On writing well as a product manager
In a lot of tech companies, a part of the product manager’s job also involves writing “things”. These “things” could be user stories, cases for business teams (known as BRD in some companies), or specifications for engineers (can’t mess with them, anytime :P), or just communicating feature progress or discussions over mail. So basically writing anything about the product: from thinking out loud to shipping it to the market.
Honestly, I am not good at writing and I am still learning (hope I don’t disappoint you in this post). I am fortunate enough to have been surrounded by people, who help me improve myself every day at this. At the same time, I also explore resources that can be quick guides and are useful. This is when I stumbled upon
On Writing Well: The classic guide to writing nonfiction by William Zinsser
Here are a few quick takeaways for professional as well as personal writing:
1. Clarity
“A clear sentence is no accident.”
- Organize your thoughts — Clear thinking leads to clear writing. Writing is another way of thinking out loud on paper.
- Set the context clearly — Tell the reader about the what, why, where, who and when of your document.
- Question yourself about the content — What is the document really about? Have I made my point?
2. Simplicity
“Good writing is lean and emphatic”
- Structure the content — Strengthen transition between one sentence to the other. It should be seamless for the readers to follow. They should not need to jump from one section to another to get context (Wasting time of the stakeholders is just not affordable).
- Don’t inflate what needs no inflating — Do not throw jargons to throw dust in the eyes of your stakeholders. Use simple words/terms which are easy to understand for you as well as for them (Basically, don’t send your readers to google.com to process your document).
- Maintain consistency and uniformity — Don’t switch back and forth. There must be uniformity in the tense, pronouns and context. This reduces ambiguity in the document.
- Use active verbs over passive verbs — It is short, precise and leaves no doubt. Active verbs help readers in visualizing the activity. E.g — “User adds products to cart” over ‘Products are added to the cart by a user’ (In user stories, the stakeholders may empathize more with the users).
3. Brevity
“Writing is visual — it catches the eye before it has a chance to catch the brain.”
- Remove Clutter — Make the sentences cleanest to its form. The objective of the readers is to understand the exact idea you are talking about. Beating around the bush can confuse them and make your writing prone to misinterpretations.
- Cut short the sentences — Long sentences push the readers in a loop where they may have to revisit the sentence over and over to grasp it.
- Avoid over-explaining and over-stating — In order to give complete context or back-story of a product or feature, we tend to overexplain things. This kills the essence of the core idea and may end up putting a cognitive overload on the reader.
4. Proof-Reading
“Quality is its own reward.”
- Look for more and more mistakes — It is hard to get away from the emotional attachment with the first draft. Also, this coupled with the urgency of delivering leaves less room for re-writing or re-reading your document. However, reading, again and again, helps to catch spelling mistakes and grammatical errors hence improving the quality of the document (For the lazy ones among us, there is always Grammarly to the rescue)
- Re-read your piece from the stakeholder’s perspective — This refines the content to make it more relatable for them (For e.g — Re-reading your PRDs from the developer point of view may remind you of edge cases that you might have missed)
- A final touch to the document — Eliminate unwanted words and sentences. Visualize the complete document as a story. Reorganize its contents if needed.
This article is based on my personal learnings from the book. However, the book has a lot more to offer for people who want to get better at writing in general.
