Transcript: Embracing Innovation: Introducing the PR FAQ Framework with Marcelo Calbucci
0:00 Marcelo You have to think about what are the hard questions that you're going to be asked,
0:03 Marcelo both internally and externally.
0:24 Brad Another episode of How Many CTOs Does It Take podcast.
0:28 Brad I'm Brad Hefta-Gaub, and my co-host is Scott Porad.
0:31 Marcelo Hello.
0:32 Brad And today we have a guest with us,
0:35 Brad Marcelo Calbucci,
0:37 Brad who's a longtime CTO,
0:39 Brad startup founder.
0:41 Brad Marcelo and I met years ago in the sales startup scene.
0:44 Brad And he's got a new book out called the PR FAQ. Welcome to How Many CTOs.
0:50 Brad Does it take podcast,
0:51 Brad Marcelo?
0:52 Marcelo Hey folks,
0:53 Marcelo thanks for having me.
0:54 Scott Thanks for coming on here. We appreciate it.
0:56 Brad Why don't you give us a little rundown, Marcello? What have you been up to lately?
1:00 Marcelo Yeah, so I just published a book a couple weeks ago.
1:04 Marcelo It's called the PR FAQ Framework, Adapting Amazon's Innovation Framework to Work for You.
1:11 Marcelo That came from the couple years that I spent working at Amazon and prior to that many years at startups and wondering like,
1:19 Marcelo I'm like,
1:19 Marcelo how come these two things haven't, you know, got together and had a baby yet until I created that baby right now, which is the book.
1:30 Marcelo So primarily I'm focusing on, you know, evangelizing and talking about this framework with folks so they understand what is it for,
1:38 Marcelo what's not for,
1:39 Marcelo how to use it,
1:40 Marcelo what's the value,
1:41 Marcelo how to adapt to startups and product managers everywhere.
1:46 Marcelo And very quickly about me, before that I spent a couple years at Amazon,
1:50 Marcelo before that 18 years of startups in Seattle and London,
1:54 Marcelo before that many years at Microsoft working at Bing,
1:58 Marcelo before that hacking, you know, on my basement kind of thing.
2:03 Brad Love it.
2:04 Scott I have a question for you just to get out of the gate here,
2:07 Scott Marcelo.
2:07 Marcelo Go ahead,
2:08 Marcelo Scott.
2:08 Scott After all those years of doing early stage startups,
2:11 Scott What did it feel like jumping into the ice bath of Amazon?
2:16 Scott Was it a shock to your system or did it feel like actually a warm shower?
2:20 Marcelo Yeah, it was a shock.
2:22 Marcelo I'm not going to lie.
2:25 Marcelo Among the big companies, Amazon is very interesting,
2:29 Marcelo very entrepreneurial.
2:33 Marcelo Just if you compare to like your Microsoft,
2:36 Marcelo your Google,
2:36 Marcelo your meta of the world,
2:39 Marcelo it still is a big company. So everything is, you know, somewhat bureaucratic and a little bit slow.
2:46 Marcelo Decisions need to be looked at from all different angles,
2:50 Marcelo you know, from legal and compliance and engineering and like everything that you can imagine,
2:56 Marcelo right? So sometimes you want to move fast and do certain things.
2:59 Marcelo to the things and I'm not going to say that Amazon doesn't move fast.
3:02 Marcelo It moves fast for a big company,
3:04 Marcelo still is 10 times slower than a startup.
3:07 Brad Yeah, yeah,
3:10 Brad I imagine.
3:11 Scott And had you worked with the PRFAQ? Was that a tool that you would use in your toolkit before Amazon or did you learn about it there?
3:18 Marcelo I learned before I joined Amazon,
3:20 Marcelo but like you don't know what it is until you practice it and you're using real life.
3:26 Marcelo It's almost like, oh, I know about LLMs, but I never coded against an LLM API.
3:31 Marcelo So like, yeah,
3:33 Marcelo you know, but you don't know.
3:34 Marcelo Right.
3:34 Scott Mm hmm.
3:35 Marcelo So that's how it was for an APR FAQ for me.
3:38 Scott Did you just kind of fall in love with it when you were there or like it's clearly captured your imagination in some way because you wrote a book about it. So like what's that story?
3:46 Marcelo Yeah.
3:46 Marcelo So.
3:47 Marcelo What happens is like Amazon uses the PR FAQ extensively,
3:52 Marcelo right?
3:53 Marcelo So every decision the company makes is usually starts with a PR FAQ. I shouldn't even say usually,
3:59 Marcelo always starts with a PR FAQ, right?
4:02 Marcelo Any meaningful decision,
4:03 Marcelo sometimes a decision that's going to cost only $100,000.
4:07 Marcelo There is a PRFAQ behind it, right?
4:09 Marcelo And these decisions are about new business or a new product or a new feature or even a new program or a new policy within the company.
4:21 Marcelo So IT might decide to change some policy about,
4:25 Marcelo you know,
4:26 Marcelo laptops.
4:27 Marcelo It's going to write, someone in IT is going to write a PRFAQ and that PRFAQ is going to be used to...
