How marketing supports the PRFAQ process

Lots of folks think of the PRFAQ as a document. The PRFAQ is all about the argument that the document forces you to have as an organization.

Who you are fighting for

The idea behind the PRFAQ is that you are defining who you are fighting for. That's the phrase I like to use for searching out the customer target for your product. The debate inside an organization is all about homing in on who the customer actually is. One part of the organization could think that it's the enterprise buyer. At the same time, another part could think that it's the individual developer.

The PRFAQ format forces you to put yourself in the mindset of the customer and surface the things that are most important to them. Because a press release is a targeted marketing tactic, you end up having to adopt that same level of precision in your planning document.

When you think about writing the PRFAQ, focus less on the structure of the press release, although that is somewhat the art of writing them. Instead, focus on who the customer is and what is the salient one-line thing that's going to get them excited about what you're shipping.

The PRFAQ is a starting point. It is an opportunity for everyone in the organization to weigh in on who the customer is, and then to agree or disagree and commit and move forward on product development.

The purpose of the document

It's true that an LLM can produce a flawless PRFAQ in about 90 seconds. It could be a beautiful document. It could follow the format of your organization or a template that you've created ahead of time.

I've read more than my share of AI-generated PRFAQs in the last few months. They're all correct in their own way, but very few of them take a stance on the customer. Going through the motions of generating the document to make it look like a press release misses the whole point of it.

The purpose is to surface the customer and their needs and their problems. And from there, to spark discussion within an organization about that customer, to make sure every single person understands them the same way, interprets that understanding in the same direction, and can lead all of that towards product design decisions.

Don't focus so much on the document itself. Focus on the discussion around the document to arrive at the customer that matters to you. As I say these days, everything is cheap. And when everything is cheap, the value of other things becomes much higher.

Customer-centric language

The first thing I look for when I evaluate a PRFAQ is customer-centric language. I want to see that the language is describing the customer and their pain points in the customer's own words. I'll include real customer quotes, typically from sales conversations that have already occurred. Your best advocate for a position on future product direction is an existing cohort of customers. But sometimes you are entering new markets, and in those (rare) instances where this product opportunity is not being pulled by an existing customer, you can fabricate the quote. The PRFAQ is, after all, an internal document.

We all have our own way of interpreting what a customer is, and that is the magic of the PRFAQ. Because in a diverse environment where everyone is allowed to speak and contribute, you get different perspectives on who the customer is. These are usually enlightened by someone's own career progression. A marketer who's fresh out of college has a unique read on this customer, while a seasoned marketer with 35 years of experience has a different one. Somewhere in that spectrum is the truth about the customer.

While the model can generate a PRFAQ very quickly, the discussion around the document surfaces multiple perspectives, which eventually lead to truth.

The swap test

The second test that I like to apply to any PRFAQ, and indeed to any positioning document, is what I call the swap test.

The swap test is when you take your company's name or your product's name and swap in your competitor. If the PRFAQ reads the same, still reads true, then you don't have differentiated positioning and you don't have a differentiated product.

Every market is crowded now. Every incumbent has at least 10 competitors that have been vibe-coded or AI-engineered. Every product that could have been made in a few months can now be made in one weekend. In that marketplace, you need to seek out differentiation, and that differentiation must be rooted in an actual customer problem.

The PRFAQ is a great tool for surfacing these two characteristics early before code is even written.

There are multiple vibe-coded projects that I have taken on in the last 18 months that could have been headed off had I applied the PRFAQ process to my own work. I created a competitor to Vivino because I didn't like all the ads in Vivino. But here I am, 18 months later, maintaining this dumb app and wishing I had just stuck with Vivino in the first place. Oh, and I also have no customers. It's just me.

Even for personal projects, the PRFAQ would have told me that there is no difference between the incumbent and the product I've built. It probably would have told me that the addressable market for wine tracking apps is fairly small.

What they do today

The third thing I look for when I evaluate a PRFAQ is the "what they do today" paragraph. This describes what the customer does right now to solve the same problem. If that is sufficient, then what problem are we really trying to solve here?

Product marketing should be involved in all aspects of the PRFAQ process, but this is one area in particular where it can add a lot of value. In our customer research, in our competitive analysis, we typically will look at other vendors, but we'll also look at the job that the customer's trying to do and examine what they already do to achieve that goal. A lot of times, what they're trying to do is fraught with inefficiency, unnecessary cost, taxes on cross-organizational coordination, any number of things that make it painful. However, there are certain instances where that pain does not meet the bar of requiring a brand new product.

Product marketing explaining what the customer is doing today, and coming at it from the perspective of "Does this add value, and is this monetizable?", can turn or hone this product idea into something worth building.

The process around the document

Finally, the process around the PRFAQ. The document is one aspect of it, but the discussion and the different perspectives are what give it the magic and the value.

The goal is to spark the discussion.

Make sure you are structuring the PRFAQ to probe for questions and to solicit perspectives.