Lean By Design
Lean by Design delves into the dynamic world of biotech, pharma, and life sciences, focusing on operational excellence through effective workflow and process optimization. Join hosts Oscar Gonzalez and Lawrence Wong as they engage with industry leaders who share their insights, innovative strategies, and real-world experiences in transforming complex challenges into streamlined, efficient solutions. Through thought-provoking conversations, you’ll gain practical tips and inspiration to drive continuous improvement and success in your organization. Produced by Sigma Lab Consulting, Lean by Design empowers you to enhance productivity and innovation, one process at a time. Listen on Spotify, iTunes, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Lean By Design
0204. Start With the End: How PRFAQs Create Clarity Before You Build with Marcelo Calbucci
Have you ever started a project only to realize you’re building something your leaders never asked for? You’re not alone.
In this episode of Lean by Design, we sit down with Marcelo Calbucci, a veteran of Amazon, Microsoft, and multiple startups, to explore the PRFAQ Framework, Amazon’s secret weapon for aligning strategy and execution.
By drafting a mock press release and FAQ before a single line of code is written, teams force themselves to clarify vision, spot roadblocks, and reach consensus across departments. The real magic comes from the collaborative review and no bullet‑filled slides, just a tight narrative that surfaces gaps in logic and focuses on solving genuine customer problems.
Whether you’re battling scope creep as a product manager or aiming for alignment as an executive, this conversation will equip you with a powerful tool to kick off your next project with crystal‑clear purpose. Tune in and learn to work backward for forward momentum.
Learn more about the PRFAQ at https://www.theprfaq.com/
Connect with Marcelo at https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcelocalbucci | https://x.com/calbucci
Ready to assess your organization’s efficiency? Connect with us at leanbydesign@sigmalabconsulting.com to uncover high-impact improvement opportunities. 🚀
Learn more about us by visiting: https://sigmalabconsulting.com/
Want our thoughts on a specific topic? Looking to sponsor this podcast to continue to generate content? Or maybe you have an idea and want to be on our show. Fill out our Interest Form and share your thoughts.
Welcome back to another exciting episode of Lean by Design podcast. I'm your host, oscar Gonzalez, alongside my co-host, lawrence Wong. We are very excited to have a guest with us today, marcelo Calpucci, who is the author, product tech leader. Founder author of the PRFAQ Framework. He's been a product technology executive over the last 25 years, including places like Amazon, microsoft and many other startups, so we're excited to have him on board, and today we brought him on because we want to talk about this really critical challenge that seems to be stemming from executive level projects that are you know, the execution just may not quite be there. So what we find is that too many projects begin without really defining what that success marker is going to look like. Marcelo, thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:Folks, we're excited to dig into this, and you know, I think, that yourself, myself and Lawrence, we've all been in this situation where we are handed a project or a side quest that may have value coming from leadership, yet the goals are vague, the strategies are typically ill-informed. We can see this often with decision makers that may be too far from the ground level, they may be too far removed from the operations, and what happens? You get dead ends. In some cases, you may complete or reach a milestone where you find out it was nothing like it was supposed to be, based on the leadership that sent this task down. So I want to explore more about the PRFAQ framework and what is this framework solving for these projects. Can you tell us a little bit about the framework?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So let's take a step back here. I love the way you set this up right. So what often happens is even an executive as myself, or like if you're a manager or an individual contributor you are asked for an output, not an outcome. That's the number one mistake that a lot of people go through when they are working on a project. They're just saying, like, do this thing because we want this other thing. Right, and that's not enough for you to have the context or to understand what value are you creating. Why are we doing all this stuff?
Speaker 2:And at Amazon about 20 years ago, there was a lot of problems going on with the organization right, because the company was growing fast and many projects were running parallel. People start to lose track about why are we doing this again, like, how does this connect to the bigger strategy? So Amazon created the PR FAQ framework, which stands for press release and frequently asked questions, and Jeff Bezos was directly involved in the creation of this right. So it was to support his need and the need of the team working on a project so they could communicate better. Right, and what this framework is? It's a vision and strategy framework for you to discover, debate and decide For any kind of project. It could be a new product, a new business, a program, even a policy or a process within the organization.
Speaker 2:You can use the PR FAQ and it's also known as the working backwards. The reason it's called like that is because the first page of the PR FAQ, which is the press release, is a hypothetical press release about a future state of your product. So you write as if you already done the work. Right? So you write a PR press release as today we are launching this product that solves this problem for these customers. This is how our solution works. But nothing has been done yet, right? So you're setting a state of the world how you want it to be, and then you work backwards from that on the FAQ section, saying, like, how are we going to get there? Right? So the FAQ is in the format of frequently asked questions, answering questions about the viability, the feasibility, what research has been done, who's the customer, what problem they have, what is in the market today. So everything is including the FAQ.
