Use and abuse of the PR FAQ
Looking back after 30 months at Amazon
Working backwards is the magic formula Amazon gives employees to stay customer obsessed, the first leadership principle. The main process to work backwards is the PR FAQ, a six-page document that forces you to spell out the vision for your idea, in the form of a press release (PR), and anticipate what you’ll need to do to get there (FAQ). The PR-FAQ is a hard feat of business writing that includes a fake press release at the beginning, followed by what's essentially a self-interview; the questions in the FAQ can include: "Why should we do this now?" and "What can go wrong?".
Such a long document is mandatory to make decision because Jeff Bezos believes writing is the great equalizer of ideas. An engineer might be not be good at storytelling, presentations or speaking in public, but can put some work in defining her idea and get resources to build it from management. While that is not necessarily true, and I've seen many engineers struggle with writing as much as they struggle in public speaking, the PR-FAQ process is definitely the most valuable thing I learned at Amazon and made a difference in the quality of my work, even when I was not the one writing it (sometimes you are part of the review, or you read an old one to bring yourself up to speed on a project).
It doesn’t have to be as long and rigid as the one Amazon has: the point is that writing things down forces you to do the work needed to make ideas become reality, think ahead of risks to mitigate, and make sure you are solving a real customer problem that is news worthy. It's also refreshing and rewarding to see people actually taking the time to read and pay attention to what you write.
As every process, it can be abused and manipulated. In my time at Amazon, nothing has slowed a project down as much as being asked to write and rewrite a PR-FAQ that plans it. Or your manager asking you to reduce the scope to make the delivery realistic, only to have your manager’s manager tell you you’re not “thinking big” (another Leadership Principle). Few things are as painful and demoralizing as spending hours developing your idea into words with such precision that it’s almost real, and watch it land in apathy. Most of the “doc reviews” meeting I’ve attended were informational, but not constructive, and there were no next steps. We won’t build it, but it’s not clear why.
To explain this to a colleague, I came up with this concept of “emotional battery”. When we want to rally people around a project we are passionate about, and we hope to inspire action, we need to be willing to “drain our emotional battery” and potentially see it rejected. Self-awareness of one’s “emotional battery” is key in striking a balance between picking battles and making an impact at work. Like in love, to win big you have to be ready to go all-in, and face the risk to have you heart shattered, knowing it was worth it. But you also can’t go all-in all the time. And if your lover keeps draining your battery, it’s time to take your passion where it doesn’t go to waste.
I left Amazon in November 2020, 30 months after joining.