This piece is excerpted from the new book The PRFAQ Framework: Adapting Amazon’s Innovation Framework to Work for You, by Marcelo Calbucci.
“A PRFAQ (Press Release + Frequently Asked Question) is a framework for articulating in writing an innovation, capturing the key facts, assumptions, and hypotheses for strategic decision making,” Calbucci explains. “It’s an evolving document to debate and discuss an idea.” They’re used within Amazon as part of a process known as “Working Backward,” to help develop products and features that are meaningful improvements on what already exists.
Below, Calbucci provides an example of what a PRFAQ should look like.
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This is a concrete, yet fictional, example of a PRFAQ.
For the example PRFAQ, I picked an idea that’s easy to grasp by all professionals. I avoided anything that required domain knowledge or that represented a breakthrough idea. This helps you focus on how the content is presented instead of questioning the validity of the idea.
The PRFAQ document has specific guidelines about style and formatting. You can download this and the bonus PRFAQ examples, using proper style and formatting, on www.theprfaq.com/resources.
Green Light, a B2B SaaS Startup
In one startup I worked at, employees traveled to meet with customers, for trade shows, and to go to our other office locations.
This is a common scenario in the corporate world. We grew to a size and adopted a policy of executive approval for each trip. There were no tools in place, and we tracked it via email. Emails were also used to approve new job posts, new hire offers, IT purchases, and other operational tasks. It was challenging to keep tabs, generate reports, or establish consistent procedures for these.
The Fictional Setting
You and your co-founder left a startup that grew to five hundred employees in six years. You joined when the company was thirty-five people, and everyone knew each other. You’ve seen firsthand what happens when companies grow, and the operational debt that catches up to it. The company got an SOC-II certification. You were involved in the compliance project and learned how lacking an audit trail made it challenging to get the certification. It’s difficult to have consistency across teams and people in the procedures to follow. Talking to friends, you learned this problem is not unique to tech companies. Many organizations rely on email chains to track who asked for what and who approved it. You and your co-founder left to start Green Light to solve this problem for medium and large-size companies. You wrote the PRFAQ with your co-founder to share with advisors, future team members, and pre-seed investors, and to apply to the Y Combinator and the Techstars startup accelerator programs.
Green Light brings autonomy, efficiency, and auditability to corporate approval processes.
Employees create and use approval flows for travel, expenses, hiring, IT, facilities, and much more.
Business Wire—Seattle, October 26, 2025—Green Light, a Seattle- based startup, launched a new service to manage approval processes. Teams set up approval flows based on their policies, and employees have a consolidated and easy experience requesting approvals.
Organizations rely on email to request, track, and approve employees’ requests. When people need an approval for travel, to open a new position, or for ordering a device, they don’t know whom to ask. It’s not clear what information to provide and what the right procedure is. They learn they must email a person in another department, which creates a growing chain of emails. It includes the team responsible for carrying out the request, the management chain, those that need to be informed, the approvers, and others. Emails get stuck in someone’s inbox because they didn’t see it or were unavailable. In larger organizations, functions like HR, Procurement, IT, Travel, or InfoSec have disjointed tools and procedures, making it challenging for employees to remember where to go and how to ask for an approval.
Green Light changes the game by providing a system that is configured by each team on how the approval chain works. It integrates into the company HR system to gather the organization structure and roles, and it’s easily set up for any use case that requires one or more approvals. Teams easily convert company policies into approval flows that can handle employees’ availability and when team members join or leave the company.
“Companies find themselves in a messy situation complying with their policies,” said Heidi Hernandez, founder and CEO of Green Light.
“Green Light makes it simple to codify policies in clear programmatic rules for everyone involved to focus on what we hired them to do instead of dealing with process overhead,” she continued.
Teams create new approval flows using simple drag-and-drop and AI chat interfaces to describe them. They define who can request an approval, what information they need to provide, who needs to approve it and in which order, and who will be notified. For example, a travel request might require the approval of the manager of the person requesting it, the travel team, and the VP of the division. Green Light supports automatic approvals and automations and integrates directly with other services, like a travel vendor.