4:33 Marcelo who discover and debate the right strategy to do this like why are we doing like what is the impact uh how are customers going to think about and in the case of it the customers are the employees right so they incorporate that thinking uh and very quickly as like a participator many of these PRFAQ reviews early on not my own PRFAQs but someone else's in my organization
4:57 Marcelo I realize,
4:58 Marcelo wow,
4:58 Marcelo this is really powerful.
5:00 Marcelo It's a very interesting tool.
5:01 Marcelo It's kind of odd in the beginning because the format is very strict.
5:05 Marcelo The style of how you review it and how you look at it is very strict,
5:08 Marcelo not strictly descriptive would be the right word, right?
5:13 Marcelo So if you're like, oh, this is strange,
5:15 Marcelo but as soon as you get into the rhythm of it,
5:16 Marcelo it's really hard not to see this as a major asset for thinking strategically and making decisions.
5:24 Brad One of the things that I think really resonated with me in the book was this notion of making sure that you've really captured the why.
5:38 Brad behind the thing that you're trying to make the decision around,
5:41 Brad whether that be building a product or to your point about like some new laptop provisioning policy or something like that.
5:48 Brad And there was like one of the lines that was out of your book that I really resonated with me was this idea,
5:54 Brad and I think it was how many software engineers or designers wake up on Monday morning and pick up the next item in the backlog and start working on it without understanding the customer value behind it.
6:06 Brad And when I read that line,
6:07 Brad I was like, yes, like that, that is so often,
6:11 Brad I think, the challenge that engineers struggle with, like if they if they understand the customer value.
6:20 Brad then they're going to do their job so much better than if they don't.
6:23 Brad So I'm just kind of curious,
6:24 Brad maybe that's just my little bias.
6:27 Brad And so I that you know, my confirmation bias was like,
6:30 Brad yes, that resonates with me.
6:32 Brad But do you feel like
6:34 Brad Is that kind of one of the key things that we should be taking out of the PRFAQ toolkit or how would you say like the most salient thing that engineering teams should take out of this toolkit would be?
6:49 Marcelo Yeah, and I said designers and engineers,
6:52 Marcelo Brad,
6:52 Marcelo but it's also managers and directors and VPs that sometimes are just working on things without actually questioning,
6:59 Marcelo what are we doing here?
7:01 Marcelo Why are we doing this?
7:02 Marcelo What is the value that we're creating for our customers and for our organization?
7:06 Marcelo So the biggest value of the PRFQ is a team, and I'm using the word team very broadly here.
7:14 Marcelo Not only the team working on it, but the team adjacent to the project as well that are aligned on strategy and vision.
7:24 Marcelo like everyone discussed debated discover and decided on that vision is not a committee driven decision still you'll have a few people that were responsible for the decision making but everyone was involved in the process of coming up with that and they had an opportunity to question certain aspects of the project like oh i don't think the technology is possible or a product person say like i don't think we can build this or a ux person saying like well the design shouldn't be like
7:50 Marcelo be like that or the legal team say like no no no no you can't you can't collect that kind of information so everyone had a little bit of their voice incorporating into a single document that integrates all this thinking
8:04 Marcelo uh you know in a cohesive way so that anyone reading it be like oh i understand what's going on even if i don't agree with it like it makes sense from a to z like it's it's there so you know that's where amazon has the leadership principle of disagree and commit um like once you understand what is in there you might even disagree but like the team is aligned that that's the direction we're going to go and that's
8:29 Scott it
8:29 Marcelo That's the direction that we're going to go.
8:30 Scott Well, I was just going to try to take a step back here.
8:33 Scott And could you just give us a quick,
8:34 Scott I know I'm like you were talking about with the guy who's never programmed against the LLM. Like I know this concept, I've used it informally throughout the years, but I've never worked at Amazon. So I really don't know the real deal.
8:47 Scott I'm wondering if you could just outline for us just for a second, like tell us the real deal, what it's like to really how it really works.
8:54 Marcelo Yeah, let me take a step back here and let me say APR FAQ stands for Press Release in Frequently Asked Questions.
9:03 Marcelo So this was invented by Amazon circa 2003-2004 as a decision-making mechanism.
9:12 Marcelo And it's often referred as the working backwards six-pager.
9:17 Marcelo Amazon has other types of six-pagers.
9:20 Marcelo The PR FAQ is one of them, right?
9:23 Marcelo And what it is, is a press release that paints a picture of the future, right? So what you're really talking about is what if we launch this product today?
9:35 Marcelo How would we announce it?
9:37 Marcelo So you write that press release in the first page and then you have five pages of frequently asked questions.
9:44 Marcelo And the questions can be, you know, from a customer perspective,
9:48 Marcelo like,
9:49 Marcelo oh, how much this is going to cost?
9:50 Marcelo How do I get started?
9:52 Marcelo Can I import my data?
9:54 Marcelo So you're answering those questions as if customers were asking them.
9:57 Marcelo And then you have another section that is called the internal FAQs that is for the team.
10:03 Marcelo asking itself certain questions questions like who is the customer and what problem are we solving for them when do you think we can have this data set to integrate into the product or like how much this is going to cost to operate like that type of questions that are answered on the FAQ now the document is just an artifact
10:27 Marcelo that is used at a catalyst for conversation.
10:32 Marcelo Like, so the goal is not to create like the perfect document alone in a room.
