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Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches
BONUS The PRFAQ Framework With Marcelo Calbucci
00:28:15
BONUS: Marcelo Calbucci reveals Amazon's secret innovation framework that transforms product development! Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast...
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- [00:07]
Vasco
Have you ever wondered what it really takes to make Agile work well? At the Global Agile Summit, we're bringing you real life first person stories of Agile succeeding out there in the real world that will inspire you to take action. Whether you're a leader, a product innovator, a developer, you. You'll hear practical insights from those who've done it. They'll be telling their own stories from the stage. I'll tell you more about this at the end of this episode. So stay back and listen to the full detailed description of what we have in store for you at the Global Agile Summit. But if you can't wait, you can go right now to globalagilesummit.com and check out our full schedule for now onto the episode. But I'll see you at the end of this episode with more details on the Global Agile Summit. Talk to you soon. Hello everybody. Welcome to this very special episode. And for this special episode, we have with us all the way from beautiful Seattle in the US, Marcelo Calbucci. Hey Marcelo, welcome to the show.
- [01:19]
Marcelo Calbucci
Thank you for having me, Vasco.
- [01:21]
Vasco
It's a pleasure. So I wanted to get Marcelo on the show because he's the author of a recent book, the PR FAQ Adapting Amazon's Innovation Framework to Work for your. And in the book he describes Amazon's PR FAQ method, which is a strategic approach designed to refine and present new product ideas by focusing on customer centric narratives. Marcelo is also a founder, a product, an engineering leader, and an innovation expert. So he has a lot of experience in the field we all work in. So, Marcelo, to get us started, what inspired you to write this book? How's your personal journey influenced your perspective on innovation and product development?
- [02:09]
Marcelo Calbucci
Yeah, so my life started in Brazil. I'm from Brazil and I got a computer science degree and my tech career was, you know, Mostly in the US Microsoft hired me, brought me to the US. I spent seven years there. Then I left Microsoft and I did 18 years of startups, startup studios and worked with a lot of investors. And a few years ago I joined Amazon. What happened was when I joined Amazon, I learned about the prfaq and I immediately thought that these two would be great for founders and product leaders and executives outside of Amazon. So I spent two years at Amazon and when I left, I felt the need to write this book to evangelize this framework because I think it's so powerful for other people. And Amazon has been using it for 20 years. They invented 20 years ago and it's super effective as a strategic decision. Tool and as you said, like working from the customer, writing a narrative, there was many elements to it.
- [03:14]
Vasco
Do you have a story to share that kind of shows what kind of problems teams face when developing products and how the PR FAQ method might help them?
- [03:27]
Marcelo Calbucci
Yeah, absolutely. So let's start by saying that PRFAQ stands for Press Release and Frequently Asked Question. And it's a format for you to discover, debate and decide on a strategy and a vision. So what happens in a lot of tech companies, and a lot of non tech companies as well, is that people build things without understanding the why behind it. And what I define as why is like what is the impact for the customer, what is the impact for the business? So they are just following the motions, Right? Like I get a ticket from jira, I build the ticket from Jira, I close the ticket.
- [04:04]
Vasco
It sounds very familiar.
- [04:06]
Marcelo Calbucci
Yes. And what the PRFAQ does is it help everyone take a step back and say, like, what problem are we solving? Who is the customer? How are the customers solving this problem today? What is our solution? What is the boundaries that we're going to put on our strategy to solve this problem and then people can go and execute. What that does is it helps people be more aligned in what they're doing so they can move faster with fewer meetings, fewer emails, fewer slack messages. So I give you an example here, a test to see if your organization is aligned or not, to pick five or 10 people on your organization, like software engineers, user designers, product managers, managers, and ask each one of them, why are we doing this and what is the impact for the customer and what is the impact for the business? Chances are you're going to get different answers from each person. That's because they are not aligned on vision and strategy. If they were aligned on vision and strategy, that wouldn't be a problem. So what end up happening is a lot of folks move ahead with what they think is the vision strategy and they are not aligned with each other, so they end up not meeting at the end. So there is a lot of friction and a lot of stress that happen, particularly halfway through a project.
