
The format's name designates a genre of communication, which spontaneously steers towards a marketing reading — and that is the main ambiguity: two teams can run the same exercise while one judges the text and the other what had to be settled in order to write it.
Unsettled: the author. The original practice doesn't say who should write it, whereas that is what determines whether the point of view written down is the customer's or a function's.