“Our company worked in healthcare, and we had to authorize and keep track of data access requests by our data scientists,” said David Mills, a Senior Director of Engineering at PressHealth. He continued, “I had to be checking my emails to avoid blocking someone from doing their job. It was awful when we had to go through quarterly certification audits, and I had to chase the data that were needed. Green Light made this problem go away for us.”
Customers go to www.getgreenlight.co to get started and to learn more about the use cases and integrations currently supported. Green Light offers a 90-day free trial.
Customer FAQs
Q1: How much does it cost?
Green Light has a free three-month self-service trial for up to 50 users. The basic plan costs $4.00 per employee per month. It includes single sign-on (SSO) and integration with Google Work Suite, Microsoft Entra, and several Human Capital Management
Systems (like BambooHR, Rippling, etc.). The Premium plan includes integration with services such as Concur, Jira, and GitHub and access to the Green Light API. The Premium plan also includes AI-based anomaly detection and alerts and advanced escalation and auto- approval features.
Q2: Do I need to migrate data or integrate with existing systems?
There is no need to migrate existing data to Green Light. It requires employee information, which you enter manually or use via one of the built-in integrations.
Q3: How long does it take to deploy the service in my organization?
Deployment can be gradual and can start with one or two approval processes. Authorization to open new positions and publish job posts is a good place to start. Other typical use cases include travel approval, new hardware orders, or access to data or IT systems. It takes less than a day to integrate with existing authentication and employee data systems and a few hours to set up an approval flow.
Q4: What products does it integrate with?
For employee and organization data, Green Light currently integrates with Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Entra, BambooHR, Workday, Rippling, and Zoho People. For request and approval automation, Green Light integrates with GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, SAP Concur, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Coupe, SAP Ariba, and IronClad. We are adding new integrations every month.
Q5: Can approvals be automated, re-routed, or escalated?
Yes. Approval flow forms can include data to be used to automatically approve requests based on any rule. For example, rules may include that people of a certain seniority request an expense below a threshold to get an automatic approval, while others require a manager’s approval.
Q6: Does it require training to use it?
The employees requesting approvals don’t need any training, and the product will guide them on what they need to provide. Approval flow owners must understand the creator interface and learn how to convert company policies and procedures into it. Each approval flow has a form builder, a routing system, rules for the approval, and several configurable settings (e.g., notifications).
Internal FAQs
Q1: Who’s the customer, and what problem are we solving for them?
Our core customers are HR, IT, facilities, and other departments in companies with 250 and 2,500 employees with many manual processes in approving or tracking approvals for operations and compliance. Our initial entry market is organizations in enterprise software, healthcare, and the financial industries. These organizations have challenges enforcing, tracking, and reporting for ISO 27001, SOC-II, and other regulatory requirements. They have elaborate policies and non-tech teams searching for solutions such as ours.
Q2: How are customers solving this problem today?
Companies have in-house procedures for each department. With IT and software teams, project management tools play the role of approval workflow using tickets and custom workflows (e.g., Jira). No-code and low-code solutions for workflow automation are used to solve some of the problems we identified. However, teams such as HR or finance don’t have the skill set or the license to use these tools. These products are difficult to set up given the complexity of policies, since these tools weren’t designed for it. Even when the procedures are “automated,” they still require a lot of human intervention, making it costly and slow for the employees and the organization. They also don’t offer a robust reporting mechanism.
Q3: What progress have you made so far?
We’ve built an MVP with eight integrations, and we’ve been running a pilot with four customers for the last two months, varying from 95 to 550 employees. Our MVP allows teams to set up flows with a drag-and-drop interface with role-based approvers to create approval request forms, including allowing the uploading of documents or pictures. We’ve built an email and SMS notification system for users, and a rule-based engine for auto-approvals or auto-escalations.
Q4: Who is the team behind it?