Speaker 2:So this is a six page document and on Amazon, and what I wrote on my book is like use that as the centerpiece for the discussion, right? Like? So the team can go back and forth and like, refine the idea and figure out how to make it better, like what we don't know, what we need to do more research on what we can take a leap of faith. All those things are like out in the open.
Speaker 2:And the beautiful aspect of the PRPQ, at least for my opinion, is not the document itself, it is the review and the process where you get different perspectives, right From an engineer, from a designer or from a salesperson or from marketing, even from executives, right. So often executives are left out of that phase of ideation and they are just presenting the ta-da you know presentation at the end, but they're like, wait a second. This doesn't align with the strategy that I was thinking, because no one like incorporated the feedback from executives. So the PR review is very valuable, you know, for all the team to collaborate into finding a better strategy and vision for what we should be doing. I love that explanation.
Speaker 1:I mean, one of the very first things that you mentioned was that what happens often is that we get asked for an output and not an outcome, and I think we talked about this a little bit in our initial conversation prior to the podcast that talked about, for example, features rather than what you're actually solving. What are you actually trying to do? And sometimes it causes a pause because it's a different way of thinking about your end state. What is so powerful now that is forcing you to create a project, to fix something? And it's not the features that you find at the end, it is the underlying root causes, the underlying issues behind all of the things that will eventually lead to having features or or, in this case, what that output would look like.
Speaker 1:Because, as we talked about before, it's almost. It's almost like going in and going to the doctor and saying I need you to pull my tooth. Well, maybe your outcome is that you want your tooth pulled, but you're having a toothache because of something else that's happening that has nothing to do with needing to extract a tooth in there. You know, so it's. It's interesting because when you ask for an output, you're essentially jumping into I need you to execute this. Why is it that we feel so comfortable jumping into execution without a real strategy? And then, who is responsible for filling in that gap? Who is the one that needs to say okay, this is what they said, but what they really want is something that solves X.
Speaker 2:How do we get over that? I think it's human nature. I think we love to do things right, Like we love to solve problems. We like to jump and like execute, particularly like good professionals. Right, they're like hey, we have this problem. The first thing they do is like let's solve it right, Not let's think about it, let's take a step back. Is it even worth solving this problem, or is this the right problem to solve? So in many settings, at least in the tech world that I work at, like everyone is like go, go, go, do, do, do. Right, there was not a lot of thinking, not a lot of strategizing.
Speaker 1:So's what I, what I think it is you know there's something to be said about taking on an initiative that's going to fix a problem. You know there's excitement there's, and from our experiences, these things are not quick fixes. If they were quick fixes they probably wouldn't be as big of a problem as they are there's usually. You know at the end whether you have a product or a process. You know whatever in place, you need to adopt that thing, and it's not just you who's participating, it's also the stakeholders around you. So you know, I think, that when you are jumping into execution, you make a very valid point let's fix it.
Speaker 1:I have this problem in my own personal life. When there's any issue in the house, my first thing is okay, oster's going to fix the problem. And that's not always the solution. Sometimes I just need to listen to my wife for you know half an hour and figure out together what we're going to do, have a strategy towards fixing something, because we're so accustomed to finding not the disease, not the illness, but the symptom that's making us think that, oh, if we apply this, it will stop that. But again, those are symptoms. Those are not the real issue and the real problem. And what I love about the PRFAQ framework is that you create your desired future state right at the top, saying this is where we aim to go. That's the North Star. What does it look like when you don't have that North Star? What does it look like when you don't have that North Star? What does it look like when you haven't thought about that future state? Are there signs that teams or projects that show up to show that they never had that future state?
Speaker 3:Before you answer that question, I think, culturally, like what you said before, as humans we just like to do things, we like checklists, we like direction, we like to follow rules, and so if you're in a culture where that is the norm, then you don't really question these initiatives and people just go right along.
Speaker 3:But I think, even talking to Oscar about maybe perhaps using this for some of the stuff that we're doing in our own business, that it unlocks your creativity and dreaming about what this is going to be, what it's going to be like for your customers, but also for your internal team, and so it removes some of the constraints where you're going to have to add them back later on, but at least in this initial phase it allows everybody to get out, whatever their thoughts are. That shift in thinking allows you to think about problems in a completely different way, and it's a change for people to think that way. And you must see teams that don't think about it this way, and there are some clear signs of maybe they operate using just project charters and it's just like this document. That's very boring and you have all these rules, and so you know look to Oscar's question what are some of those signs that you see when people are not thinking in that same philosophy as a PR FAQ.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, you're spot on, Lawrence. What happens is a lot of times people don't do enough divergent thinking right. And divergent thinking is a whole category of things that include, like design thinking, brainstorm, SWOT analysis, like let your brain like think of many things, think of many aspects of the problem. Also think of many solutions. One of the problems that often occur is like people find a solution for a problem and execute on it right and like doesn't challenge that Is this the best problem for us to solve? Is this the best solution for that problem, and should we execute this against every other priority that we have on our business, right? So the way that manifests itself that you notice very commonly is when teams start to get quite misaligned right, when you see people going in slightly different directions.
