You Can Write Devastatingly Effective Docs - Barbara Minto and the Pyramid Principle

Slide 1

Slide 1 text

You Can Write Devastatingly Effective Docs! Andrew Hao @andrewhao g9labs.com 1

Slide 2

Slide 2 text

We are excited to announce that our team plans to move to cloud-based SaaS services. However, we need to control our costs in order to remain proﬁtable. We plan to use a mix of private and public clouds to host our applications. We will use Google Cloud at ﬁrst to host our Pizza Browsing endpoints, but because of the high cost variances we expect to need to also leverage Azure and AWS for other services. We will use a hybrid approach to migrate our applications. We will use containerization to move our applications to the cloud, and we will use scripts to automate the ⁉ What is going on here? 2

Slide 3

Slide 3 text

The Gift of Clarity 3

Slide 4

Slide 4 text

Barbara Minto, Trailblazer 4

Slide 5

Slide 5 text

Slide 6

Slide 6 text

The Minto Pyramid 📐 aka “The Pyramid Principle” 6

Slide 7

Slide 7 text

The Intro The Structure & 2⃣ Two parts 7

Slide 8

Slide 8 text

SCQA The Pyramid & 2⃣ Two parts 8

Slide 9

Slide 9 text

SCQA 📜 The Intro 9

Slide 10

Slide 10 text

Situation C Q A 10

Slide 11

Slide 11 text

Situation Complication Q A 11

Slide 12

Slide 12 text

Situation Complication Question A 12

Slide 13

Slide 13 text

Situation Complication Question Answer 13

Slide 14

Slide 14 text

S C Q A Our annual attrition rate is usually X% In this tight job market, it has gone up to Y% What can we do to retain key talent? We believe we should… ✏ You try it 14

Slide 15

Slide 15 text

The Pyramid 🏛 The Structure 15

Slide 16

Slide 16 text

✏ You try it Assemble task force to evaluate fully-remote work Move from annual to semi-annual promo cycles Overhaul our talent philosophy The Answer Recalibrate salaries with latest market data The Key Points … … … … … … … … … The Data 16

Slide 17

Slide 17 text

Let’s see some more! 🪴Pyramids, pyramids, pyramids 17

Slide 18

Slide 18 text

S C Q A Normally our product is reliable We have suffered several major outages recently How can we restore product reliability? We believe we should… 18

Slide 19

Slide 19 text

✏ You try it Review operational metrics regularly in meetings Create slack by reducing team load Revamp the on-call process The Answer Decompose shared rotation into multiple rotations The Key Points … … … … … … … … … The Data 19

Slide 20

Slide 20 text

S C Q A We have been focusing on top-line user growth by measuring Daily Active Users (DAU) We are unable to retain these new users, who leave our platform after an average of Y months How can we have a more holistic measurement of business performance? We believe we should… 20

Slide 21

Slide 21 text

✏ You try it It measures the right things for customer retention It measures the right things for everything else Change our north star metric from DAU to XYZ The Answer It measures the right things for customer acquisition The Key Points … … … … … … … … … The Data 21