How product people can force themselves to think deeper
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How product people can force themselves to think deeper
psst, it's related to pen and paper.
Deep thinking is one of the top qualities that separate great product people from the rest.
The inability to provide a clear story prevents people from creating successful products. And lack of success usually results in a slow career progression.
Writing can help you to become a deep thinker
Writing is a well-known and reliable technique to gain more depth in a specific topic.
Writing gives poor thinking nowhere to hide. It's a technique that allows you to connect to your subconscious mind. It helps you to become much more clear and convincing.
Jeff Bezos realized the importance of deep thinking. He banned slides and doubled down on writing. His famous 6-pager written narrative concept is now used all around the world.
I’ve seen incredible transformations happening when the product people start writing. The end result: clarity of thought, stakeholder buy-in, and confidence boost. But more importantly, a higher likelihood of achieving product outcomes.
How often do you think you have a clear story in mind, but your spoken or written narrative ends up being choppy? And you discover it only when you start telling a story…
In some cases, things don’t even add up in your mind, and you struggle to make progress.
Don’t worry, there’s a way forward.
First, write for yourself
Write to think through your narrative. Phrase it, reduce murkiness and identify the key questions and decisions.
Write in prose and avoid having detached lists of bullet points. They will have a place in your toolset, but they are counterproductive at this stage.
This step will highlight the narrative gaps that you need to fill.
Second, write for the others
When you write for others, your goal is to achieve a detailed pick up of the depth of thinking that you went into.
Your narrative needs to be ready for sharing with a wider audience. So you want to get some feedback from your close peers or your manager before you go wide.
Your narrative is likely to get a lot of feedback. Yet, it will be less about the gaps in your narrative and more about building on top of what you are proposing.
Third, tailor the content to the audience
Not everything in life will be a written narrative. Often 1-pagers or 6-pagers aren’t the most effective ways to communicate your message.
Your writing needs to become tailored to the audience, occasion or ritual. However, writing should still be your standard practice to gain the required depth.
Telling a visual story? It's so much easier to turn your written narrative into slides than to create slides from scratch.
Preparing for a speech? Writing your speech down will result in a much smoother presentation.
Providing the key points about a topic? It's easy to extract bullet points from your written narrative. And each of the bullet points will have a back story that you can refer to.
Don't think about writing as always or never. Start small, use it when you need it the most. It will make you a better product person.
Product Without Bullshit
This blog is dedicated to helping product managers cut through the clutter and get straight to the point.
I strive to provide practical advice for those looking to improve their skills in the product management field without any fluff or jargon-filled explanations.
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