Speaker 2:That doesn't feel that harmful, but as the project evolves, there starts to have a lot of conflict, a lot of dysfunction, like a lot of heated exchanges about people saying, no, it's not have a lot of conflict, a lot of dysfunction, like a lot of heated exchanges about people saying, no, it's not this, it's that right, it's not this direction, it's that direction. And, like you said, Oscar, it's the lack of a North Star right. Like imagine you and your wife go on vacation but you do not have a conversation of where you're going, you know how long it's going to be and those kind of things. Like it's going to be awkward. Like you're driving and she is thinking we are going this place and you're thinking we're going that place, and they're like, wait a second, I wasn't prepared for that.
Speaker 2:So teams have the same problem, right? If they start a project and they really don't understand the end state, like the outcome that they want to have is going to be much harder for them, they're going to go all over the place and bounce around. So I say like the symptoms of, you know, lack of vision and strategy early on are usually misalignment, too many meetings, too many emails back and forth, because people cannot do the work that they think they need to do independently. They depend on so many other people. Because there was that lack of initial alignment and also what happens is a lot of misfires, right? So the project moves in a direction. Then like, oh no, that was not it. Take it back, execute the right direction. So it makes the project moves much slower we're talking two, three times slower than it needed to be if there was that initial alignment.
Speaker 1:You know, as you were giving that example, it was making me think of when you're in the process of planning a vacation with a loved one or with a family or a group of friends.
Speaker 1:Whatever the case may be, there are certain things you got to do. You're going to take off of work, going to figure out who's going to feed the dog and the cat and all of these things that are irrelevant to where you're actually going, and then finding out that, let's say, for example, we were going to go to Sunshine and Beaches and my counterpart thought that we were going up north to see Northern Lights or something somewhere cold. Well now, we're definitely not prepared for the same space. You know something that it seems so fundamental. But I think that this is a great point to tack on to what Lawrence was saying earlier when you realize that a documentation that's developed like this, that allows multiple perspectives, gives you really this open canvas for how to get there, Because when you're only thinking in the mindset or the framework of one or two main parties within this issue and you're ignoring all of the stakeholder feedback and the various experiences, I mean we are in an industry that we are so blessed to have people that have not had the experience that we have and, in the same line of thinking, we have not had the experience that they have had, and so it's really important, I think, to take advantage of that to say you know what are the different perspectives, Because you're exactly right, these misfires what do they look like? Well, in some cases we had somebody from research and they went back and told their manager, who then it went up to the chief of research and now there's a whole perception of what the project is that is incorrect and is now creating emails that are coming in.
Speaker 1:I got a random meeting that came up that somebody wants to talk to me. How did this happen? We only met two weeks ago. We shouldn't even be having this conversation with leadership. We're weeks, if not months, away from the delivery of the solution. It's because we were not aligned.
Speaker 2:Yes, and that happens often, oscar, when you have a slide deck culture like you use PowerPoint to do things right. Because what happens with the PowerPoint strategy is it doesn't have enough there that you can just hand off the PowerPoint to someone without telling them anything and they fully understanding what is the strategy. Right, the PR FAQ forces and narratives so that anyone reading that document will understand it. They might not even agree with it, but they will understand it. So there is a lot less misalignment about that. They might say, like that's not the direction we should go, that's not our North Star, but at least they can say that when they look at a PowerPoint that is a bunch of bullet points, a few diagrams, you know they're going to interpolate or project what they are imagining, what the North Star is right and what is the strategy to get there. So when they go and tell someone else right, this is already two degrees of separation from the original person things get really diffused, right, like you're talking about almost a different project project, and it gets worse and worse and worse as the information passed along to more people.
Speaker 2:The PR vehicle doesn't have this problem. There was a document. Everyone can read the same document and start from the same context and same information. Right, so it's it's way more powerful and that's what helped Amazon quite a bit, because it helps them execute in isolation. Quote right, like a team can do their job in isolation because everyone that's going to be involved already bought into the strategy and the vision and they know exactly what it's going to do, so that team can move really fast.
Speaker 1:Just to add actually to query do you recall how large Amazon was when they decided to come up with this framework or at least make this framework a part of the organization?