10:36 Marcelo The goal is to collaborate with all your team members to create this document so that when it's done,
10:42 Marcelo everyone agrees on it,
10:44 Marcelo right?
10:44 Marcelo There is no big reveal of like,
10:46 Marcelo ta-da,
10:47 Marcelo here is the strategy,
10:48 Marcelo like go execute on it.
10:50 Marcelo That's not really how it works,
10:52 Marcelo right? Like people work together on it, which is very different than some organizations that use.
10:57 Marcelo like PRD or functional specs and like they just throw over the wall to the engineering team go build it right PR FAQs are not like that the intentions are like that and by the way PRDs should not be like that either like you want the engineers in the process of creating that PRD but most companies don't have that practice but PRFQ doesn't work if you don't do it like that right the point is like a collaborative discovery
11:25 Scott It's almost like it's the recording of the conversations and the outcome of those,
11:30 Scott not the input or direction for everybody,
11:34 Scott but the kind of, as people talk and develop a shared understanding of whatever this thing is going to be,
11:40 Scott this kind of memorializes that.
11:44 Scott Good way to think about it.
11:45 Marcelo That's exactly right.
11:47 Marcelo You know, it's not uncommon for our to have things in the PRFAQ to say like,
11:51 Marcelo what are we not doing?
11:54 Marcelo You know, or like, why have we decided by option A versus option B?
11:57 Marcelo Like it's on the PRFAQ because that conversation took place and halfway through the team decided to do it differently.
12:05 Marcelo So you keep it there, right? It's part of one of the FAQs.
12:09 Brad Yeah, you know, it's interesting,
12:11 Brad Marcelo, I kind of was thinking about how one of the things that we I remember from the early days, for example, of real networks, we were really adamant about creating what we would call rude Q&As about,
12:24 Brad you know, once we did a product release, like or as we prepared for product release.
12:29 Brad And of course, that's the spirit behind the rude Q&A is.
12:34 Brad You know, there's no questions, no questions are barred, right?
12:38 Brad Like what is the most antagonistic question that the press could ask,
12:42 Brad the competitor could ask, and we might ask ourselves about this product.
12:46 Brad And I think that, I guess I'm sort of like digesting you talking about the way to create these PR FAQs. It does strike me that so often.
13:00 Brad team members are well why are we doing it that way or why didn't we do it that way or what about this corner that we're not turning to look down like why aren't we considering this and it and it does strike me that if we there's this value in the rude q a the value in the the questions that are the hard questions and
13:22 Brad I'm assuming that that's an important part about the FAQ is that you really are capturing the tough legal question from the privacy team,
13:30 Brad right?
13:30 Brad You're capturing it and you're answering it as part of your getting on the same page.
13:36 Marcelo Yeah, that's right,
13:37 Marcelo Brad.
13:38 Marcelo You got it correctly.
13:39 Marcelo I talk about rude Q&A in the book,
13:43 Marcelo right?
13:44 Marcelo You have to think about what are the hard questions that you're going to be asked,
13:48 Marcelo both internally and externally,
13:50 Marcelo right?
13:50 Marcelo Like how are the customers going to feel about certain things?
13:53 Marcelo How does this compare with that other product?
13:55 Marcelo Or like, why would I share this data with you?
13:58 Marcelo So you have to think about that and incorporate that into the.
14:03 Marcelo into the document to create good conversations.
14:06 Marcelo The one thing that is important to say, Brad,
14:10 Marcelo as well is a PR FAQ is not a plan.
14:13 Marcelo It's a strategy.
14:15 Marcelo Right. So you keep it very high level.
14:18 Marcelo Usually don't go to the which cloud provider are we going to use?
14:22 Marcelo Which LLM vendor is the best one for us?
14:25 Marcelo Sometimes you might incorporate some of that because there is a uniqueness to that tactic of the plan that has an impact on the strategy.
14:37 Marcelo But most of the time, you don't want to go to that level of detail,
14:40 Marcelo right?
14:40 Marcelo a PR FAQ is basically the starting of a project it's like the kickoff let's spend actually pre-starting of a project let's spend you know two weeks on this PR FAQ to make sure that we understand the vision we understand the strategy we understand certain outcomes that we're trying to achieve and everyone is aligned on that once you arrive to a certain alignment then you go like all right
15:05 Marcelo We are a goal for this project.
15:07 Marcelo Let's start working a plan now.
15:09 Scott Okay,
15:09 Marcelo Yeah.
15:10 Scott so you've given me, I want to explore an idea here with you, Marcelo.
15:13 Marcelo Go ahead.
15:14 Scott Something Brad and I have talked about a bunch is tech debt.
15:17 Scott And I was just talking to one of the engineers on my team this week about kind of an area he wants to solve, address,
15:24 Scott you know, where there's problems,
15:25 Scott where there's a lot of tech debt.
15:27 Scott And I'm trying to think, I was just thinking as you were talking,
15:30 Scott I was thinking about.
15:31 Scott How could he use this?
15:33 Scott Like who would his audience be if he was writing that press release?
15:36 Scott I can imagine what the FAQs would be like, but I'm trying to think about who the audience would be.
15:40 Scott You ever seen it used like that?
15:42 Scott Where an engineer sort of talked about
15:43 Marcelo Yes, absolutely.
