Write For Your Audience Not For Yourself
If you're a product manager anyway. Novelists can do what they like :-)
There’s an image of a whiteboard that is quite often shared on social media, and the whiteboard is titled “Tips for Amazon writers”.
The story is that this was shared by an Amazon employee and shows the advice that Amazon give to those who are responsible for writing anything within the organization.
It consists of five bullet points, and regardless of the provenance of the image, the rules are ones that all product managers could do well to imprint in their minds. It will help not just improve how you communicate but also how you think.
Use shorter than 30 words per sentence
Most people are busy.
Most people don’t care how clever you are with language.
Most people just want to find something out.
Keep things simple and help them get there as efficiently and effectively as you can.
Replace adjectives with data
We like that the latest changes are more “user-friendly” but has this increased revenue?
It’s great the website is faster, but how much faster is it?
The latest search engine optimization work has increased our reach, but to how many people?
If you can’t explain what you’ve done with the data, then has what you’ve done really made a difference?
Eliminate weasel words
These tend to slip in when we don’t actually have the data, or when we do have the data but the results aren’t as strong as we’d like so we describe the result instead.
By “nearly all customers” do you actually mean 91% of customers?
By “significantly better” do you mean that conversion has increased by 0.6%?
Does your writing pass the ‘so what’ test?
I have to ask myself this question every time I’m looking at what to write in my next post. “So what?”
So what that you’re writing about some rules about writing? What’s the point? Who’s going to get something out of this?
It’s the same for every presentation we as product managers make. So what that you’re going to add a sticky add-to basket to your product page? What’s it going to actually do?
If you get a question, answer with one of these four answers
I should probably use this with my children.
“Have you brushed your teeth? I don’t care that you’ve been reading your school textbook. The answers should be yes, no, I don’t know if you’re really forgetful, or maybe once today”
The question is being asked with a purpose in mind so deliver on that purpose first. Anything else is supplementary information.