Speaker 1:I would imagine there's so much power in here, as you mentioned, that it gives the ability to go against a North Star versus in some PowerPoint-centric industries, really like ours. Try to tell a story through PowerPoint and tell me that people are doing that every single time. They do slide presentations and I would call you a liar, because that's not true. You come in there and it almost is delivered that every slide is by itself Reference its own North Star. The way that the PRFAQ lines things out really shows you whether you agree or not. This is the direction. This is what this is going to look like.
Speaker 1:At the end, you can argue that that is not where we need to go, which is great. We can talk about that and then work out that FAQ part afterwards, but it gives you an anchor and I think that's what misses from a lot of these. That's where you know, when we talk about, where the root cause for these things are. We have high level decision makers that are super intelligent, where you know that misalignment and that you know. I love that you mentioned in a PR FAQ. You include your leadership because you want them to also be bought in. This is what we're looking for at the very end of the road Not a feature, not a software. For at the very end of the road Not a feature, not a software. This is the way we want life to be. When we're done with this project, do we put all the blame on the one that asked us for a project? How do we bridge that? How do we undo that misalignment from the beginning?
Speaker 3:I think the easy answer is to blame it on somebody and for them to be short-sighted.
Speaker 3:And a lot of ego is involved in these large companies, and I think people have a lot to prove when you have such a large initiative.
Speaker 3:But I think it's this like chicken or the egg thing, where you're misaligned because you haven't gotten the feedback yet, and so we have to get the feedback in order to be aligned, and so I think it all comes down to the tools that people use to really communicate this information, right? So, whether it's a PowerPoint or some rigid document like a project charter, it's not very open for soliciting feedback, and I think the beauty of the PRFAQ is that you can customize the questions to really match what those two segments are, whether you're reaching out to customers externally or you're looking at your internal teams to figure out, okay, what are the problem areas that you're trying to really focus on as we think about developing this service or product. I'm just curious how you see I mean, you've worked with a lot of high-level executives that I would imagine have a lot of ego but then at the other end of it, that is not the sole blame, right? I think there's other components to the system, as I will call it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, there is not a single person that is culpable of this problem. It's a systemic problem on the organization right? An organization that doesn't embrace feedback and doesn't embrace questioning or is not curious to know why we're doing this, what exactly are we executing and what is the impact for the business? What is the impact for the customer? They're going to suffer this problem no matter what right, regardless of PR FAQ or PowerPoint. But a PR FAQ, like you said, like it is part of the process to get reviews. So what I often say is there is no buy-in on a PR FAQ. There is way in, like people are part of the process of defining the vision and the strategy so that you know you find the best version of it right. And the interesting thing is, sometimes there is no great version of it and you decide not to do it right. So the PR FQ itself saves you tens of millions of dollars or tens of months from going in at that end, because, as the team debated and discussed and gathered more information and put on the document, they realized this is not a good opportunity, like it's not worth pursuing. Maybe it's not big enough, maybe the product doesn't exist, maybe the solution is not feasible or not viable, it's too costly, but like, that was decided early on, before people committed to it and start executing. So what I say is usually PR FAQ. You do a PR FAQ before you start a project.
Speaker 2:The PR FAQ is the instrument that's going to help you decide if you should pursue an opportunity or not. Right, that's going to help you decide if you should pursue an opportunity or not. Right, and you have to take the angle from. You know different perspectives, different people looking at it, giving their opinion. It's not a plan, it's not a roadmap. Like you're not going to put, like all the list of things that you're going to do and when you're going to do it and all the team that's going to do that. It's more what would the strategy be to achieve that outcome? Right, so people can critique the strategy.
Speaker 2:And one of the beautiful things, for example, is two things. Actually, pr figures don't include any names, like there was not. The name of the author doesn't appear on the document, because we are not discussing, you know, the importance of this person. We're discussing the merit of the idea, right? So focus on the idea, focus on the vision, focus on the strategy. That's a very important aspect of PR thinking.
Speaker 2:The second thing is, for example, if you're doing a software, like, you don't include screenshots or wireframes or mocks or anything like that, because you don't want people critiquing details. Or, in many projects like branding, for example, don't include anything related to branding. That comes later, like once you decide these projects worth pursuing, then you can work on those specifics. Right, what is the branding? What is the user experience? What is the why? What is the product rendering that we're going to build experience? What is the why? What is the product rendering that we're going to build Like? Whatever other details of the execution don't belong in a PR FAQ. The PR FAQ is really strategy and vision, so you focus on that area, so you can have a conversation that is very high level.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and it sounds like your traditional tools like PowerPoint and all these other different mechanisms as a project charter, like the purpose is more output focused, whereas I think the PR FAQ, the purpose is more outcome focused.