15:44 Marcelo Not only I've seen use cases like that on the book, I include an example just like that.
15:53 Marcelo about an engineering team replacing a piece of outdated technology.
16:00 Marcelo So the audience for that is everyone who is going to be working on that project,
16:05 Marcelo all the engineers or SREs or other people that are going to be working on that project,
16:09 Marcelo their peers and everyone who is going to be impacted by it. So like other engineering teams and organizations,
16:16 Marcelo potentially the product team.
16:19 Marcelo If there is consequences like for the budget,
16:24 Marcelo you might need to involve finance as well.
16:27 Marcelo If there is legal consequence,
16:29 Marcelo you need to involve the legal team as well.
16:32 Marcelo And this person can write a PR FAQ.
16:35 Marcelo And by the way, in the book, I explain like not necessarily needs to be a press release that you start with.
16:41 Marcelo Press release is the best format,
16:43 Marcelo but it could also be the email from the CTO to the entire company.
16:47 Scott Mm
16:47 Marcelo Hey,
16:48 Scott -hmm.
16:48 Marcelo today we are announcing that we are replacing this old project with this new project.
16:53 Marcelo You know, this is what's going to happen. This is the benefits for us, the problems that we had before.
16:58 Marcelo So that also works because what you're doing is painting a vision.
17:01 Marcelo of the future right
17:02 Scott Hmm
17:02 Marcelo anyone people reading that is like
17:04 Marcelo wow yeah let's do that right
17:06 Scott Yeah.
17:07 Marcelo i'm online i understand let's talk about the the strategy now so now you go to the q a section the faq section and like you have like some hard questions there like why are we doing like what are we saving like what is the consequence if we don't do it right what is the cost of delay you can include all that in the faq section very technical in that case is
17:30 Marcelo Since it's an internal project,
17:32 Marcelo you do not need the customer FAQ section,
17:34 Scott Mm hmm.
17:34 Marcelo just the internal FAQ section,
17:36 Marcelo because your customer is internal,
17:38 Marcelo you know, and the same team working on it is the same thing. So like, you don't need that section.
17:44 Marcelo So in the book, I explain how to use it for that use case as well.
17:47 Brad It's so interesting.
17:48 Brad I'm like.
17:50 Brad I have so many questions for you, Marcelo. One of the things, though, that your point about this internal project as well has struck me is, has this, I mean, it seems like we could use this technique also to just do any kind of organizational change management.
18:06 Brad Right.
18:06 Scott Mm
18:07 Brad Like
18:07 Scott -hmm.
18:07 Brad we're, you know, we're going to try to change like, you know, how we recruit new new team members. Right.
18:15 Brad And so we could use this same sort of start with the end in mind type approach of like, here's my press release,
18:22 Brad the internal email to the whole team about our new approach for recruiting the best talent and and then use the same FAQ approach to really kind of.
18:33 Brad interrogate that strategy.
18:36 Marcelo Yeah, that's a very common use case, you know, like everything related to HR,
18:41 Marcelo recruiting IT,
18:42 Marcelo compliance,
18:44 Marcelo all of that could start with a PRFAQ as well to have like this conversations,
18:51 Marcelo right,
18:51 Marcelo so people can discuss and think through and understand the impact that it might have for them.
18:58 Marcelo That's not unusual at all.
19:01 Scott Yeah, and I like this is at the beginning of the process.
19:04 Scott It paints the vision of the future at the beginning of the process,
19:06 Scott not like at the end of the process often where you're kind of telling some people about what's going to happen after kind of all the work has been done.
19:15 Scott This is at the beginning.
19:16 Scott I kind of like that.
19:18 Brad How have you seen this like brought into organizations that maybe already have an established
19:26 Brad culture around decision making right like it would be easy if the three of us are going to start a new startup together like we're we're malleable and we're like open-minded and we're like yes we're going to do this because it's you know it's worked for marcello in the past and it's we buy in but what about an organization that's already established and and maybe is rigid or calcified in their in their approach decision making
19:53 Marcelo Yeah, it's it's not easy,
19:55 Marcelo Brad.
19:55 Marcelo I wish I would say like this is how you do it and it's going to be easy and everyone is going to be happy.
19:59 Marcelo but you know this changing organization is really hard like change is slow there's a lot of resistance even when people say we do want to change we think this is going to be great uh but there is always pushback right and there is always a person that's going to point as soon as the first failure say see i told you this wouldn't work right uh in the reality is a lot of change require persistence you need to try like one two three times before you say like
20:26 Marcelo It didn't work for us.
20:27 Marcelo Right.
20:28 Marcelo So my recommendation and it's the same way that I would recommend someone who is adopting a new framework like OKR or other frameworks like that.
20:38 Marcelo Like don't start big.
20:40 Marcelo Don't start all at once. Right.
20:42 Marcelo Like pick one project that is manageable,
20:45 Marcelo you know, with a few people and do it there and see how it fits the culture.
20:50 Marcelo Right. And do some adjustments.
20:53 Marcelo and to see how did it work in that setting,
20:55 Marcelo right?
20:56 Marcelo And even if it was a complete failure,
20:58 Marcelo I would say try again in another project and try again in another project, right? Because you don't know if the failure was related to the project or to the framework.