- [05:31]
Vasco
So one of the things that I want to explore a little bit more is this. Okay, so you talk about the lack of alignment that I understand and I've seen it in, you know, in, in real life with for example, some people thinking that our goal is to acquire more users and others thinking that actually our goal is to reduce churn and others thinking that actually our goal is to just help sales get more sales meetings scheduled, whatever that might be. But there's always a, a lot of different perspectives. What I have found though is that the lack of alignment is, is one. Perhaps it's something we could point to, right? Like, okay, we are not aligned because we have different answers to this question. But one of the things that I have found with many product teams is that they don't even have anything to align on in the first place. Right? Like that vision and strategy don't even get discussed at all. Is that something that, that the PR FAQ framework tackles?
- [06:27]
Marcelo Calbucci
Yes. Vasco, you're 100% right. What I say is like the biggest problem with strategy is there is none. It's not that the strategy is bad, it's that sometimes people think there is a strategy, but there isn't really. Right. And a strategy is not like how you do the work and the details of the work. It's what happens above it are like some hard decisions that you're making about what you're doing and what you're not doing. That's what they define. So the prfaq, what it does is maybe we should talk about the document and what it looks like. It's a six page document. It's specifically designed this way. So it's very prescriptive in how you do it. The first page is a press release. The second page is a set of questions called the customer FAQs. And the next four pages are the internal FAQs. And you're going to answer questions on these FAQs about, for example, what problem are we solving? Who is the customer? How are customers solving this problem today? How are customers finding the solution? What problems customers have with the existing solution? What is the solution that we are proposing? How are they going to find our solution? How is our solution different than what they are already doing? You answer all these questions and then you have review sessions. Review sessions. You gather a group of people. You can divide by function, by team, by. But usually by function makes a lot of sense, right? You get your product managers in a room and say like, let's review the document and let's make it better. So they provide feedback on the document. They say what they think it's feasible, not feasible, viable, not viable, usable, not usable, viable, not valuable. And you refine it. Then you have a second meeting with the engineering team. Then you have a meeting with the design team. Then you have a meeting with executives. Then you have a meeting with stakeholders. Legal, marketing, sales. You keep revising this document until you have incorporated their feedback into the strategy and what a strategy is not is a roadmap or a plan that is not part of the strategy. This is what happens after you decide a strategy, doing a roadmap or a plan or a feature list or wireframes or detail marks, before you even decide the strategy is the wrong way around, you really want to nail the vision strategy. And vision strategy really defines what's important for the business, for the customer and for the team involved, which is the outcome that you are trying to achieve.
- [08:58]
Vasco
One of my experiences with the product vision specifically, so not talking about yet product strategy, which is a big topic in itself, but one of my experiences with the product vision is that it's very hard for people to have multiple thoughts in their mind and then come together and crystallize on one vision. Right. Like something concrete that the product should live up to. How does the PR FAQ help people to go from their multiple different perspectives? And you just gave examples. Right. Product managers are going to have a different perspective from engineers, from other stakeholders, from the support team, whatever. Right. Like, how does the method help these different perspectives come together and actually get that alignment we were talking about?
- [09:47]
Marcelo Calbucci
Yeah. So one difference between, for example, traditional way that people does this is a PowerPoint presentation or a Google Slide. They create a slide and they call like, this is the vision that we're doing. And they might put some nice designs on it as well. What happened there is you're not thinking deeply and critically about all the elements. You're just creating bullet points and diagrams and some visual wireframes of that what you call like a vision. Right. What the PRFAQ does is forcing you to write. And when you write, you feel the need to be coherent. You want to write a paragraph that actually makes sense. So when the paragraph doesn't make sense, you pause and you think like, what am I missing here? How do we make this right? And it's not hard writing, but it makes you understand what you don't know and go chase that information and come back and incorporate. And then once you write. And by the way, the way you write a PRFAQ, you start from the FAQs and then you do the press release later. So the press release is the last thing that you do. So the press release is the summary of the FAQs in a way. Right. And a lot of people feel like, oh, I don't know how to write a press release. There is a formula to do that as well. There is a very specific formula with seven paragraphs and how you write those paragraphs. And at the end, what you get is a press release that represents this vision. So the PRFAQ is a very good mechanism to do that for people that are either not familiar or uncomfortable creating vision documents.