Speaker 3:Right, and so you're more focused on what is when we build this thing, what is it going to be for everybody versus okay, what are the A, B and C of the product feature, and it's really rigid in that way. I think there's a lot of different use cases now that I'm more thinking about it and it's not really specific to a product and you can apply it to different initiatives. But I'm interested to hear what is the line between whether you do it or don't do it and then what are the small mechanics around the process itself. How long would this typically take and how many people do you get feedback to weigh in on? Right, Because you can have way too many cooks in the kitchen that everybody has something to say and that gets out of hand and you want to elicit opinion, but at the same time, you don't want a thousand people weighing in and you're reading all of these different comments about what you're about to do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that depends on the culture of the organization, right? And I think the other two elements that go into that is what is the scope of this project and what is the blast radio of this project? What happens if it goes badly? Right, so in many projects, maybe nothing happens if it goes badly. It's just a new opportunity that we're going to explore.
Speaker 2:So it might be a small opportunity, so it might not be worth a PR FAQ. A typical PR FAQ is going to take two to four weeks to go through the full rounds of reviews and feedback and everything else, and so you have to right size that to the type of project. If you're doing a project that is four weeks long, maybe a PR FAQ is not appropriate, unless it's four weeks long, but it can bankrupt the company. So then, like, yes, you want to spend a lot of time talking about that one. Even though the project feels small, the blast rate is very large. On the other hand, if the project is like three months or more, you probably want to spend two weeks talking about vision and strategy to make sure that the team is going to execute the right. Yeah, that's a good way to put it.
Speaker 1:I was just going to say. There's so many little nuggets that I'm pulling out here just to reiterate, from being focused on the strategy and vision. And as soon as you said don't add details, it honestly took me back to PowerPoints, where you're going for a response from leadership, you're going for insight, and they have the nerve to take up the time by saying why doesn't this chart look the same as the other ones, or the other project or the other, like just things that are not bringing value at all. That we are focused on because there is detail. We are detail oriented in this type of technical whitear work, computers, et cetera, engineering. There's so much detail that we look into that we find it even harder to review things without having the nitty-gritty detail.
Speaker 1:But the beauty of this is that it provides the freedom for you to do that in a safe space, a avoid of functions and people's names, and just literally this is where we want to all get to. Now let's talk about what makes sense to do that. We're not talking anybody's name the culture, the blast radius I love that, something that I have not done that myself. That, I think, is a critical point. If this doesn't work, how bad is it going to hurt? What are we going to cause in effect, from the work that we're doing now? Are we going to dismantle things or is it a small blip that we can patch a bandaid on and try something else? So I'm vibing right now with all of this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and one of the FAQs that is not uncommon to include on a PR FAQ is what are the risks, right? So you're going to have one or two paragraphs there that are going to talk about the risks and as you review the document with more people, people are going to say wait a second, there is a legal risk here, there is a compliance risk here. So you include that on that paragraph. You make it simple, like you don't want to explain the full extent of the law and what is the problem, just a strategic level. You want to have that sentence include that. So the next group of people reviewing it are going to read that and it's like, oh okay, this is included. So I need to think about this other engineering risk or, you know, customer go-to-market risk or other aspects. So you're including, like, different angles on the FAQ section so that at the end it becomes such a better idea, a better document, than what we started with.
Speaker 3:I was going to add too. I know you mentioned that the typical length is six pages, and so is that based on your experience with doing a lot of these PRFAQs, Because I would imagine that if you don't have limits around how long this is going to be, it can really you can go crazy 30 page document.
Speaker 1:no one will ever look at.
Speaker 3:Exactly. You can have too much, but then you can also have too little. Right, you want enough detail in there where somebody is reading it, and I guess you know. One question is how do you determine the length? And then I think the other part of it is how do you treat this later on throughout the lifecycle of that particular product or process? I think in a lot of our spaces there's a lifecycle around it, so it's not just a thing that's like you etch in stone and then we never touch it again. It's probably something that should get revisited if there are additional features in the future.
Speaker 2:Like how do you, how does that work with the PR FAQ? Yeah, I'm going to make it easy for you. The document is six pages long. It's not seven, it's not five, it's six and it's a tried and it's a battle tested system developed by Amazon. So Amazon try many different formats and the six is the optimum length, because what they do and what everyone doing a PR FQ should do, is every review meeting you start with reading the document for 20 minutes, so 95% of the people can read the document in 20 minutes or less, usually six pages. You can read in document in 20 minutes or less, usually six pages. You can read it in 15 to 18 minutes and then you have 40 minutes to have conversations about the document. If you do a document that is five pages instead of six, that's okay, but seven is not okay, right? Because then it takes longer, it takes away, it takes the focus away from it and what it does is like when you have six pages only, it forces you to be very clear and very succinct and very concise about what you want to talk about and what doesn't have to be there, all right. So what I tell in the book is like if something is on the document. That's going to not going to improve the conversation, the discussion or the strategic choices. Just remove it. Like put in another document. Like put in a PRD or an OKR document or an execution plan or implementation plan. Like there are other documents for that? Right.
