Working Backwards Template

The press release section runs one page: a headline naming the outcome in customer terms, a subheadline adding a second point of information, an intro paragraph naming the target customer and the problem, a body explaining the solution, a quote from a company leader, a quote from a customer, and a call to action. The FAQ section splits into two parts: external FAQs, answering the questions customers and press would actually ask, and internal FAQs, anticipating the hardest questions finance, engineering, legal, and other internal stakeholders would raise before greenlighting the work.

An example headline and subheadline for a hypothetical Builders Camp feature: Builders Camp launches AI powered mentor matching, subheadline, members get matched to the right 1:1 mentor in under a minute based on their stated goals instead of browsing a directory. The internal FAQ for that feature would need to answer, honestly, how matching accuracy gets measured and what happens when no strong match exists yet for a niche specialty.

Use this template before committing engineering time to a significant feature or a new product line, specifically when a team is tempted to start with an architecture diagram or a sprint plan instead of the customer's actual experience. It is a poor fit for small, incremental features where the customer experience is obvious and does not need to be argued for on paper first.

Fill in the press release section first, in plain customer language with no internal jargon or acronyms; if a reader outside the company would not understand a sentence, rewrite it. Write the external FAQ next, then the internal FAQ last, and make the internal FAQ genuinely hard on the team: the whole value of the exercise disappears if the internal questions are softballs the team already knows the answer to.

The most common mistake is writing the press release in a hopeful, aspirational tone that glosses over the constraint that actually matters, essentially marketing copy for a product that has not been built and interrogated yet. A second common mistake is skipping the internal FAQ entirely and treating the exercise as finished once the press release reads well, which defeats the point: the internal FAQ is where the hard trade-offs actually get surfaced.

Builders Camp's Product Strategy bootcamp introduces this Amazon style reverse planning method as one way to pressure test a strategic direction before committing resources to it. The template lives in the Builders Camp templates library, included in every Membership alongside the rest of the catalog and the bootcamp that teaches how to use it well.