Crafted Reading List: Smart Brevity
Muscular TeaseLedeCraft your communications the way you build great software
Smart Brevity is a framework that gives us the tools to get our voice heard in a sea of voices and parallels many software development principles.
Why It Matters
As a product manager, my biggest takeaway from the Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less book is that we must craft our communications the way we build great software: lean but mighty.
I was excited to see that the principles of Smart Brevity parallel so many of the software product development fundamentals that Crafted is grounded on:
Audience First - Similar to user-centered design, Smart Brevity advocates crafting communications for your audience to make the messages worthy of their time. Understand what the user wants from a product and give them just that. Otherwise, your reasons for building a product are selfish.
Ruthlessly Prioritize - Smart Brevity advocates selecting what is most valuable for the reader and deprioritizing anything that isn't. This guiding principle parallels Lean Product Methodologies. As product developers, we must focus on the most important features first because those are what matter. These are the features that drive our business, will be used the most, and are essential for user retention.
Write like a human, for humans - When demoing software for stakeholders/other nontechnical members of an organization, or updating customers on bug fixes/major feature updates, engineers should be simple, clear, and direct. Use relatable, conversational language, and make it clear what one thing you want your colleagues or users to remember. While the exact lines of code used to remedy a bug may be interesting to you as an engineer, all your users care about is that the product is working properly and helping them accomplish what they want to do.
Go Deeper
The authors of Smart Brevity said, “Never in the history of humanity have we vomited more words in more places with more velocity.” So how do we get heard when we’re up against more competition than ever? The framework is simple:
Be worthy of your reader’s time
Grab them with a headline
State ONE big thing
Explain why it matters
Give them the option to learn more
Use the right words
Utilize visuals