Speaker 2:On the PRPQ, you only include the things that are going to be valuable to discuss vision and strategy. That's it right. And even on the vision and strategy things, there are certain aspects of strategy that might not be that important. For example, you can say, like you know, the cloud provider that we're going to use to build this technology on is part of our strategic decision. Is it really, like, does it matter? Like if we're going to do this project or not, if you're going to use Google or AWS or Azure? Like, probably not. Like don't include it right, unless it is strategic. When would it be strategic? Well, because we're doing a project with Microsoft, so we probably don't want to use AWS, so you want to include that on the document? Then right. So you have to, as the author of the document, to start thinking like is the?
Speaker 3:information should be here for other people to discuss and debate, if not including some other document. Right, and then the other piece about the lifecycle like it probably takes some duration of time to develop the thing and then, like everybody goes off into the woods and then they do all their thing and then maybe there's some changes that need to be done. How do you usually handle those types of changes later on in the lifecycle of the document?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I prefer to treat the PR FAQ as a historical document, right? Instead of a live document. Like, you use the document, you make your decision and you lock it down into like go to everyone, right. And of course, a few things are going to diverge from the original document, as you discover. As long as they don't diverge too much on the strategic or vision side, like, you don't have to worry about it.
Speaker 2:If there is a divergence on like well, we were doing that, now we're doing this then you probably need a new PR FAQ. Right, it's a new project, it's a different thing. But you shouldn't be keeping updating it, because if you keep updating it, you're telling the entire team needs to review it again and again and again, because otherwise they're going to be working from a different starting point or a different destination. So use that as, once and once everyone is on board and the project is approved, you're also going to use when new employees join your team or your organization, so they start from like here's why we're doing what we're doing. You hand them off with a peer FAQ. They're like in 20 minutes they get it right, they know where you're going. Again, they might not agree with it, but they know where the team is going right, and that's so valuable in so many organizations.
Speaker 1:Are there instances, I guess, within a given project or a product that's being constructed, where the duration for that instruction might be to a length where your PR FAQ may not quite you know. Is it good for six months? Is it good for five years? I suppose that there's going to be some differences depending on the organization, the culture, how quickly they roll up projects. But wondering if there's anything that you've seen, yeah, yes, yeah.
Speaker 2:Actually, a PR FAQ is for your next launch, right? So what you're doing is you're describing what we're going to do six months from now, nine months from now or 12 months from now whatever. That is right. So the press release actually says in December, we're going to launch the thing for the holiday season, yada, yada. So that PR FAQ is worth for that length of time.
Speaker 2:Right, it's not the full vision of what you want to achieve. You might have a much bigger vision that is five years long or 10 years long or whatever they might be, but the problem with those very long vision statements or documents is that they are not concrete enough for you to execute against, right? The PR FAQ is like here is the next stepping stone that we are building, you know, towards the bigger vision. So one of the questions that I recommend people include on the PR FAQ is what is the bigger vision? Right? So what you're painting is you're painting the next step on that vision, and then you have an FAQ that explains what is the bigger vision that we're trying to achieve.
Speaker 1:You know, when I think about this, marcelo and Lawrence, it really does create sort of these micro visions for projects that you're conducting. I think we often get tied into like a bigger vision for like an organization and we stay with that and try to bridge that long-term strategy to the activities you're supposed to be doing now or in the next six months. And it's very hard to do that and there's only few people that I can think of that have the ability to say I can take this leader's vision from this very jargony, sort of floaty language that doesn't have any specifics. And I can see this framework really providing just such a fundamental component of any project or product launch is getting people aligned in the beginning and not in the middle. And, with that being said, I'm sure you've been called in at some point. Where you're, they're in the middle of something and this group is over here and that one's over there and we come back together and they thought we meant this. How has this framework brought them back to go toward that North Star?
Speaker 2:Yes, that is actually a use case for PR FAQ. So what I recommend people do is like do the PR FAQ process before you start a project. If you haven't done it, it's okay to do one halfway through it. If you feel like the team is not aligned right and you're seeing like things are moving slowly and all that, so like take a step back, let's write the PR FAQ for what we're doing. Let's make sure that everyone's on the same page. Let people critique, comment, review, revise so that get incorporated. And then you get a lockdown on like okay, we have clarity now, right, so now we can continue on that project.