- [11:18]
Vasco
So the prfaq, if I get you right, is more like an essay style document with a structure and as a set of things that we need to go through, but more like an essay than a presentation, is that right?
- [11:30]
Marcelo Calbucci
It is. And the advantage of that is someone can read your document without you being in the room and understand the vision and the strategy. They might not agree with it, but they will understand. If you hand off someone a vision and strategy in the format of a PowerPoint. If you're not there to present, very likely people not going to understand. And that's important for a couple reasons. Not everyone can be in the room all the time. So you want to make sure that the information about vision strategy spreads through the organization so everyone executing have clarity on what they're doing. So when you have a written document like that, it's very easy for anyone to read and understand. For example, a new employee that joined the team, they can read the document and immediately get, oh, in 20 minutes. I understand what the vision and strategy of this new project is. I don't need to ask people around, I don't need to have interpretations. There's going to be fewer gaps because the written format is better than PowerPoint. So it's a very effective tool for capturing vision and strategy.
- [12:42]
Vasco
When you think about this specific process, I'm sure there's a story where you go like, yeah, this is how it worked there. This is why it was so powerful. Can you share that story with us, walk us through step by step how, how the prfaq process helped a team that you were working with to really get to that alignment and understanding you were just describing for us?
- [13:03]
Marcelo Calbucci
Yeah. At Amazon, prfaq is used widely. So every new product, every new business, every new process, program policy service starts with a prfaq. Not only that changes to program, product, policy. Business also have PRFAQs involved on that. And even when you're shutting down a product or a program, you use the PRFAQ format as well to discuss it. And at Amazon someone has an idea, right? Like they oh, it wouldn't be great if we build a product for X. Well, the first thing someone is going to do is write a PRFAQ for that. So that's how you start. You identify an opportunity or you have a gut instinct for opportunity and you tell someone like write a PRFAQ for this and this person goes and, you know, try to discover the customer, the problem, the solution, what's available. Do some market research, might do some UX research. Amazon has a lot of resources, so they might spend a month, two months or three months even preparing the PRFAQ and there might be 20 people involved. This is not practical for most organizations. You're not going to have that level of resources. And the reason Amazon does that is because sometimes it's investing $100 million in a project. So you want to make sure that you're doing the right thing before the project starts. At most organizations, you can do a PRFAQ in a week or two, but adopt the same approaches before jumping into building something or jumping into creating the feature list and specification. Spend a couple of weeks discussing vision and strategy just to guarantee that you close the gaps on what you don't know. You define what is assumption, you define what is hypothesis, and then the team can contribute as well.
- [14:54]
Vasco
Yeah, one of the things that I so many years ago, I discovered this concept of a product vision, it's different from what you're describing. And one of the things that I realized when we were writing out, it was not a presentation, it was a written document, it was actually a wiki page. And what I discovered is that once we wrote down these different things that we wanted to take into account and then crystallize that into what we call the vision statement, we could get very valuable feedback on details that otherwise would have been ignored or not even discussed by other stakeholders. We would eventually in the product team discuss those, but we wouldn't get the feedback from stakeholders. And for me, the experience has been that not only does it help us clarify our own ideas, which you already mentioned, not only does it help other people understand you when you're not in the room, which you also mentioned, but my experience is that it actually creates feedback opportunities that would otherwise never be experienced. And I guess that's also what you're talking about when you talk about this process of giving it a couple of weeks to write the PR faq, right?
