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Embrace written narratives, ban powerpoints
The one thing that made me a better PM: using written narratives (documents) instead of slide presentations.
Jeff Bezos was (and is) 100% right đ
Most PMs underinvest in their âthinking timeâ. Youâre constantly in-between meetings, gap-filling wherever youâre needed, and building Powerpoint decks to explain something, to someone. And probably youâre making double shifts writing JIRA tickets, covering Slack threads, prototyping some lame sketches to explain in a planning, and whatnot. âThinkingâ always seems to take a back seat.
Iâm super honest: this used to be my life. Until two really strong PMs (JĂșlio and Francisco) shared their âwrite to thinkâ philosophy: write to understand, and youâll be understood. One example were presentations (something PMs have to do extensively), when turned into written format became a great excuse to simply lock more thinking time.
Hereâs what I realised when I started going all in into narratives:
- Decks made me lazy. It focused me on the âheadlinesâ and not the details.
- Decks made me spend >50% on aesthetics, instead of connections.
- Decks made me rely on âwinging itâ with my speech and presence.
- Decks didnât invite to thoughtful commentary, and if youâre a good presenter, you could convince others of crappy ideas.
- Decks made the conversation unilateral, instead of collaborative.
All of these âïždeeply reduce the quality of your own strategic decisions as a PM. They do make your life easier, but they donât make you more effective at building what solves your customers problems.
After a bit into narratives, this happens with those around me:
- Narratives 10xâd collaborative discussion. People left A LOT of comments. Especially engineers (it felt like reviewing code).
- Narratives invited depth but syntax. I couldnât write too much, but it covered way more edge cases. And the comments added 100s more.
- Narratives filtered out those who didnât care enough (they gave up on reading and writing). The best products are built by those who care more.
- The amount of content that could be consumed while presenting and reading a narrative was 5x more vs a deck.
âHalf-naked thinking was harder to disguise on the written page than in the PowerPointâ - Working Backwords
Get rid of decks, embrace written narratives. Slowly, but surely, it will transform your (and those around's) execution.
PS: going from decks to narratives is like taking sugar out of coffee. Weird in the first week, but after a while you canât see yourself going back.
PPS: start with Notion as itâs quite dynamic, reduces the shock and frill to fit the content as you were used to at decks.