Writing Like a World-Class Product Manager

Easy writing is painful reading.

How do you level up and write like a world-class Product Manager?

Transcript

1. Writing Like a World-Class PM Maarten Dalmijn Easy Writing is Painful Reading
2. Handy Acronym you can use every day to make all your writing better and more influential. What We Will Explore Today
21. Meet Halli
22. Why Did His Tweets Resonate?
23. CRISPY Acronym Concise - Keep it short and remove, remove, remove Relationship - Respect the Relationship Importance - front-load what matters Simple - simple words Passion - What do you want them to feel? Y - What are you trying to achieve?
24. Bruce, Adobe is recruiting from Apple. They have hired one person already and are calling lots more. I have a standing policy with our recruiters that we don't recruit from Adobe. It seems you have a different policy. One of us must change our policy. Please let me know who. Bruce, It’s come to my attention that your organization has initiated a focused recruitment initiative targeting Apple talent. I understand that one individual has already transitioned, and additional outreach efforts are underway. Within our leadership ecosystem, we operate under a clearly defined talent engagement framework that precludes active recruitment from Adobe. It appears your organization’s strategic approach differs on this matter. To preserve mutual respect, partnership integrity, and long-term value alignment between our companies, one of our operating models will require recalibration. Please clarify which of us will be optimizing our policy to ensure continued strategic coherence. Concise Relationship Importance Simple Passion Y
27. This is day 11 for me at Opendoor. Over the next month, the hardest thing we need to do as a company is to become Al native incredibly quickly. Our job at Opendoor is to build the best platform possible to make selling, buying, and owning a home as delightful as possible. That's the mission and it matters because home ownership matters. Every week we don't make immense progress against this mission is a bad week for the world - the world is objectively worse and families are worse off if we don't make an insane amount of progress every single week. So we need to move faster - always. And we can't do that without being Al obsessed. So, starting today the first line in everyone's job expectation is simply this: Default to Al. (This applies to everyone, including me!) Starting with the next performance review, in addition to asking how much impact each employee delivered we will also ask ourselves how frequently does each person default to Al. If you reach for Google Doc or Sheets before you reach for an Al tool, you are not defaulting to Al. If the prototype for a project is not built in Cursor or Claude Code, you are not defaulting to Al. If you have not used chat.opendoor.com and started thinking about how you can build your own agents and save your prompts, you are not defaulting to Al. (Great upside of chat.opendoor.com is that it becomes the company's problem to worry about data security, etc and not yours.) Al use is a skill, like anything else. The more you use it, the better you can get at it. I expect every one of us to become experts at this. We will help you with resources and training, however it is ultimately up to you to master this skill. We have a lot of work ahead of us. We will not get there without everyone defaulting to Al.
29. Easier and Shorter = Better Easy to pronounce stock performs better Unnecessary complex words and long sentences make you less persuasive We like what we can easily process
30. “I try to write using ordinary words and simple sentences The less energy they expend on your prose, the more they'll have left for your ideas.” - Paul Graham, Founder of YCombinator Simple - use simple words
31. Put in the Work as a Sender Don’t offload your laziness or lack of clarity to the reader Easy Reading is Hard Writing
32. “To write well you have to think clearly, and thinking clearly is hard. I probably write three to four words for every one that appears in the final version of an essay.” Paul Graham, Founder of YCombinator Concise - Keep it short and remove, remove, remove
33. We Suck at Removing We suck at removing, because removing means: Loss aversion Risk We’re addicted to addition
34. “Brevity is confidence. Length is fear.” My take: Concise writing is scary, Expanding and adding is comforting
35. Don’t Bury the Lead “Kenneth L. Peters, the principal of Beverly Hills High School, announced today that the faculty of the high school will travel to Sacramento on Thursday for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Speaking there will be anthropologist Margaret Mead and Robert Maynard Hutchins, the present of the University of Chicago.” Importance - front-load what matters
36. Make Them Feel Something “If the glove does not fit, you must acquit.” Passion - What do you want them to feel? Y - What are you trying to achieve?
37. Make Them Feel Something Passion - What do you want them to feel? Y - What are you trying to achieve?
38. Don’t Send This. Ever.
39. Rewrite and Remove Importance - front-load what matters
40. Don't Settle: AI Sucks For Writing AI can make a bad writer mediocre, but it can’t make a mediocre writer great.
41. CRISPY Acronym - Triple Fry Your Writing Easy Reading is Hard Writing Concise - Keep it short and remove, remove, remove Relationship - Respect the Relationship Importance - front-load what matters Simple - simple words Passion - What do you want them to feel? Y - What are you trying to achieve?
42. I’m Hiring and Leaving