Part 2: Being a visual versus written communicator
Part 1: The job of a product manager is to convince others
Part 2: Being a visual versus written communicator
Part 3: Gamma for slides and webpages
Reading time: 12 minutes
Topic: Communication
Part 2: Being a visual or written communicator
When I join a company, I try to understand what language people speak at the company and do a deep dive into the Google Drive archive to understand what kind of documentation has convinced others on taking a certain stance. Thereâs a lot of leverage in first understanding how people are convinced and then invest in it. The foundation of a companies knowledge base is based on leaders either being a great writer and writing stellar written documentation or a great speaker with a power for presentations.
Written documentation (âWriterâ). When youâre onboarding at the company, you might be given a list of documents to write, you might see certain people refer to documentation in their Slack to a 1-pager, a strategy document, or product requirement document. When a decision needs to be made, you notice someone says that theyâll work on it and they circulate a document. All relevant stakeholders read the document and either approve or ask follow-up questions. Youâre most likely working in an organization where youâre required to have great writing skills.
Visual presentation (âSpeakerâ). As a product manager, letâs say youâve just joined a start-up and the first thing they ask you to do is join this meeting. Actually, youâve been asked to join 5-6 meetings about âvery important product launchâ and youâre wondering what all of these meetings are about. You sit through the presentation, where everyone oohs and aahs about the evidence that your manager shares for what the product launch should focus on and what weâre scoping the product to for the MVP. They also have built a slide deck with visual evidence: images and data that bring evocative arguments for the success of this product launch. Your manager has successfully supported a narrative that the launch will include core pieces of functionality but no flywheel capturing emails yet. At the end of the meeting, you mainly see people nodding their head in agreement. You realize the company youâve joined prizes great speakers who are great at speaking and help make decisions in meetings by building convinicing narratives. Great speakers can easily translate peopleâs body expressions into whether theyâre bought into the argument or not (e.g. leaning back, or leaning forward with interest, pursing their lips), improvise on the fly and build great visual presentations.
There is no right or wrong way to communicate, but companies tend to lean one way or the other. Itâs rare that both have the same impact or the same weight. Company culture will either rely on the product leader and leadership team having a great ability to write well or build a visual narrative well, rarely have I seen the two coexist at the same level of quality. In addition, if a leader is good at speaking through a decision but not driving a well written document and the founder relies on well written documentation, the truth is that the leader will have less decision-making power, not because they are right less often, but because they arenât able to convey their point in the companyâs language of choice.
Having a written or visual communication style tends to trickle from founders down to their teams. If Iâm a product manager and I need to convince my manager, my manager is most likely using the same arguments and you might be asked to share the opinion with the right stakeholders up the ladder, going all the way up to the CEO for big decisions.
Letâs take a look at the advantages and disadvantages to a company that leverage written versus visual communication.
Written communication
Advantages:
Critical thinking: Being able to rationally sequence ideas and logically make a connection between them is critical in writing.
Deeper: When writing, youâre able to dive deeper into an argument, cite multiple facts and build a comprehensive argument.
Evergreen: You can constantly refer to a document and be able to pull up a document. Once itâs been created, it can more easily become a reference for a team, a function or a whole company
Forever growing audience: You can have a large audience and a big circle of influence just by having the document available to everyone. Your influence can continue to grow pretty much without you needing to do anything
Disadvantages:
Time-consuming: It takes a long time to write a well-written document and fully explain complex ideas. Though the effort is sometimes worth it.
Maintenance: While the written docs are evergreen content, it does require them to be constantly maintained. Remember the documents weâre talking about are to make a certain decision (e.g. PRD, product strategy), however there is a high likelihood that someone needs to reference it in the future.
Examples of written culture:
Amazon is known to work backwards and write a press release before shipping a product.
Stripe is known for written documentation. My hypothesis is that itâs due to being an API product and needing to be strong in writing in clear words how to use the API from writing all those API docs, and because both founders are voracious readers and prize good writing.
The higher the quality of written documentation, the more decisions can be made asynchronous. Written documentation works quite well in particular with remote companies.
Paul Graham is of the mindset that great writing trumps great speaking anyway. While I donât completely agree with him about speaking being total fluff, I do think if you can explain your thoughts in writing, youâre more likely to be grounded in logic and are able to better explain to others (reference).
Having good ideas is most of writing well. If you know what you're talking about, you can say it in the plainest words and you'll be perceived as having a good style. With speaking it's the opposite: having good ideas is an alarmingly small component of being a good speaker.
Visual culture
Advantages
Narrative-driven: When you speak through a presentation, youâre even more likely to notice whether youâre able to drive a narrative. An examples of a narrative is rags to riches ending your presentation with an apex. As much as weâd like to think that people are always driven by logic, most of the time, the narrative is what drives people to make sense of your decision and increases your influence
Engaging: Presentations with evidence and speaking to an audience means engaging with people more directly. Itâs about making eye contact. While written documentation is about having the document be able to stand on its own legs, making a presentation is precisely about having the speaker make a personal connection with the audience and creating something engaging
Disadvantages
Only works in live settings: Presentations require a live run through to really land with an audience. Eye contact can only be made when youâre in the room with someone. That means that the first time you present something is really the biggest impact you will have and then the influence degrades from the impact of having a recording of the meeting or someone looking at the presentation without anyone doing a voice over for it
Becomes stale quickly: Unfortunately, most times that people share visual evidence, itâs naturally based on real time data or charts, and this data becomes stale over time. This means that a presentation that was made two months ago might quickly become irrelevant
Examples of visual cultures:
Apple: Known for its emphasis on design and visual communication, Apple places a high value on presentations. Product launches set a standard for how presentations can captivate an audience and effectively communicate the company's vision and product details.
Google: Teams communicate through larger meetings, with presentations becoming the anchor for making decisions.
I want to talk about slides and how to thrive in an org where building visual slides is important in your organization. There are three questions to ask when building a slide deck:
Is the deck meant to stand on its own without a narrator or meant to be narrated through during a meeting? If it needs to stand on its own, itâs worth putting enough information on the slides or presenter notes. If itâs for a meeting, itâs worth having a recording using Loom and sharing that out with the rest of the company
Is the deck intended for a specific function or generally for the whole company? Ideally, the more important the decision is, the better it is to be ingested by anyone at the company, the better it is to start with basics (define the space, start from basics and have 1-2 introductory slides on the topic)
Personal opinion
Itâs first critical to understand whether your organization values written or visual communication skills and focus on building those skill sets.
From my own perspective, outside of work, I prefer to write. Writing is focused on the strength of my arguments and continuing helps me hone my critical reasoning. Unfortunately, reading compelling arguments doesnât translate into me writing in a compelling manner. Writing in a recurring manner, practicing, making mistakes, learning from them, is what makes me a better writer.
Writing also doesnât require extremely sophisticated tools. I still mainly rely on Google Docs for my writing. For this blog, I just write in the Substack editor.
However, for presentations, the previous generations of tools are outdated and it can take me hours to edit something for very little ROI.
The tools for business communications are changing and Iâm glad that weâre seeing better tools for presentations.
In my last blog post about influential communication, we will review an interesting recent business communication tool, Gamma.