21:09 Marcelo And I've been in many meetings where OKR went terribly badly,
21:14 Marcelo you know, both from the planning and the results of having OKRs.
21:19 Marcelo But like once you persist and you start to learn and how to use it, you know, you start to reap the benefits.
21:26 Brad Hey, Brad,
21:28 Brad I can tell you, inspired by Marcella's book,
21:31 Brad I kind of just got a little.
21:33 Brad I lit a spark recently,
21:35 Brad and I'll tell you how I did it.
21:37 Marcelo Huh?
21:38 Brad I didn't, and it got adopted better than I thought it was going to get adopted.
21:41 Brad But we're still in process,
21:42 Brad so we still see how well it works out.
21:45 Brad A couple of weeks ago, we were starting another planning cycle.
21:48 Brad And kind of the beginning of our planning cycles, people write these documents that sort of pitch their ideas with the ROI and all that kind of stuff,
21:54 Brad right?
21:54 Brad And someone suggested.
21:56 Brad you know we should really have a common format for this and just because I had Marcella's book in my mind I just kind of said offhand I was like well why don't we use this PR FAQ format like Amazon uses it people really like it and
22:07 Scott Love it.
22:07 Brad there was kind of a general agreement for that and then there happened to be one person in the room who had previously worked at Amazon and she was like oh yeah that's great and it just kind of took off so we'll now we'll see how it goes people aren't done with them next week we start reviewing them but the real point I'm trying to make is
22:23 Brad at the beginning of sort of a planning cycle when pitching people are pitching ideas yeah it's a great time to do it the notion that people wanted to come in format somebody else could have been in the room and suggested a different format I just happen I guess to be the first one to open my mouth and it was the only reason I opened my mouth is because it was just on my mind because I knew we were talking to Marcelo and so that seems to have worked
22:47 Brad We'll see how good they come out,
22:48 Marcelo That's
22:48 Brad but we'll see
22:49 Marcelo good.
22:49 Brad how it works and see if I'm sure it'll take a few cranks around the wheel to get them dialed in.
22:55 Brad I wanted to ask about pitfalls.
22:57 Brad What are mistakes people make?
22:59 Brad What should we avoid doing here?
23:00 Marcelo Yeah, there are many pitfalls with PRFQ.
23:04 Marcelo One of them I kind of mentioned,
23:06 Marcelo which is people think a PRFQ is a plan,
23:09 Marcelo a tactile plan,
23:10 Marcelo right? And instead of like...
23:13 Marcelo only talking about division and the strategy they're going to very high level of detail like we're going to build this services and we're going to use these APIs and we're going to create these databases and like do this all this detail and like this person is going to work on this project and this person is going to work on that other part like PRFQs are not for that do not try to stuff everything into a PRFQ you can extend a PRFQ by having things on the appendix
23:39 Marcelo techniques, but I still I would recommend to keep it very high level, like very superficial.
23:45 Marcelo What you don't want to do is create a PR FAQ that feels like a perfect plan, regardless if it's perfect or not,
23:51 Marcelo and then people are not comfortable providing feedback.
23:57 Marcelo Right. Because like, oh,
23:58 Marcelo so much work has gone into that already.
24:00 Marcelo Like I don't have the courage to question this thing here that might make the entire tower collapse.
24:06 Marcelo Right. So.
24:07 Scott You made that point about.
24:09 Scott In the book, you make that point about like the build, learn,
24:12 Scott build,
24:13 Scott measure, learn and getting putting build in the wrong place. Like if your prototype is too advanced,
24:18 Scott if your prototype is too robust,
24:20 Scott it actually reduces the input,
24:24 Scott the honest feedback you're going to get.
24:26 Marcelo Yeah, that's my personal hack when I ask people to provide feedback on blog posts or articles that I'm writing.
24:32 Marcelo I always say here's a draft,
24:34 Marcelo even though I work my ass off to make this draft perfect,
24:38 Marcelo you know, I always say here's a draft because when you say like that,
24:41 Marcelo people are like, OK,
24:42 Marcelo it's a draft like he's really asking for feedback.
24:45 Marcelo So let me give him like what I really think versus me telling them like I work 10 hours on this article.
24:52 Marcelo article like can you give me some feedback people are going to be very shy about pointing flaws on on my view and strategy is just like that right like if you say like oh we have the perfect strategy here review it for us who's going to have the courage to break your heart you know and say like this strategy sucks
25:09 Scott So one pitfall is the don't put too much detail in it. That's a common pitfall.
25:15 Brad Another common pitfall here is getting it too polished before you start to circulate it for feedback.
25:21 Marcelo Yes, there is a right timing to do things like you want to you want to create a draft first so otherwise people don't have anything to hang on to.
25:29 Marcelo But like the process of getting the feedback is the process of working the PRFAQ.
25:35 Brad Working the PR FAQ,
25:35 Marcelo Yeah.
25:36 Brad that's a great way of phrasing it.
25:37 Marcelo Yeah.
25:38 Marcelo Another pitfall that is somewhat common is for people to write the PRFAQ at the end,
25:45 Marcelo retrospectively.
25:49 Marcelo Like you're about to launch a product and it's like,
25:51 Marcelo wow,
25:51 Marcelo let's create a PRFAQ now so we can be all aligned, but we should have been aligned in the beginning of the project,
25:57 Marcelo not.
