The Elements of Voice First Style

Chapter 22. The Key to Successful Product Launches

You may have heard or read somewhere that Amazon, Google, and Apple, among other companies, all use something called the working backwards method when they undertake to launch a product, a project, a program, or anything that requires a team of people to deliver. That is, they start from envisioning clearly the end result and then work backwards from there to figure out where to start and how to move from there to that envisioned end. The method is meant to be both an exercise in creating clarity and a process at the end of which a concrete document is delivered by the document owner—in the case where the deliverable is a product, the product manager—to a team of stakeholders that will serve that team as a guiding, go-to source to answer all questions they may have about the product.

At Amazon, for instance, they use a method called PR/FAQ: (Press Release and Frequently Asked Questions). The PR/FAQ document consists of two sections:

• An actual press release describing in clear, lay terms that anyone can read and understand, focusing on mainly the value but also the key features that enable the delivery of that value.

• A FAQ list, which is a list of questions and answers covering all aspects of the product.

A measure of how successful an initial PR/FAQ is can be measured by comparing the PR/FAQ’s press release and the actual press release that was used to launch the product. If the two are very similar, then it means the initial ...