As a product manager, my primary responsibility is to figure out the most
valuable use of time for my team and then to ensure that we make forward
progress on our goals. In this post, I want to share some of the benefits of
developing a habit of writing ideas down by default, even when the contents
seem obvious. While my main focus is on how this benefits business owners and
product managers, I imagine these observations apply to most job functions.
Of course there are also certain situations that are better handled without a
written record, but those should be relatively infrequent.
While I know this idea is not novel per se, I thought I would follow my own
suggestion of committing these thoughts to writing.
- In order for your impact to scale, you need to be able to communicate with
more people. Written communication allows you to share ideas asynchronously,
which provides you with more reach.
- Written documents ensure that you are able to keep everyone up to date on the
specifics of your ideas. This will help to minimize the chances of your ideas
being recalled incorrectly, which will save you time in the long-run.
- Taking the prerogative to write the first draft of documents will help you
frame the conversation and prevent surprises (e.g., scope creep).
- When possible, give concepts / plans a name. This provides useful
short-hand for more complicated ideas.
- The process of creating a written document will increase the likelihood of
your internalizing, remembering, and acting on its contents. This is
important because as a product manager, people will often come to you
asking for clarification and they’ll expect you to be able to respond
promptly.
- Circulating a draft with your ideas offers a mechanism to collect feedback.
- By putting a problem statement and solution in writing, you demonstrate
understanding of inputs from your team. This builds trust that you are
listening carefully and in your ability to advocate effectively for them.
- If you are having trouble understanding someone’s point of view, you can
suggest that they contribute it to your document so that there is a shared
source of truth that everyone can refer to. This provides a natural forcing
function to clarify definitions, perspectives, and next steps.
- It’s natural to add links to citations or specific data points, which build
credibility and would be awkward and inefficient to talk through in
conversation.
- The presence of a written plan of record inspires confidence. It demonstrates
organizational abilities and gives you a tool to hold team members
accountable.
- Even if ideas feel obvious, it is helpful to write them down. At the very
least, it may help you remember relevant context in the future when you
memory starts to fade or you are stretched for time.
- Being able to share a document with people in the future, will help you cut
down on the number of meetings you need to have to get people up to speed.
- Having a document also allows you to easily share your work with others who
you may not be able to get meetings with either due seniority or scheduling
challenges.
- Share credit generously. By liberally adding people as coauthors on your
documents, you will be gifting them artifacts that they can share with their
management chain, customers / partners, or team. And a nice side effect of
this is that people will feel good about collaborating with you.
I’ll leave where your documents should live as an exercise for the reader. ;)