25:57 Marcelo At the end. Right.
26:00 Marcelo So that's not the purpose of a PR FAQ.
26:04 Marcelo And the PR FAQ is really a confidential document.
26:08 Marcelo Right.
26:08 Marcelo Even though you have a press release that sounds like it's meant to be sent to the press,
26:13 Marcelo it's not.
26:14 Marcelo It's confidential. It's internal only.
26:16 Marcelo So the team can feel confident that they can work on it without worrying that we're ever going to publish this.
26:23 Marcelo to the press.
26:24 Marcelo That's why you haven't seen many PR FAQs out there.
26:28 Marcelo Even Amazon doesn't publish many.
26:30 Marcelo I think they publish two PR FAQs as far as I know because there was a lot of confidential information on it. There was financial information,
26:38 Marcelo there was legal questions,
26:39 Marcelo there was root questions and it's uncomfortable to put out there.
26:43 Brad Yeah, that makes sense. You want people to feel like they can talk openly about it.
26:48 Scott Is that also then a pitfall is inadvertently having people inadvertently assume that it's not a draft or that it will be published?
26:57 Scott How do you and how do you how do you set the tone for that?
27:01 Scott Is that just sort of by fiat like we will we will treat this as truly a working document or is there other tips you have on helping people's mindset be framed that way?
27:14 Marcelo Yeah, a PR FAQ is really a tool for the team that is working on the project and the stakeholders related to that project and the decision makers.
27:26 Marcelo Usually you don't want to share outside of that group of people.
27:31 Marcelo Right. So the lack of context can be problematic.
27:35 Marcelo So even in large organizations,
27:38 Marcelo you want to make sure that the PR figure is not like.
27:42 Marcelo Everyone can read this because you might create conflict,
27:45 Marcelo you might create politics,
27:46 Marcelo and other types of problems.
27:48 Marcelo Of course, people can request to read the PRFAQ and you have to evaluate.
27:52 Marcelo Often what happens is,
27:54 Marcelo and I mentioned this a few times in the book as well,
27:57 Marcelo you can create slightly different versions of the PRFAQ.
28:01 Marcelo So you have your master PRFQ that your team work on that has all the confidential information and then you're going to create a version that maybe redacts a few portions so that you can share more broadly within the organization,
28:14 Marcelo never outside of the organization,
28:16 Marcelo right?
28:17 Marcelo Of course, the one case where you break this rule is when you're asking for an expert advice outside of your company or you're talking to investors about your...
28:27 Marcelo your startup,
28:28 Marcelo then it's outside of your organization.
28:31 Marcelo I still recommend people to create a redacted version,
28:34 Marcelo like remove things that you think are very confidential or you don't want to get out there,
28:39 Marcelo particularly if it has detail about personal information.
28:43 Marcelo or about customer information then you don't want to put it out there right because that would be a break of confidentiality and sometimes even a break of privacy yeah
28:52 Brad Gosh, I can see even just using this for myself,
28:55 Brad not even for sharing with other people, to just get clear on what I'm trying to do.
29:00 Scott Totally.
29:01 Scott Your own personal goals.
29:03 Marcelo it's it's it's really hard to write a PR FAQ without clarity so the interesting thing about writing a PR FAQ
29:10 Marcelo Thank you, Scott.
29:10 Marcelo Just like you said, is as you're writing, you
29:13 Brad Mm-hmm.
29:14 Marcelo start questioning yourself,
29:15 Marcelo right? And you're like, wait a second,
29:17 Marcelo this doesn't make any sense.
29:18 Marcelo This is not coherent.
29:19 Marcelo I need a better story here. So like you revisit,
29:22 Marcelo refine your idea,
29:24 Marcelo you know, for whatever initiative or project you have into a better one.
29:29 Marcelo So the process of writing is phenomenal,
29:31 Marcelo really.
29:33 Brad Yeah,
29:34 Brad we were just discussing like a little org change today for a company. I mean like minor adjusting one or two teams.
29:39 Brad And as we're talking here,
29:41 Brad I'm thinking,
29:41 Brad gosh,
29:41 Brad we should write a PR FAQ for that.
29:43 Brad Why are we doing this?
29:44 Scott Totally.
29:44 Brad What are the questions people have?
29:46 Brad I mean, we're having that discussion.
29:47 Brad We're doing all the discussion,
29:49 Brad but no one's writing it down.
29:51 Brad And nobody's sort of,
29:52 Scott Yeah.
29:52 Brad it's more informal getting on the same page.
29:56 Marcelo Yeah. And you can think of a PRFAQ on a case like this or other cases as well as the straw man,
30:01 Marcelo right?
30:01 Marcelo Like you start from a straw man proposal.
30:04 Marcelo So you put something on the paper and then people can poke at it and like give their feedback versus like a free form where like, you know, sometimes you go to these brainstorming meetings where it feels very chaotic.
30:16 Marcelo Everyone is from an idea. No one is collecting.
30:18 Marcelo There is no.
30:19 Marcelo you know, convergence of thought.
30:23 Marcelo So it feels very weird.
30:25 Marcelo PRFAQ avoids that.
