Our CEO recently set out a simple, non-negotiable mandate; we must write press releases for the things we’re making. It was a tactical, almost anti-agile challenge to our teams. We needed to define the external success story before writing the first line of code or sketching the first wireframe.
As a UX Lead focused on productised approaches within a complex, high-stakes live broadcast environment, this resonated deeply. In enterprise scaling, inefficiency is often the result of poor initial framing; teams start with the ‘how’ or the ‘what’ instead of the ‘why’ and the ‘so what’. Working backwards from the press release is not a documentation step, it is an act of strategic clarity.
The discipline of the public narrative
The press release is a constraint, and constraint breeds efficiency. Most internal project charters, briefs, and epics are written in a language of internal complexity, focusing on technical feasibility, budget, or timeline. They fail to capture the one thing that truly matters: the customer’s joy or the problem solved.
A press release changes the lens entirely. It forces you to write from the perspective of an external audience, on the day of the product’s launch. The questions you must answer are immediately sharpened:
- What is the single, headline-worthy benefit?
- Which existing pain point is now obsolete?
- How will the customer’s life, or the business’s bottom line, demonstrably improve?
If you cannot articulate the value proposition in the first three sentences of a simulated public announcement, the product idea is not yet clear enough. You have not established the constraint necessary to organise your team’s focus. We have found this is the fastest way to kill a project that would otherwise waste six months of engineering effort before failing to launch.
Defining success in an enterprise context
For us, working at enterprise scale in live broadcast, any product launch carries high technical and reputational risk. Ambiguity is the enemy of performance. The press release, followed by the FAQ document, becomes a powerful communication artefact that locks down the narrative and, critically, the single metric of success.
The anatomy of clarity
A well-written ‘working backwards’ document is a masterclass in alignment. It is not verbose, but ruthlessly condensed into four essential paragraphs:
- **The Title and Date:** A clear future headline that states the benefit.
- **The Summary of Problem and Solution:** A description of the current, painful state followed by the elegant solution we are launching.
- **The Customer Quote:** A fictional but authentic quote that grounds the benefit in a real user’s voice and experience.
- **The Call to Action:** What is the next step for the customer; how do they get it?
We found that arguing over the hypothetical customer quote was often more productive than any three-hour steering committee meeting. Why? Because you are forced to define the *feeling* of success. If the quote feels weak, the product is weak. This process transforms a product brief from a list of tasks into a narrative of value.
Focusing on the first 90 days, not the first sprint
The ‘working backwards’ methodology forces us to operate on a strategic time horizon. It pulls the team’s focus out of the next two-week sprint and places it firmly in the 90 days post-launch. This shift helps us prioritise features that move the needle for the customer experience over those that simply satisfy an internal technical dependency.
This practice is not about writing fluff; it is about writing code and designing interfaces that have a predefined, public outcome. The press release is the first sprint deliverable, and without it, we simply do not build.
I learned this ‘working backward’ model in a leadership seminar years ago, and it’s transformative. The key isn’t just writing the press release; the key is the FAQ section. When you write the FAQ, you immediately identify all the hard, existential questions the product can’t answer yet. It forces you to define not just what the product is, but what it isn’t. It’s a ruthless prioritization tool, and frankly, I wish more startups would mandate it before writing a single line of code. Stop building features; start writing narratives.
We tried the press release thing. It felt a bit cheesy at first, but it truly did force us to define the emotional why of the product, not just the technical how. We scrapped our first concept entirely after writing the FAQ and realizing we couldn’t honestly answer the “why now?” question. It was a painful but necessary bit of product discipline. Cheers for the reminder!