Writing my first PRFAQ was unnatural . I remember thinking to myself: “why do I need to write a fake press release for a routine program expansion?”. But only to myself. That’s just how things worked at Amazon. The Amazon way. The 6 pager document with line and page numbers. The WBR. Tenets. PR/FAQ. A consistent format for communication. A constrained toolset for passing information.

Amazon will argue it needs each one for different reasons: Of course we need 400+ metrics to understand our business. A PR/FAQ helps us see the planned product from the customer perspective. You don’t need more than 6 pages to explain any situation. and so on.

There’s a simpler reason: A consistent format eliminates “content onboarding”.

Content onboarding is how long it takes for you to understand what you’re looking at, and what is expected of the reviewing audience. Amazon’s consistent format eliminates that.

“Yes, but not everyone does that.”

They all do, at any level that matters. It’s unlikely once a business gets to any reasonable scale. The volume and importance of decisions scale astronomically. And even at Meta where I work, certain leadership teams require specific formats in written communication. Predictable, consistent formats eliminate “content onboarding” and accelerate decision-making.

Consulting companies do the same thing, at least internally. You know what you’re going to get. It’s going to be one main idea on each slide. A descriptive sentence. A skimmable deck or email.

This is a reminder to think just as much about the format and style the next time you’re in front of a decision-maker.