30:27 Brad Now it fits also with something that I like to do way lower in the process in terms of technical design Which is get people to write their technical designs down because I always like to say fight with the document don't fight with each other
30:39 Brad Like let's you know, let's not because you get in a tug-of-war when you're talking but when you're just reviewing a document It can be a much more civil
30:46 Marcelo Yeah, I love that.
30:47 Marcelo I should have used that tagline in my book.
30:49 Scott don't fight with each other fight with the document oh
30:55 Marcelo Actually, let me add something interesting,
30:58 Marcelo Scott.
31:00 Marcelo PR FAQs don't have the author name on them.
31:03 Scott yeah i noticed that
31:05 Marcelo Yeah,
31:05 Scott Yeah.
31:06 Marcelo because the idea is to discuss the merit of the project or the initiative,
31:10 Marcelo not discuss, you know, the person
31:14 Scott Yeah,
31:14 Marcelo behind
31:14 Scott exactly.
31:14 Marcelo it.
31:16 Scott Yeah,
31:16 Brad Oh,
31:16 Scott I'd like that
31:17 Brad that's
31:17 Scott point.
31:17 Brad blowing
31:17 Scott I
31:17 Brad my mind
31:18 Scott actually right had now. another question for you, Marcel,
31:20 Scott if you don't mind.
31:20 Scott You kind of gave us the pitfalls, but I was kind of curious, like, what are the most controversial things in the framework? And I'll admit,
31:32 Scott like, has...
31:33 Scott You know, you know, this is this is sort of like CTO's perspective and so therefore it kind of, you know, there's a piece of being the CTO where you're like representing the engineering team to the business and representing the business back to the engineering team.
31:47 Scott And there's a few things in there that I was kind of like, oh,
31:51 Scott I bet some engineers are going to bristle at this.
31:53 Scott But what do you feel like the most controversial pieces of this framework are?
31:59 Marcelo I don't think there is a controversial aspect of the framework itself,
32:03 Marcelo but what I've seen is, you know, part of the PR FAQ is to get experts to critique the PR FAQ in what they know.
32:14 Marcelo So when you are in a room full of engineers and you have a PRFAQ in front of them, you want them to critique the feasibility,
32:22 Marcelo the technical feasibility of the project versus, for example.
32:29 Marcelo like the privacy laws of GDPR,
32:31 Scott Right.
32:31 Marcelo right?
32:32 Scott Their
32:32 Marcelo Because that,
32:32 Scott opinion on something they're not an expert on.
32:35 Marcelo yeah,
32:35 Marcelo that you're going to talk with the legal team and the compliance team,
32:39 Marcelo right?
32:39 Marcelo Or the council or someone else, right?
32:43 Marcelo The same way that you don't want the legal team to read your PRFQ, ignore the legal aspects and start critiquing the UX aspect of the project, like or the use case or the pricing.
32:56 Marcelo So that can be contentious because lots of people have opinion about product,
33:01 Marcelo right?
33:02 Marcelo And they love to talk about that, but like you need to catalyze people's energy into their domain expertise so
33:09 Scott Yep.
33:09 Marcelo that the PRFQ becomes the best that it can be.
33:12 Scott Another thing I noticed in there,
33:14 Scott and I thought you kind of called this out as potentially.
33:17 Scott controversial is the idea that it it has like a a location and a date on it like you know a date and particularly like the the the imagined end point press release is released on a date you know Yeah. june 1st 2025 um what are your thoughts on that not being a hang-up for engineers who so often feel the pressure of the date
33:42 Marcelo I think it's very important to have a date the same way it's important if you're doing like a piece of hardware to have a price on the PR FAQ. Like you want people to feel uncomfortable.
33:53 Marcelo You want them to challenge like and say, wait a second,
33:56 Marcelo like I can't do that by that date or I can't do that with that price or we can't launch that in that city,
34:03 Marcelo you know, from a legal team perspective,
34:06 Marcelo for example. So you're putting a few.
34:09 Marcelo few stakes in the ground and like let people navigate that and come back to you and say like what is it actually possible to be done and what actually not possible to be done right and then you go and evolve the PR FAQ in that context to add more value to it right but I think like having everyone rally about a date helps everyone like your marketing team is gonna understand the engineering team is gonna understand the content team is gonna know what to do
34:35 Marcelo Right. So we are all aligned on that commonality.
34:39 Marcelo So we are not like thinking different things.
34:44 Scott Totally.
34:44 Scott Do you think that if you had this tool,
34:47 Scott like if you could go back in time now that you have this tool,
34:50 Scott is there a version of one of your startups or a team that you were the CTO on where you feel like, oh man, I wish I had had this tool then?
35:01 Scott and how history might have been different had you had this tool.
35:07 Marcelo Yeah, absolutely.
35:08 Marcelo Actually, I know the startup I left higher.
35:13 Marcelo Two and a half years ago to join Amazon,
35:15 Marcelo now they have adopted PRPQ.
35:18 Marcelo And what's interesting about the PRPQ is we're really big on OKRs.
35:23 Marcelo But OKR always felt like something is missing here.
35:27 Marcelo The story behind of this OKR is missing. The narrative,
35:30 Marcelo like why are we doing like what we're trying to achieve, right,
35:34 Marcelo like felt not there,
35:35 Marcelo even though we were pretty good at writing our objectives in Kubernetes.
