Month: October 2023

6 Thoughts on Smart Brevity

Another one bites the dust – I just finished hearing “Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less” by Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz. One of my chief complaints about engineering training is the dismissal of communication skills – speaking, reading, and writing.

Effective communication for developers is everywhere –

  • Being succinct and accurate in daily meetings
  • Opening clear tickets so others can understand, reproduce, and prioritize
  • Effectively communicate their work, suggestions, etc.

Here are some thoughts I had while reading the book –

  1. Using LLMs – chatGPT, along with other tools such as Grammarly, Wordtune, and so on, can help you tune the tone of your passage and adjust it to your audience. The book recommends asking a friend for feedback, but in 2023, we can first ask chatGPT.
  2. CV – the book suggests many scenarios for using smart brevity – social media, presentations, etc. I would also like to suggest writing a CV. Many CVs start with a short paragraph about the person. You can use this paragraph wisely.
  3. Spell out your takeaways – I understand the rationale while struggling with this advice. This is a rhetoric trick – tell your audience what is the one thing you want them to take from this talk instead of leaving it open.
  4. Amazon 6 pagers – the book starts with saying like “words overdose” and “words addicts”. Stating that since we moved to the web instead of print, the number of words is unlimited, and nobody reads them besides the headlines. Then, they refer to Amazon 6 pagers as a good example of a compact way of transferring a message. Six pages is a lot, and there is probably a way to reduce the length.
  5. Culture – I find this book very American-centric and complains that people need to be more direct. This is, of course, relative to the Israeli culture I come from. I strongly recommend reading “The Culture Map”  by Erin Meyer on this topic.
  6. Content structure – one of the repeating recommendations is to use bullet points to draw attention and help the audience focus. Additional recommendations include using bold fonts to emphasize important points, combining graphs and charts, etc. As a reader, I get this completely. As a writer who tries to distill her words, I want my words to stand out without using those tricks.

5 thoughts on Working Backwards

I had a long day of walking around and waiting a lot, so it was a good chance to listen “Working Backwards” by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr. It was more insightful than I anticipated. Here are my thoughts about it – 

  1. Corporates vs. startups – whenever I read or hear about best practices and success stories of big organizations (Amazon, Netflix, etc.), I wonder what I can adapt and what I can use for a small startup. Two things sparked my mind –
    • Hiring for diversity – the book mentioned that they cared for diversity, specifically concerning gender, from the early days of Amazon. They say that one of the groups noticed that they had some bias in their hiring process, specifically in CV screening, and wanted to improve it while not changing the bar. To eliminate biases that arise when reading women’s CVs, they modified the hiring process so that every woman who applied to the position would go through a phone interview.
    • Diving into the details – in startups, there are always fires to put away, new requests, and urgent tasks. I can improve on diving into the details, and that can put some of the fires away.
  2. “Be stubborn on the vision but flexible on the details.” – I love this quote, and I think it is one of the enablers for Amazon’s innovative culture.
  3. Blackberry inspiration – the authors mention that when designing Kindle, they were inspired by Blackberry, which was innovative for the time being as it was always synced and available. As in the examples in the Jobs to Be Done book – while the inspiration stands in place, the example is a bit outdated. Maybe I should read this next.
  4. 6 pagers – one of the justifications brought in the book for moving from PowerPoint to six pagers is that it eliminates the differences between a skilled marketing person, a junior developer, and an experienced VP and makes it more equal. I disagree with this argument. It might decrease the dependency on presentation skills, but I still think that there is a gap and experience matters even in writing – choosing the right wording and style and surfacing the relevant doubts, concerns, or benefits of the relevant stakeholders and audience. Writing is also an art, and writing a concise passage is not an easy task. 
  5. WatchNow subscription – when talking about Prime Videos, they mentioned Netflix’s early days when it was called WatchNow, and they offered a subscription to whoever had a DVD subscription. This resonates with jobs to be done advice regarding obstacles to adaptation –  offer the customers a way to try the product (freemium, limited trial, etc) before they buy it.
  6. AWS – as they say, the origin story and other stories about AWS can fill a book independently. I look forward to such a book. Having said that, they talk about the pricing of S3 and whether this should be a subscription or usage-based, what should count for usage – storage size, API calls, etc., and how the pricing was changed once they better understood the usage patterns. This is a great anecdote that even if you walk backward and prepare the PR and Q&A before you develop the product, you will learn new things when users start using it.
  7. 2 pizza teams legend – there are a few concepts associated with Amazon, such as the “2 pizza teams” which, after reading the book, I find it is highly misunderstood or very freely interpreted. On the other hand, I didn’t hear many companies or many people discussing the “Working Backwards” process, which I find far more interesting, and I wonder why one concept is so popular while another one stays in the shade.

5 thoughts on Jobs to Be Done

After it was mentioned in “Second Brain” and was waiting in my reading list for a long time, I finally listen to “Jobs to Be Done: A Roadmap for Customer-Centered Innovation” by Stephen Wunker, Jessica Wattman, and David Farber. Here are my thoughts about it –

1. Examples relevancy – The book was published in 2016 are brings several examples – slack, snapchat, etc. Are those examples still relevant? Do they still emphasize the relevant points? 

This problem is not unique to this book. One often finds an anecdote and uses it to emphasize or justify a theory. As time passes, the perspective also changes, and it sometimes differs from the theory.

2. Multiple stakeholders – B2B purchasing procedures frequently involve a varied group of stakeholders, each with their unique jobs to be done. This point of view is often not thought of and has great implications for how sales should done.

3. Emotional and Social Components – jobs to be done are not only functional tasks such as getting from here to there, wearing something, etc. Jobs to be done also have emotional and social components that should be addressed.

4. Obstacles to use and obstacles to adoption – Obstacles to adoption are challenges that restrict a consumer’s inclination to purchase a product or service. Facilitating the ease with which people can learn about and experiment with your new offering can diminish obstacles to adoption. Obstacles to use refer to impediments that hinder success, ultimately reducing a customer’s probability of ongoing product usage, acquiring supplementary features, or upgrading to more recent editions. I love this insight, and it is an important distinction, especially when one needs to prioritize.

5. Effective Brainstorming – brainstorming is discussed in long in one of the chapters. Personally, I have many doubts about group brainstorming as a way to encourage creativity. If there is one thing to take from this discussion, such a session should be well-mederated. See more here.