Heidi Hernandez is the co-founder and CEO. She was the Sr. Director of Technology at CloudFirstTech, leading a team of 45 software engineers and product managers. Previously, she worked at Microsoft for nine years. She has a B.S. in Computer Science from the National University of Colombia.
David Corbett is the co-founder and CTO. He was the Principal Software Engineer at CloudFirstTech. Previously, he worked at Zillow for seven years as a software engineer. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of British Columbia.
The team also has a senior software engineer and a UX designer.
Q5: How’s the project being funded so far?
We raised a $250K pre-seed round from Heidi, David, former co-workers, and angel investors in Seattle.
Q6: How many customers have you interviewed, and what have you learned?
We spoke to the head of HR, Technology, or Operations at 17 companies so far, ranging from 95 to 1,200 employees. Twelve of these companies were in the Seattle area, three in California, one in New York, and one in Austin. We learned that three companies have IT departments that built internal solutions. Although they aren’t as complete as ours, it’s challenging for us to displace them with our current offering. We identified two companies that don’t consider approvals to be a problem they need to deal with. One was a retailer with three stores, and the other was an energy company. Seven of the companies we talked to had grown their employee base by 10 to 70 percent in the last year, and they were interested in what we offer.
Five companies didn’t have employment growth—they had layoffs in the last year. They were intrigued because they are currently spending too many resources on compliance reporting and saw this as an efficiency gain opportunity.
Q7: Does the product work for companies with employees in multiple countries?
Yes. Each approval flow can be customized by any attribute of an employee, including their country, city, type of employment, tenure, etc. Approval routing, delegation, escalations, and even approval forms are customizable for those scenarios. For example, an employee requesting approval to access a data set of European customers may have different flows if they are based in Europe or if they are based in the US. The user interface is currently only available in English, and the approval forms don’t support language customization. We intend to add these capabilities in two years.
Q8: What’s the business model?
We’ll use a standard SaaS subscription model for the foreseeable future, using a per-user pricing scheme with two tiers of price: basic and premium. The high-water mark system is used to calculate the number of users, so organizations don’t feel like they are paying for a service their employees are not using. This mechanism also aligns incentives between Green Light and our customers.
Q9: Who’s the buyer persona?
We have identified the head of IT and the head of HR as the two key buyers. HR doesn’t have access to software engineering resources and prefers turnkey solutions. IT teams are overwhelmed with a backlog of projects, and they are resource constrained. Both functions are considered cost centers, so they are always seeking human capital efficiency. Once we penetrate one part of the business, it becomes straightforward to expand into other teams.
An advantage of our solutions is that we democratize the creation of approval flows by anyone in the organization. This means even small teams may set up their approval flow use cases. Software engineers are already familiar with approval flows when they use GitHub pull requests. We are extending this approach to all kinds of uses. We have identified more than 170 use cases in HR, IT, finance, facilities, legal, procurement, marketing, sales, business development, data science, product, UX, software engineering, etc.
Q10: What’s the distribution strategy?
In the near term, we’ll continue to sell directly to customers via self-service on our website. We found 17,000 organizations in the US that fit our ideal customer profile (ICP). We are building a small direct sales team and developing a tool to identify and prioritize organizations and entry points based on our network.
Q11: What resources do you need to launch this product and acquire customers?
We are seeking to join an accelerator to help us strengthen our product, build our customer pipeline through its network, and help us raise $2-3M in the next six months. Our goal is to add two engineers, a marketing manager, and one salesperson and start experimenting with customer acquisition.
Q12: When do you expect to break even?
We don’t have a complete financial model to determine when we will break even. There are an estimated 39M corporate employees in the US in 900,000 companies that have between 250 and 2,500 employees. That excludes contractors, interns, and in-house vendors. We estimate that 70 percent of those organizations don’t have a satisfactory solution. They are our target customer, which means our total addressable market to be 630,000 organizations and 27M employees. That’s a total addressable market of $1.3B/year.
Marcelo Calbucci is Founder of PRFAQ Lab, and a former Director of Product and Technology at Amazon.