35:39 Marcelo results you never felt that had like the the bigger thing behind it so I would definitely adopt have adopted PR FAQ had I know how to use it back then and definitely all the startups that I done in the past
35:54 Marcelo Um,
35:55 Marcelo I can't imagine myself doing a startup or a big project right now that I wouldn't write a PR FAQ.
36:02 Marcelo And I did one just two weeks ago for a new project that I'm considering starting.
36:07 Marcelo I'm not even starting.
36:08 Marcelo I'm just like considering.
36:09 Marcelo So I wrote a PR FAQ, shared with three people, you know, started to get feedback.
36:14 Marcelo I'm going to throw that out, write a new one that is better than the previous one because I got a lot of feedback.
36:21 Marcelo And that's great.
36:22 Marcelo Right.
36:22 Marcelo So you know where you're going that makes sense or it doesn't make sense, resonate doesn't resonate.
36:27 Scott Yeah, I mean, there's a little bit of like kind of painted door strategy as well that kind of overlaps with PRFAQ, right?
36:33 Scott Where it's like, I don't know, we got this idea,
36:36 Scott let's let's put a door, you know, let's put a, you know, storefront up and see if anybody clicks on it as a way of kind of learning.
36:43 Scott before building,
36:44 Scott right?
36:44 Scott So
36:44 Marcelo Yeah.
36:44 Scott it does seem like there's some overlap in that strategy.
36:47 Marcelo Yeah.
36:47 Marcelo So the interesting thing about PRFAQ is like as you write your PRFAQ,
36:51 Marcelo as you're writing your frequently asked questions,
36:54 Marcelo let's say one of the question is like, how much this is going to cost to make?
36:59 Marcelo And you go like,
37:00 Marcelo oh,
37:01 Marcelo gosh,
37:01 Marcelo I need to figure this out.
37:03 Marcelo Right. So let me do some research on that topic.
37:07 Marcelo So one of the questions might be like.
37:09 Marcelo How many people are interested on this?
37:11 Marcelo And they're like, well,
37:13 Marcelo we don't know. So let's go measure.
37:15 Marcelo Let's go figure out. You can leave assumptions and you can call it out.
37:19 Marcelo We think there is like 10,000 people a month that need this product or you can go and measure.
37:25 Marcelo Right.
37:26 Marcelo And so like we we know for sure there is like 700.
37:31 Marcelo people that search for it on Google every month, right?
37:35 Marcelo That's a good start.
37:36 Marcelo So it forces you to do this kind of research and go out there and like figure stuff out.
37:40 Scott Love it.
37:41 Brad So how's the book been received?
37:44 Marcelo Very positively.
37:45 Marcelo I'm learning a lot about book marketing.
37:47 Marcelo I never done a book before.
37:49 Marcelo It's so different.
37:50 Marcelo It's so slow.
37:52 Marcelo This is a whole different industry than what I'm used to with software.
37:58 Marcelo It's also not a product that you can update very easily.
38:01 Marcelo You know, you can't just like push updates to someone that got a hard copy of the book.
38:06 Scott That's so interesting.
38:08 Scott And did you write a PRFAQ before writing the PRFAQ book?
38:13 Marcelo Yes, I did,
38:14 Marcelo Brad.
38:15 Marcelo I did write a PRFAQ about the PRFAQ book.
38:18 Marcelo It was terrible,
38:20 Marcelo not good, but it did help me think through certain aspects of this book, right?
38:27 Marcelo So my original intention with the book was I'm going to write this book just for startup founders.
38:33 Marcelo And then I realized,
38:35 Marcelo you know what, the real beneficiaries of this are not startup founders,
38:39 Marcelo it's anyone doing any innovation who want to tell an idea and want to think through an idea and want to articulate that idea to other people and potentially they want to inspire people to join them on this journey.
38:51 Marcelo So you could be a product manager,
38:53 Marcelo you could be a CTO,
38:54 Marcelo you could be an executive at a company or the VP of HR.
39:00 Marcelo That once you create a new like referral program for interns or whatever they are coming up with,
39:06 Marcelo right?
39:06 Marcelo So it's anyone that is adding,
39:09 Marcelo removing or making changes to a program, a business,
39:12 Marcelo a service policy.
39:15 Scott I love it. I got to read the book.
39:21 Scott And this conversation has inspired me to think, man, there's so many ways you could use this, like to Scott's point about personal goals or just change management. So it's super exciting stuff,
39:32 Scott Marcel.
39:32 Brad Yeah,
39:33 Brad thank you for coming on today.
39:34 Brad We appreciate your time and if people want to go get the book,
39:38 Brad where do they go?
39:39 Marcelo They can visit the book website. You can Google for PRFAQ book or go to www.theprfaq.com.
39:47 Brad All right.
39:48 Brad Thanks, Priscilla.
39:49 Marcelo Thank you so much for having me, folks.
39:51 Scott It was great talking to you again,
39:52 Scott Marcel.
39:53 Marcelo Yeah,
39:54 Marcelo take care.
39:55 Scott This episode of How Many CTOs Does It Take Podcast was edited by South.
39:59 Marcelo Check them out.
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