Speaker 2:I would say the only timeline of a project that you should not do a PR FAQ is at the end of the project, because a PR FAQ has a press release and frequently asked questions. People are like oh, it's a marketing tool, so we can use the press release to announce the product. It's not for that. Like you can write a press release and a FAQ if you want to launch your product, but the PR FAQ is a strategy and product decision tool, right, so it's very early on or before even you start a project. So that is a good example. But the other thing that I think it's important mentioning as well, oscar, is PR FAQ also work for personal projects, like if you're thinking about launching a new podcast, writing a book, or like doing you know a side gig, whatever. Like, the PR FAQ helps you get the clarity of, like, who you're serving, what problem you're serving, what you don't know about this yet, what you don't know about their problem how are they solving their problem today? Like all that is very helpful.
Speaker 2:Like, I wrote a PR FAQ for my own book, right, because I wanted to understand, like, who is going to read this book, why they're going to read this book, how this book is going to solve their problem and how they are solving this problem today, right? So let me get clarity on that. And it was such an enlightening moment for me I didn't review it with anyone. It was just like me writing this by myself and like getting more clarity and the book changed because of it, right? So my original idea was one about writing a book for PR FAQ for founders. As I start writing a PR FAQ for this book, I realized founders was not really my market. My market is innovators, anyone who's trying to change something, like build something new or change something that exists. These are the people that are going to need to write for, and that insight only came to me because I wrote the PR FAQ.
Speaker 1:I was just going to say. It's amazing when you hear the term putting pen to paper. But when you actually do these things, you can ask these questions in your head and you can sort of have this understanding that you know, yeah, it's sort of there. Yeah, you know I'm going to be putting this out to certain people or this is to solve certain problems. But when you have to actually sit there and craft a document that is empty and to say, okay, now put your pen where your mouth is right now, where your head is, wherever you know, and illustrate that you have the vision wherever you know, and illustrate that you have the vision that you understand what with. Well, how could we use this for things that we're trying to do, for things that we want to convey later, for ideas that we have that aren't quite fully baked, that can help us ask those questions?
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Very powerful.
Speaker 2:And there's some science to that, what you're saying, oscar. By the way, when I wrote the book, I decided to read a lot about the science of reading and writing, like what happens to our brain when you're writing and reading content and there is fascinating cognitive science behind it. So when you write down your thoughts, what happens is you start challenging the story that you made on your head about it. So it creates a cognitive dissonance if the story is not coherent. So it's very hard for someone to write a paragraph that is not coherent.
Speaker 2:It's very easy for us to think about things that are not coherent In our minds.
Speaker 2:We create the scenarios and we go like, oh, we could do this and do that.
Speaker 2:And like, oh, it's such a great idea, let's go do that. It's all in your head, right. But when you write it down, like it triggers a different part of your brain that activates in your brain like writing and reading that at the same time challenges you right, immediately, puts you in a critical thinking state because it goes like wait a second, this is not gonna work, this is not going to work, this is not the right way. So you go and you refine and you find the gaps on your thinking, you find what statements you made that are not necessarily true. That's why writing is so powerful, and you lose a lot of that when you use PowerPoint, because you don't have to write full paragraphs, you just need a bullet point. It's very easy to be incoherent with three bullet points because you don't have to have the full story, so you don't need that coherence among those bullet points. Your brain is filling up the gap. So and we already told, the brain is not very good at that.
Speaker 3:And I remember laughing over here, man, yeah, I was going to say like there was somebody once said don't believe everything you think, and this is exactly the point that you're making, and I know you mentioned that. One of the questions that you do ask as part of the PRFAQ is like, what is the bigger vision? And I don't want you to disclose too much that's inside your book, because people should buy it and read it for themselves. But are there a few questions that you've you know over the years of doing this that you really recommend people definitely include in their peer FAQ and there's probably questions more tailored towards, obviously, companies building products and services. But there's also maybe some questions on the personal side that like, as you're thinking through your change that you want to have in your life, like what, what kind of questions are you put in there from from your experience?
Speaker 2:I would say the most important questions that you need to spend the most time focusing on are problems-related questions, customer problems questions, right, because problems should be facts, it shouldn't be opinions, it shouldn't be hypotheses, right? You want to know that, like this group of people or this customers, or you know, this team has this problem, because if you don't believe on that problem, if you don't have enough data about it, how can you solve it? Like, if the problem doesn't really exist, if it is not urgent, if it is not severe enough, if they are already happy with the solution that they have? Like, what exactly are you doing? Right? So you spend a lot of time on those questions.
