How to write clearly
Need to write a sales pitch, product strategy or RFD? Discover the biases behind poor writing and actionable tactics to improve the clarity of your docs.
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I’m Mikhail and I'm excited to share my learnings to help you navigate the murky waters of product management, leadership, and corporate dynamics. Subscribe to unlock the full value.
In today’s newsletter
(Free) Why “writing clearly” matters and why we’re so bad at it
(Free) Approaching writing from the reader’s perspective
(Paid) Actionable and battle-tested tactics to improve your writing immediately + a link to the RFD that I’ve used to pitch my idea
Since the day I joined Bolt, I’ve been writing. Daily and a lot. In a typical week I end up writing up to 4 A4 pages in Google docs. If you add Slack and emails on top in total it’s ~600 pages of text up to date. That’s equivalent to a few dense books.
Writing is everywhere. Whether it's the annual product strategy, quarterly goals, business cases, PR-FAQs, RFDs for engineering - you name it. If you want to pitch and sell your ideas to stakeholders or get the development going, you’ll have to write.
Being able to write with clarity is critical to getting the job done. However, what surprises me is how little understanding there is about effective writing in product management. Every single day, I plow through excess verbiage that contains little meaning. Paragraphs of hand-wavy text that could be summed up with two words.
These everyday experiences, coupled with my personal battles against academic biases led me to ponder - what prevents us from writing well? What makes writing easy to understand? How can you make sure people understand what you write? Most importantly, are there effective tactics that can help improve your writing immediately without requiring years of practice?
Read on to discover the answers.
🤷 Why we write badly
There are two reasons, on both macro and personal levels.
On a macro level, we live in the era of content abundance. According to Domo research, internet users generate ~188 emails daily or 235 bln words. Just emails alone. Add various blogs, articles, self-published books and you can easily end up with 500 bln words published daily.
What’s more, there are no barriers to entry. Any dummy writer can publish whatever they want without any editorial oversight. On top of that, because our attention span is limited we tend to favour catchy content. It gives an instant rush of dopamine compared to a slow-burn dopamine release from reading a well-edited book. Hence, our thinking and writing are shaped by freely available, half-baked content.
On a personal level, we were never taught to write clearly. In schools and universities, we are graded by complying with the form. An essay should have an intro, body, conclusion, and at least five paragraphs of text. If you do not comply, you get a D. It’s easier for teachers to grade similarly structured works at scale. The consequence is heaps of meaningless text written just to adhere to the framework.
Now we enter the corporate world with baggage full of biases we are not even aware of. In organizations, text isn't judged by its form, but rather by its ability to deliver the message. What gets the job done is short, crisp, and direct writing.
⚔️ My personal battle
Until not long ago, I was blind to my own biases. Assuming an academic background, I felt fairly confident I could write well. However, some of the critical documents I produced in the past two years were slow to get stakeholders’ approval.
Academic bias
According to the feedback I tend to write dry and verbose prose that resembles a scientific article. No surprise there. I spent 4 years in academia, writing article papers and a PhD.
My initial take was that academic precision increases stakeholder confidence. It turned out to be the opposite. Being too precise dilutes your narrative and imposes a lot of cognitive strain on the reader.
Writing to think
I usually write in order to think, not the other way around. Hence, if I needed to deliver a document on a tight deadline, I would go for breezy writing, dumping all of my biases onto paper.
I still use a blank list for thinking, but the way I turned it around is by doing multiple edits afterwards. These edits allow me to shorten the document to its most readable form.
🖼️ Reader’s perspective
Reader’s time is valuable
We tend to over-explain when writing. The typical school-biased approach is that we need to show off our knowledge. But what this leads to is an excess consumption of the reader’s time. We completely forget that the reader’s time is valuable. The reverse mindset is to treat the reader’s time as more valuable than your own. No matter where in the ladder your reader is, just treat this as an axiom.
Define the reader
What I frequently observe is that product managers write business proposals to stakeholders in a similar way they would draft an RFD for engineering, diving deep into the nitty-gritty and over-explaining technical details.
This adds zero value when a reader has a different context from yours. For example, a director of operations might care more about P&L performance rather than your features. Hence, changing the perspective from tactical features to strategy and impact on the business will help you move the needle.
First, define who your reader is and what type of context that reader has. Business, engineering, marketing, or legal stakeholders all come from different perspectives and parse information in a different way.
Define the goal
Aside from the engineering RFDs and a few business cases, little thought is given to why the strategy or quarterly reporting documents are written. Most product managers silently assume it’s done for compliance, as a measure to justify the impact of resource allocation.
Take a moment to step aside and think about the actual goal. Not just passive compliance, but proactively consider what should change after the stakeholders read your document. A shift in thinking happens when you ask yourself, “How is it going to contribute to the business?”
Level of comprehension
Look at the documents that you’ve already shared with stakeholders and the team. The best way to tell if your document wasn’t well understood is to look at reader engagement. If there are no comments or most of them are concentrated at the beginning of the document, it clearly indicates that there were more words than meaning.
Notice when you are not engaging with the text yourself. A clear indicator is that you start skimming though sentences and paragraphs instead of paying undivided attention.
⚙️ Actionable tactics for writing better
Below I’ve complied some of the battle-tested tactics that I use everyday. They can boost your writing clarity by at least x10. What’s more important, you can start using them immediately. No extra training required.
Available exclusively for my paid subscribers.