Effective communication is essential for product managers. It’s nearly impossible to over-communicate, so let’s dive into the two major channels of communication: writing and meetings.
Writing
Writing full sentences forces you to think through your arguments and present them in a structured way. Writing also gives every reader in your company the opportunity to understand what you’re trying to communicate without you having to be there to explain it to them.
The secret to writing well is to keep it simple, short, and specific.
Simple: Get to the Point
When you’re writing, your primary goal is to communicate a single point. Here’s how you can structure your document to keep it simple:
- Start with the main point.
- Follow up with no more than three supporting arguments.
Start with the main point because your readers are busy. If the first paragraph doesn’t tell them what they need to know, they will not read the rest of your document. By stating the main point up front, you’re showing your readers you’re confident about your argument. Those who have questions can easily read more to understand your supporting arguments.
Follow up with no more than three supporting arguments because most readers don’t like to remember more than three things. If they have to read through a laundry list of arguments, they will tune out. Worse, you’ve shown readers you don’t know which arguments are the most important.
Think of someone reading your document as peeling an onion. The more your readers have to dig to understand what you’re trying to communicate—peel the onion—the more annoyed they’ll get. Most people will not keep peeling the onion, so make sure you get to the point right away.
Short: Aim for Two Pages
In
The Elements of Style,
Strunk & White wrote about why it’s important to keep your writing concise:
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Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should contain no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.
One of the best ways to keep your writing simple is to keep it short. Every word that you add lessens the impact of all the other words.
Amazon forces all product managers to write documents that are no more than six pages. However, I’ve found that most of the time you can make your argument in just one to two pages. If you have to, you can include more details in an appendix or FAQ.
Specific: Remove Uncertainty
Don’t make your readers guess what you’re trying to communicate. Here’s an example:
Our product’s user base grew a lot over the past month.
This statement raises many questions: “How many users were added?” “From when to when did this happen?” Here’s a much better sentence:
From 4/1 to 4/30, our product grew from 100 to 120 daily active users (+20%).
Be as specific as possible in your communication to remove uncertainty.
Tips for Writing Well
Here are a few more tips that will help keep your writing simple, short, and specific:
Writing Process
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Write for your audience.
Think about who’s most likely to read your document and put yourself in that person’s shoes. Try to understand what that person cares about and what they already know. For example, an executive is less likely to be interested in implementation details compared to an engineer on your team.
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Review and edit all the time.
Review and edit your document to fix grammar and streamline paragraphs to simplify your writing. Read a printout of your document or say the words out loud to get a sense of how it flows from a different perspective.
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Ask knowledgeable people to review.
Preview your document with knowledgeable people so they can provide feedback. Ask someone who’s not familiar with your project to read your document to see if they can understand your main points.
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Answer the most common questions.
As you and others review the document, make a note of the most common questions that come up. Revise your document to answer these questions, either in the narrative or in the FAQ.
Writing Style
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Make your writing scannable.
Your headings and formatting should allow your readers to quickly scan your document to understand your main arguments.
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Use the active voice.
The active voice is more direct and confident than the passive one. For example, write “We will grow users by…” instead of “A series of improvements will help us grow users.”
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Don’t use complicated words.
Try to avoid using complex words, jargon, or acronyms as much as possible. If you must use an acronym, explain what it means the first time that you use it.
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Remove words that introduce uncertainty.
Avoid words like should, might, could, probably, and maybe in your writing. Replace these words with data or a statement of fact.
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Only include charts if you can defend all the numbers.
If you add a chart, people will look at all the numbers on it and ask questions. Often, it’s easier to show only the numbers that matter in a sentence or table.
Meetings
Sometimes even the best written communication isn’t enough to get people aligned, so you must schedule a meeting. Many product managers spend their days in meetings. Others try to block off time on their calendars to avoid meetings and focus on work.
These tactics seem to suggest that meetings are a waste of time. In reality, an efficient meeting is one of the best ways to make decisions and reach alignment. Let’s dive into four types of meetings and how you can run them efficiently:
- 1:1s
- Team meetings
- Ad hoc meetings
- Product review
1:1
The 1:1 is the best meeting to be radically transparent.
Use the 1:1 to care personally about your coworker by asking what’s on her mind and showing appreciation. Ask her for candid feedback about how you can improve and offer the same feedback in return if you think it’ll help her performance. Finally, empower her by making sure that you’re both aligned on the goal of your project and asking “what can I do to help?”
You should schedule recurring 1:1s with your manager, skip-level manager, your peers (e.g., designer, engineering manager), and your reports. Even if you see them every day, nothing beats a private half-hour conversation where you can be open about real issues
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Team Meeting
The team meeting is a weekly sync with people who are working on your project. These meetings should have both a fixed agenda and time for open discussion. The fixed agenda part usually involves reviewing the metrics, tracking the project’s status, or diving deep on a specific topic. The open discussion part (5-10 minutes in the end) allows people to bring up issues or concerns about the project.
If you’re running this meeting, it’s your job to keep the agenda on track and encourage people to participate. The structure of this meeting should be so clear and repetitive that anyone on your team can run it if you’re not there.
Ad Hoc Meeting
Ad hoc meetings are for making decisions that you didn’t have time to make in your team meeting. No one likes to have ad hoc meetings pop up in their calendar, so it’s especially important to run these meetings efficiently. Before you call an ad hoc meeting, you need to clearly understand what decision you’re trying to make and who should be part of the decision-making process.
Product Review
The product review is a meeting where you present your roadmap to executives. Product reviews don’t happen often but give product managers a lot of stress because they want to show executives they know what they’re talking about.
The goal of the product review is not to provide a status update, but to get executive input on a key decision that you’re trying to make. Executives have limited time and bandwidth to think about your problem but can provide valuable insight into how it fits with the company’s overall strategy
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That’s why you need to share the problem and decision that you’re trying to make upfront before presenting supporting evidence. Product reviews are successful if you can get aligned with executives on what you’re trying to build or if an executive can help you unblock a decision. For example, two teams may have different goals and need executive input to align on a path forward.
Tips for Running Meetings
Here are a few more tips to make your meetings more productive:
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Focus on the why first.
What is the goal of the meeting? What problem are people in the room trying to solve?
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Have a mindset of “how can I help you.”
Walk into each meeting with a mindset of “How can I help you.” Don’t be afraid to ask directly: “How can I help you make this project more successful?”
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Have an agenda.
During the meeting, make sure that the agenda is visible so that everyone knows what will be covered. List your agenda items on a slide or the whiteboard. Highlight the issue you’re talking about and cross out the items above it so that everyone knows what the current topic is. Using numbered lists makes it easy for people to refer back to things (e.g., “So going back to #1...”) and for people who are late to the meeting to understand where the discussion is.
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Keep meetings focused.
If someone is talking about something that’s not related to the goal or is meant to be covered later, please interrupt them. Remind them of the purpose of the meeting and request that they discuss it another time. You may think this is rude, but other people will appreciate that you are keeping the meeting focused.
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Send notes right after the meeting.
A meeting where people made decisions that were not documented never happened. Make sure you send out notes right after the
meeting or at least on the same day. These notes don’t have to be super polished and just need to cover the main points. Your goal is to document the key decisions so that everyone can refer back to them. I've found sending notes one of the best ways for new product managers to show value because most people can't be bothered to do it.
Besides excellent communication, you also need to be effective at making decisions. We’ll cover that in the next chapter.