- [16:05]
Marcelo Calbucci
Yes, you're right. And you have to ask a question like why there weren't opportunity for people to provide feedback. And what I look at it and I try to understand, one of the main problems is when you are reviewing a new vision, often people include diagrams and wireframes and feature lists and all kinds of things. So when I am a part of this team and I look at that, I will ignore the vision, I will ignore the strategy, and I immediately go to the wireframes so one of the things that prfaq does is it focuses you on vision strategy, like ignore. You don't include tables, you don't include diagrams, you don't include branding information about a new product so that everyone can focus on that aspect first and discuss it. So you're right. It's very effective to gather feedback and collaborate with others. The idea of a PRFAQ is not that you're going to write a document and sell it to the rest of the team and get buying. No, you're not getting buy in, you're getting them to contribute. Like, how do we make this into a better idea, into a better initiative?
- [17:16]
Vasco
Yeah, it's much more than buy in. I think that's a very good point also because that discipline of writing things down helps us get feedback from ourselves as well. Right. Like we eventually understand the ideas we are trying to express much deeper. But, but one aspect of the PR FAQ is also this customer centric approach. Right. And you said there's this, I think it was second page, right? That is a customer faq. How do you think, in your experience, how do you think that influences the people developing the product? The fact that we have to start from that customer centric narrative.
- [17:58]
Marcelo Calbucci
Yeah. When people ask me like, what is the one lesson about product leadership that you would give someone starting this business? And I always say, understand the problem better than the customer, understand their own problems. Right. So the customer centric comes in the form of what problem are you trying to solve for that customer and why it's important for the customer? What is the severity, what is the urgency for the customer? If you don't understand that, you're not going to be able to build a solution that addresses in the way that a customer needs it. And when I say customer, I want to be careful here because when people think customer, they think about the business customer. Only sometimes it's not the business customer, sometimes it is an internal customer. Right. So if you work on it, your customers might be the employees of your organization. Right. Because you're building a product for them, maybe you're building an internal portal. So they are the customer. So you have to understand what needs they have, what desires they have and how you can solve for that. So it's always taking a step back and have this vision of like, what is the value that I'm delivering for my customer and how is that better than what they have today?
- [19:13]
Vasco
So of course we will put the book link in the show notes so that people can go and check out the PR FAQ framework, which, no surprise, is on Amazon on sale. So you can find the book on Amazon, on Amazon. But if we go beyond the book, like, what might be great resources for us to start diving deeper into this PR FAQ framework. So we'll put the link to the book there, but you know, either videos, podcasts, or other books or blogs that you think you know, if you're interested, you should also check out this.
- [19:52]
Marcelo Calbucci
Yeah. On the book website. I put a lot of resources out there. I wrote many articles. I have templates for people to use. I also have examples of PRFAQs that you can read. I usually recommend people read the examples PRFAQ first. It's going to get a good sense of what you incorporate on that document. It doesn't help you how you use it, but it helps you understand what goes in there. So that's a great place to start. Unfortunately, most of the resources about prfaq online, and that's why I wrote the book, the they are not very good or not very complete. So there is really three parts to the prfaq. One is the document format. The second one is precise writing. How you write your sentence is very important. There is a style that Amazon uses that I capture on the book and explain how to create that. And the third one is the method of doing review and decisions with the document and incorporating feedback. I describe all of that on the book. What you read online is mostly about the format of the document. So most articles and most podcasts, they are just talking about the format of the document. And that's important, but it's not the full picture.
- [21:04]
Vasco
What was one, perhaps surprising insight you got when you wrote the PR FAQ for the book itself before you wrote the book?
- [21:14]
Marcelo Calbucci
Yeah. So when I was writing the book, I interviewed many people that were former Amazon employees and went to other organizations. And I asked them, like, did you take the prfaq with you? And about half of them tried and failed. And what I realized is it's not the person writing the prfaq that needs to learn about prfaq. It's the team needs to be comfortable with the framework and understand. So I also include in the book information about how do you review APR FAQ if you're just participating in a meeting, not how you write it. And you can download the free chapter on the website as well. So that was very valuable to help me understand what goes in the book. The other aspect is this whole discussion about product strategy, business strategy. There was a lot out there, but it's very abstract. It's very academic and I try to make it a little bit more concrete for folks so they can touch it and they can see, oh, this is how you describe strategy and vision. So I learn a lot about what exists and, and there are some good books out there, good resources out there, probably more than anything else in business. But it's very hard to use it if you're not familiar with these approaches.
