Instilling a writing culture
Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard. — David McCullough
“Chinese Whispers” or “Telephone” is a game where a handful of people form a human chain, and the person on one end whispers a sentence to the next one, and the sentence is supposed to be passed all the way down to the person on the tail end. This game is a classic example of how easy it is for errors to accumulate in the receiving and retellings of information through verbal communication.
Writing, as a method of communication, is far less conducive to confusion and vagueness. It offers a lot more room to think things through, use the right words to convey the message, and point to as the source of truth during times of contention.
Writing Culture
Stripe, a leading payment services provider, is well-known for its ‘writing culture’ — meaning they consciously and actively foster good writing skills as part of their company culture.
“Writing forces you to structure your thoughts in a manner just not possible when you verbalize it. When I write, I have to offer structured, precise thoughts.” says Dave Nunez, Documentation Manager at Stripe. This has pushed the team at Stripe to consistently — “go really deep and get all the way down into the details around things, then distill it down to a form that makes the complexity broadly consumable and actionable.” in the words of Michael Siliski, Head of Financial Services Product at Stripe.
Amazon, the e-commerce giant, also has a Six Pager philosophy which is a reflection of its strong writing culture. ‘Amazonians’ have to write six-page narrative memos to be read at the start of each meeting — kind of like a “study hall” session. Going one step further, they practice product design by press release. Often before they commit to building new products or services, Amazon managers write fake press releases describing them. The idea — central to the “working backwards” approach — is to clarify what the benefit to the customer will be, and magnify the focus on what will differentiate this product from anything else. The short press releases are followed by FAQ sections, which aim to address some of the most pointed questions facing the project.
Writing, here, doesn’t mean grammar. If anything, grammar is so basic that I won’t even touch upon it. And thanks to tools like Grammarly and Writer, there’s no need to sweat over it. Here, writing refers to what is being communicated, by who to whom.
As a Product Manager for a consumer-facing product, writing is a big part of my role. One of the things I write a lot is Product Requirement Documents (PRDs)— a document that lays down the Whats, Whys, and the Hows. It’s a critical document since it effectively lays out the scope of what is delivered in the final product and, by extension, how well it achieves its intended purpose i.e. the business outcome.
PRDs need to be comprehensive and clear. They also need to be in a format that provides readers with the right amount of the right kind of information. For instance, PRDs are widely used by the engineering team in my company (as is the case with most tech firms).
It needs to be granular enough to be considered a reliable source of truth, but should not be too wordy. It needs to be high-level enough so that engineers have ample room to make implementation decisions, but it shouldn’t be so high-level that it lacks direction. Let’s just say that a well-written PRD with two engineering teams working in silos based off of it would result in similar outputs (with an acceptable amount of variance).
One survey found that businesspeople spend 25.5 hours/week on average reading for work — that’s >50% of productive time potentially spent consuming low-quality information.
According to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, “Often, when a memo isn’t great, it’s not the writer’s inability to recognize the high standard, but instead a wrong expectation on scope: they mistakenly believe a high-standards, six-page memo can be written in one or two days or even a few hours, when really it might take a week or more!”. If that’s true, which I believe it is, this needs buy-in at a higher level because Time = $$$.
To inculcate a good writing culture takes investment in the form of time (out of a working day) and even actual investment at times. Stripe, for instance, offers writing skills training during their onboarding process. If it costs $$$, it better yield $$$, right?
Breaking It Down
A good place to start would be identifying communication flows within an organization (see an oversimplified example below), and asking two simple questions:
- What part of this, if poorly communicated, can have serious negative consequences?
- What part of this, if communicated well, can have significant upsides?
For instance, Product Requirement Documents (between Engineering and Product in the above flow):
- If written well can result in a great, streamlined user experience across a product or set of products.
- If poorly written can lead to a buggy and a possibly broken product due to lack of comprehensiveness.
Similarly, Outbound Outreach (between Sales and Customer in the above flow):
- If supported by well-documented product information for the team and access to reliable resources for customers, can lead to more sales
- Lacking the above will not only keep sales numbers low but significantly add to frustration within the sales team.
Depending on company priorities, resources, and risk tolerance, this flow can be adjusted to prioritize improving in one key area, or be cover the entire organization. But this exercise helps much better size the financial consequences of high quality vs poor writing practices.
Communication is the foundation of the growth of human society. It’s only right that we strive to do it well.
As with any school of thought, it’s dangerous to think this is an all-encompassing solution. I encourage you to read this article — The perils of a writing culture for a slightly different perspective.