Speaker 2:I'm not going to say like they are the most important, they are the only ones that you should include in your PR FAQ, but you should spend quite a bit of time on them, right? Like, go deep into the problem, go deep into the mind and the needs of the customers. That desires whatever you're doing. Like it could be an internal team. It could be the employee of the organization that you're working on. If you are like an internal team serving them, like HR or IT or legal or accounting, but it could be your external customers as well, b2b or B2C, like you. Really want to understand them better. They understand themselves.
Speaker 1:I love the nod that you know your focus on the problems is a way for you to have facts embedded into this PR FAQ. Yeah, it's very simple for us to make an assumption of a problem because of a symptom that we've experienced, or perhaps the execution of that process was wrong. It doesn't mean that you have a bad process, that you need to fix it. It might mean something else, like we need to train people to deliver this a certain way. Or, to your point, that the issue that is manifested, that is not the problem. You need to go deeper, find out. Oh, look at that, there's an issue within the system, within the backend of, within the back end of this website, or whatever the case may be. But that's such a key piece to recognize that even early on with your problems, with your situations, you have facts that you need to embody and remember that your future vision, the goal, is to relieve these problems in that future vision and I think, a conversation for another day.
Speaker 1:But there are instances where the vision starts to cater back towards leadership, et cetera, without alleviating the problems that were existing in the first place. Because you start digging around, the onion starts to get, you know, the layers start to come out and then you go oh well, this would be a great time to do X, nothing to do with the problem, we're solving it. So I think it's a great perspective and something that I'm going to take, and I know that Lawrence is going to take as well. So, before we wrap up, this has been great and we could probably talk for another hour. What would you tell leaders who are finding that their strategy is not quite connecting to the reality of their execution, of their teams? How can they use their framework? How can they think differently before launching new projects?
Speaker 2:I know it's going to sound self-serving, but what the PR FAQ really does, it puts you, it forces you to think through a lot of that to fill the gaps. It's not a very structured template framework. There is business model, canvas and other frameworks that are very, very structured, like put this information here, this word there. Pr FAQ is not like that. But as you go writing your PR FAQ you feel forced to figure stuff out right, otherwise you can't complete it. So you're going to have to figure out what are the facts about the problem, what are the facts about the customer, what is the facts about the market? And have to figure out what are the facts about the problem, what are the facts about the customer, what is the facts about the market? And then what are our hypotheses about the solution, what are the hypotheses about how to solve this, the feasibility of this project right, the value for our business. So you incorporate all that opens your mind and the team's mind to exactly what is possible here and what's not.
Speaker 2:And not all PR FAQs are going to lead to a green light right To let's go ahead and execute. You should expect that 50% of your PR FAQs, if you're using it frequently, are no-goes because your printing wasn't big enough, the timing wasn't right, we couldn't figure out the right problem. So that's a good outcome as well for the PR FAQ. Like you, didn't waste time going on that end, so just starting on the PR FAQ is a great way to solve a lot of the strategy problems that you mentioned.
Speaker 3:I like your interesting choice of words that you use for using it to like force you to kind of think about these questions and answer them.
Speaker 3:I think, as I was describing it to Oscar, I was telling him it's a mechanism for us to dream about what it is that we'd like to build and how it's going to impact your customers and how we would actually approach it internally.
Speaker 3:And that piece about allowing you to think creatively, I think is the real differentiator between all these different tools like you said, the business canvas and there's the SWOT matrix that you can draw and all these traditional tools that we've learned in business school. But I think this is something that is very new to us because even going through business school, we never came across something like this. And this just seems like common sense now that we've talked about this for an hour, that we're like why haven't we done this before? And it just seems that there's a lot of different use cases for this, and I just want to thank you for your time and being able to share this with us, and I'm sure our audience is going to find a ton of value from learning about the framework and how they're going to use it in the future as well. You're welcome.
Speaker 1:Marcello Calvucci, author of the PRFAQ Framework.
Speaker 2:Marcello, how can folks get in contact with you? How can they find out more about the book? Yeah, the easiest way is go to Google. Search for PRFAQ book. The book website is going to be one of the links there and from the book website you're going to find my contact information, including my email address, and lots of articles and resources about the book. There is examples of PRFAQ templates, tons of articles and tips about the book. There is examples of PR FAQ templates, tons of articles and tips on how to do it better. So a lot out there.
Speaker 1:Well, we're looking forward to digging more into the PR FAQ framework. I know that we're going to be pulling that in and seeing what it can do for us as well.
Speaker 3:So once again.
Speaker 1:Marcelo, thank you so much for taking the time to meet with us and I look forward to the next time we get to connect.
Speaker 2:Thank you, folks.