- [22:39]
Vasco
Absolutely. And we hope that people listening will go and read the book and they might even have some follow up questions and want to interact with you. If they do, where could they find you?
- [22:53]
Marcelo Calbucci
Yeah, the easiest place to go is go to Google and search for PR FAQ book and my website is going to be number one result.
- [23:02]
Vasco
Absolutely. So everybody check out the PRFAQ book. The link will be in the show notes as well to make it easy for everybody. And why not contact Marcelo if you have questions and check out the PR FAQ framework. Marcel, it's been a pleasure. Thank you very much for your generosity with your time and your knowledge.
- [23:21]
Marcelo Calbucci
Thank you so much. Vasco.
- [23:25]
Vasco
Hey friend. Thank you for staying here. Is all you need to know about the Global Agile Summit. If you've ever suffered or know people who are suffering from agile fatigue, this event is for you. Agile fatigue is that feeling that settles in when we can't really see a light at the end of the tunnel. We get discouraged, especially when conversations revolve around the same old frameworks, the same old buzzwords and theories. We don't feel that energy anymore. Well, the Global Agile Summit is a different kind of event. We're bringing you real life first person stories of Agile succeeding out there in the real world that will inspire you to take action and transform the way you work. The Global Agile Summit will happen In Tallinn, Estonia, May 18th. That's the workshop day. Then 19th and 20th the conference day. And Tallinn, Estonia is one of the most innovative tech hubs in Europe. The Global Agile Summit is hosted together with Latitude 59, which is kind of a citywide celebration of software startups and groundbreaking ideas. And we'll have a shared ticket for you to attend those events as well. So who will be speaking? Well, we've got an incredible lineup of thought leaders in software and agile. For example, Clinton Keith, the person who wrote, literally wrote the book on game development with Scrum and is busy bringing Agile to the world of game development. You must check his this session, the very famous and well known Jurgen Apello, author of Management 3.0, will be talking and exploring about AI's impact on leadership. We also have Goiko Adic, who's taking an unconventional look at product growth with his Lizard Optimization keynote. Other speakers include, for example Sixven Dietz, who's challenging everything we know about software development by ditching, literally ditching contracts and estimates. Can you imagine his teams deliver software before their competitors are even done with a contract negotiation? How agile is that? But there's more. We'll cover engineering practices in our developer track with talks on for example AI assisted test review and development, developing products in minutes with a different approach to how we develop, configure, deploy platforms, and much more. We also have a product track where we cover cutting edge ideas around product discovery, delighting customers with product delight frameworks. We'll have a talk about that. And we also have an Agile Business track where we will talk about, for example Open strategy, a very agile approach to managing organizations and delivering software faster to clients faster than you can even write a contract. Literally. I mean, I already told you about Svendeet's story is amazing. It definitely is a must see. I'm sure you'll be inspired and get a lot of ideas for your own software projects and software delivery. Now, whether you're a business leader, a product innovator or a developer, you'll definitely find value in our three focused tracks. That's Agile Business for those working with businesses and organizations Agile Product for product managers, product owners and innovators and Agile Developer for for the builders making Agile work in practice, the coders, the testers, the designers, the producers, the scrum masters, you name it. If you join, you will meet over 200 agile professionals from all over the world. People who just like you, want to grow, want to share and want to learn by challenging the ideas that don't work anymore at the Global Agile Summit, you'll get new connections, fresh ideas and the energy to take your own Agile to the next level. And who knows, maybe even find your next career opportunity. So don't miss out. Check out the full program and grab your ticket now@globalagilesummit.com I'm really looking forward to seeing you all in Tallinn, Estonia in May. I'll see you there.