Writing is the most important skill for a Product Manager — here’s why!

Product Management

Product Managers write. They write for creating a vision, thinking through the problems, and driving cross-functional alignment. But there’s more to writing than just writing! Use this framework for anchoring your written communication.

A few days back, an engineer on my team shared an article with me written by Sophie Alpert titled “There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text” which is about good writing in the age of AI-driven writing, where a 20 words prompt can generate a 2000 words article in seconds. That sparked thinking and acted as a catalyst for this piece. As a Product Manager, I write. I write a lot. If I look back at only the last two weeks, I have written decision docs, workplans, OKR documents, product briefs, marketing briefs, and policies and processes for my team.

What is good writing?

While researching for this article I found out that good writing is like good design. You don’t notice it if it’s good, but you clearly notice it if it’s a bad. The same is with writing. A decision-driving informative piece of writing that brings clarity is barely noticed, but a document which confuses everyone is clearly noticed — only if a document is even there in the first place. As per my definition, good writing in the context of product management is the one that helps things move forward without confusion, toil, and burnout.

This article is not a guide for how to write well. There are excellent resources available on writing out there. My focus on this article is to highlight a conceptual framework of writing and how it can be used professionally depending on the audience and the goal of the piece of writing. I find it more valuable because of the following two reasons. First, it fits to all the situations and is exhaustive of the use-cases when a writing is needed. Second, it offers flexibility to the person to decide how to use their writing and leaves them to use their own creativity, rather than saying which form of writing is the best.

Who is your audience?

Writing is a tool that serves two audiences. Writing can be either for yourself of which you are the primary consumer, or writing can be done for others of which you’re the primary creator, but the consumers can be different parts of the organization or the outside world. I call them writing for self, and writing for others.

Writing for Self

The name explains it. Let us try to understand it from a personal example. I had to give a presentation on a product and the current challenges with that product. Before I did that I had to understand it myself first. I read, researched and asked questions. This writing is extremely important for learning. Subsequently, I wrote a document for myself explaining everything to me. In this case, I was the creator and I was the consumer. This helped me understand the topic deeply, and exposed the gaps of my knowledge where I needed to work more. This is called writing for self.

Benefits of Writing for Self

Writing for yourself has numerous benefits especially for Product Managers. Here are quite some examples.

1. Writing for yourself helps you to think critically about an issue at hand, and find those connections which you can’t find out if you’re just reading or talking to someone else. And, definitely not, when you ask AI to write a text for yourself and then you’re just proof-reading it because by that time your own thinking has already been primed by the AI.
2. Writing for self is like being on a journey of discovery. The goal of writing for self is not to produce document that will be published in New York Times (or for my German audience, Die Zeit!). The goal is the journey itself which allows detailed thinking about the topic so that it is ready to talk to you and explain itself when you ask questions and try to answer them. The core skill needed here is being empathetic to yourself and being open-minded.
3. Writing for yourself reduces cognitive load. Once you understand a topic thoroughly and are in a position to debate about it, highlighting its pros and cons, it feels very stress-free. Human minds are not there to store everything like a 1 TB SSD drive. It’s there to be creative and think. Writing for self helps you free up this working memory.

Writing for Others

Once you have mastered the writing for yourself, then only, in my opinion, you can move to the second stage which is writing for others. This is also close to 90% of your day-to-day work as a Product Manager (at least for me!)

You write for others when you are answering questions on Slack, when you’re driving decisions, when you’re aligning stakeholders on timelines, when you’re brainstorming with your design lead, or when you’re talking to executives and giving them the state of the current affairs for your team. Keeping in mind who the audience is what they’re trying to achieve is crucial here when you tailor your communication.

Writing for Others can be divided into two parts: Information-oriented Writing and Action-oriented Writing.

Information-oriented Writing

You’re writing something information-oriented when you do not want the consumer of your writing to take a direct action after reading your piece of writing. An example of such a document is your quarterly workplan to be shared with the Senior VP of your engineering team. They just need to be informed about a process and that is the end of the process. Goes without saying, but you have the highest form of accountability when its information-oriented writing. You can’t let AI speak for you for this writing.

Action-oriented Writing

You write action-oriented when you want someone to take an action on the basis of your writing. One way you can set yourself apart from the rest of the product managers, or any other professionals for that matter would be to use the power of choice in these kinds of writing pieces. For example, last week I came across a situation where someone had to make a decision. I consulted with my colleagues and gave three options to that person who had to make a decision. All the options had benefits and risks associated to them. This helped the person see various options and a way to act on your option quicker.

Benefits of Writing for Others

Many benefits of writing which you know are eligible for writing for others. These are my top three benefits which help during my job.

1. Writing is scalable talking is not. The biggest benefit of writing is that the same document if prepared with due diligence can act as a source of knowledge base, and people don’t have to necessarily reach out to you for asking questions all the time. As a product manager, your time is very scarce.
2. Writing for others drive alignment and bring clarity. A piece of well-written context-specific piece of writing can save a lot of time that is spent on misaligned teams. Bringing everyone on the same page about where we are and where we are going is best captured in a document with proper headlines and detailed information.
3. It improves your credibility and handles ambiguity. Coming up with a document such as an excellent PRD, or a Product Brief builds your credibility in front of your stakeholders. Having a process document in place that makes all the stakeholders know when they have to do something and how feels like a well-oiled machinery that doesn’t make any noise while its working. It just produces an excellent output.

Conclusion

Writing helps you slow down and think. It helps you think for yourself, and for others. It makes you humble improves accountability and ownership, and help you grow every day. This piece of writing is an example of how my thoughts and my arguments emerged during the writing itself, which made me come up with this piece that is personal, has my voice, and is not written by an AI with 20 words prompt about benefits of writing.

Writing is the most important skill for a Product Manager — here’s why! was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.