📝 Unlock Amazon's Secret Weapon for Strategic Decisions
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Master the soft skills needed to be a great UX Designer
Beyond UX Design's mission is to give you the tools you need to be a truly effective UX designer by diving into the soft skills they won't be teaching you in school or a boot camp. These skills are critical to your success.
Learn how strategic writing can transform your decision-making process and save your team from investing in the wrong ideas. Discover Amazon’s PRFAQ framework—a powerful framework that helps identify potential failures before they happen.
What if you could identify doomed projects before wasting months of effort and resources?
The most valuable skill at Amazon isn’t coding or design...
It’s writing.
In fact, before any team at Amazon writes a single line of code or creates a single mockup, they must write a 6-page document that could make or break their project.
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Are you wasting time building someting no one wants?
This week, I chat with Marcelo Calbucci to unpack Amazon’s PRFAQ framework. It’s their “secret weapon” for validating products before investing precious resources.
Marcelo brings 25+ years of tech industry expertise, including key roles at Microsoft and Amazon. He’s founded and led startups in both Seattle and London, giving him a unique perspective on how different organizations approach product validation. Now, he’s adapted Amazon’s framework for teams of all sizes in his new book “PRFAQ Framework: Adapting Amazon’s Innovation Framework to Work for You.”
Why Amazon starts meetings with 20 minutes of silence
How writing reveals critical flaws in product thinking
The power of the 6-page constraint
How designers can gain more strategic influence
Transform your team’s “build first” culture to “think first”
Plus, we explore the role of AI in this process - why having it write these documents defeats their purpose, but how it can still be a valuable tool in your process.
If you're tired of building things nobody wants, or you're looking to make more strategic product decisions, this episode is for you.
1️⃣ Writing helps validate ideas early: The PRFAQ framework forces you to think critically about your ideas by writing them down in a structured way. This often reveals gaps in thinking and helps you identify potential issues before investing significant time and resources.
2️⃣ Focus on strategy before tactics: Avoid including wireframes, feature lists, or implementation details in your PRFAQ. The framework is designed to help teams align on the "why" behind a product before getting into the "how.”
3️⃣ Balance storytelling with data: Effective PRFAQs combine compelling narratives about customer impact with concrete data to support decision-making. Avoid leaning too heavily on either extreme.
4️⃣ Make it a team sport: The PRFAQ process should involve input from multiple stakeholders. Use review sessions to gather perspectives from different functions like engineering, design, marketing, and legal to create a more comprehensive understanding of the opportunity.
5️⃣ Use AI as a critique tool: While you shouldn't use AI to write your PRFAQ, it can be valuable for critiquing your work. Have AI review your document to identify unclear concepts, missing connections, or gaps in logic that you might have overlooked.
Join a network of like-minded folks sharing tactics, strategies, and systems to help you succeed. Check out beyonduxdesign.com/backlog and become part of a community that’s building their businesses together!
Ok web designers. Let’s talk about the “c” word...
Creative Burnout
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Join 6,000+ designers improving their soft skills, weekly!
Master the soft skills needed to be a great UX Designer
Beyond UX Design's mission is to give you the tools you need to be a truly effective UX designer by diving into the soft skills they won't be teaching you in school or a boot camp. These skills are critical to your success.
