There was a time when I included FAQs on almost every project.
It felt like a responsible thing to do. A way to anticipate questions people might have and to reduce friction.
But over the years I began to notice something odd.
The more I tried to pre-empt questions, the more it changed the shape of the work itself.
FAQs are not neutral. They are not simple answers to predictable questions. They are statements about what you assume people will not understand.
Which means you’re building expectation into the work long before anyone reads it.
When I added FAQs, it wasn’t just about answering questions.
- It was about anticipating confusion.
- It was about signalling that uncertainty was expected.
Even when the rest of the work was clear, the presence of an FAQ implied that there were still unresolved issues.
That wasn’t just a stylistic choice, it was a psychological shift.
For projects that were already procedural, instructional, or open-ended, that tension didn’t matter as much.
But when I was writing Info Product Build, a work designed to end questions rather than extend them, the idea of an FAQ felt like pulling the work backward into uncertainty.
The deeper I got into drafting IPB, the more I saw that the questions FAQs try to answer are rarely actual problems waiting to be solved.
They’re often hesitations, moments of discomfort that belong to the reader’s context, not the work’s logic.
Answering every hesitation in advance starts to look like a kind of reassurance.
That reassurance then becomes an obligation: “If someone could possibly misunderstand this, I ought to clarify it.”
Over time that impulse subtly reshapes work into something it was never meant to be:
- more expansive
- more adjustable
- and less finished.
So I stopped adding FAQs.
Not because I think questions don’t exist.
Not because people don’t wonder about edge cases.
But because resolving every imagined question was changing the work into something else, something less terminal, less contained, and less true to itself.
Now, if a question genuinely arises from the work itself, not from my anticipation of reader hesitation, it either gets addressed directly in the text or it stays unanswered. Some uncertainty is part of the territory, and that’s okay.
FAQs, in practice, often become invitations to reopen the work. And that’s exactly what I no longer want.
