Clarity for Product Managers, Part 4: Clear Communication

I’m excited to round out my mini-series of blog posts on a topic that I feel is essential for product people: clarity. In this series, I’m sharing my tips and tricks for both individual product managers as well as product leaders. In the first post, I introduced some common reasons why it’s hard to achieve clarity, outlined the four layers of clarity, and offered my tips for PMs on how to achieve directional clarity. You can find all that here. In the second post, I introduced and defined the concept of situational clarity. Find that post here. In the third post, we looked at the concept of role clarity and how certain activities like running a role expectation workshop can help you achieve this type of clarity. Read more here.

While this post is the fourth in the series, I think it’s important to mention that this topic—clear communication—is really a foundation for all the other layers of clarity we’ve discussed. You probably already know that clear communication very closely interrelates with the other layers.For instance, the best directional clarity doesn’t help if it’s not well communicated, communication can help us navigate situational ambiguities, and role clarity will massively influence how clearly we communicate.

In short: All layers of clarity are interrelated, but clear communication always matters!

Assessing your ability to communicate clearly

Here are a few questions you can ask to assess how clear the communication is in the context of your product collaboration:

Imagine it’s your first day: How much would you understand?

Try to put yourself in the shoes of a new colleague and observe the communication around you: How do people communicate on Slack? How are the tickets written? What do people share in standups? How are things communicated in larger meetings? Especially in larger organizations, you will very likely identify many things which a new colleague simply cannot understand.

How often do people ask “what do you mean”? And how often do you wish they had asked it?

If people often ask for clarification, it’s a very direct sign that the initial communication was not clear. But even if they don’t ask for clarification and you only find out later that there was a misunderstanding, it’s a strong indication that communication would benefit from more clarity.

How confident are your customer-facing colleagues when they speak about the product?

Ideally what you’d see is that your sales reps or your customer success managers confidently speak about the product, explain its functionality, respond to questions, and also help users or customers rectify misunderstandings on their part. If instead they shy away from questions or if you find their communication cringe-worthy, it’s not only a sign that they can up their communication game, but also that you weren’t clear enough in your conversation to empower them.

Lack of clear communication can of course be a consequence of missing directional clarity, missing situational clarity, or missing role clarity. And of course there can also be other factors such as language barriers that complicate clear communication. But even if such additional challenges are in place, don’t treat them as an excuse. You should always strive to be as clear as you can in your communication.

Concrete steps for clear communication: Advice for PMs

What steps can you take as a PM to ensure clear communication? Here are a few suggestions.

Make yourself understood

This is primarily a matter of attitude: It’s your responsibility to make yourself understood! Make it as easy as possible for your counterparts to understand you so that they are enabled to do their part.

Even if it sometimes annoys you and you feel like you've explained certain things five times already and the message still hasn't sunk in: It remains YOUR responsibility to make yourself understood with your concerns as a product person.

What's crucial is that in the end, your counterparts are both articulate and capable of acting:For example, this means that the Sales and Customer Success Teams are enabled to speak competently and with maximum confidence to customers about your product.

Or it means that the CEO can confidently articulate to investors or the press what's happening with your product. Because you certainly don't want the alternative—a CEO improvising in front of external stakeholders.

Provide context and orientation

You can reduce the risk of misunderstandings or the need for additional clarification loops by providing enough context information to help people make sense of what you are communicating beyond the immediate moment. This is particularly important in asynchronous communication or when you expect that written communication may be forwarded to recipients beyond your initial communication partner.

For example, instead of writing a Slack message saying “I’ve thought about your proposal and think we can make it work,” it’s clearer to state explicitly which proposal you’re referring to.

In addition to providing context, you can also increase clarity by making written documents easy to scan and pointing out what’s important by highlighting key statements and to-dos for your reader. Just think of the many messages some of your stakeholders receive every day and remember: It’s your responsibility to make yourself understood.

In addition to actively guiding your reader’s attention, another important aspect of providing orientation is to make the status of your document very explicit: Is what you’re presenting still a draft, is it a proposal, are you soliciting feedback,or do you want to let people know about a final decision? And which point of time is reflected in the document?

This is particularly important when sharing collaboration whiteboards (Miro, Mural etc.) with others because people tend to continue editing the same board instead of creating and naming/labeling new document versions. This makes it literally impossible to be sure of the status of the information shown if you don’t make it explicit in the content. It can help to add explicit labels such as “for discussion” or “Decision from 1st April” to elements.

Actively guiding attention is also particularly important on whiteboards because there’s no inherent linear structure to them. It can be very helpful to guide your viewers by providing very explicit markers to show them where to start reading and by adding numbers if elements appear in a non-obvious order.

Pay attention to clear writing?

There are many good books on clear writing. While some of them (such as On Writing by Stephen King) take a broad perspective and also include tips for fiction or journalistic writing, I recommend Josh Bernoff’s book Writing Without Bullshit because it refers directly to the context of digital business communication.?

Bernoff’s core recommendation (he calls it the “Iron Imperative”) is to prioritize your reader’s/listener’s time over your own. It may take you an additional five minutes to review and optimize an email or Slack message for clarity, but if this increases the likelihood that your collaborators or stakeholders understand your message as intended, it’s worth the effort.

While there are many tips on clear writing, I want to highlight the following four, which I believe are the most valuable in the context of product communication:

1. Shorter is better

Lengthy texts dilute your message or even discourage your counterparts to deal with them in the first place.

Focus on the main points you want to make and provide the context that’s necessary to understand them as quickly as possible. When asking for information or a decision, be clear about what’s unclear.

2. Use active voice

There’s an unfortunate tendency in business communication to use the passive voice. This is problematic because it leaves out relevant information that would help others understand. Instead of saying “it was decided to launch the new product by the end of March,” it’s clearer to make the actors explicit (“the board decided in the last board meeting that we need to launch the new product by the end of March”).?

As an easy test to spot passive voice, Josh Bernoff suggests adding “by zombies” after the verb of a sentence. If the sentence still makes sense, it’s written in the passive voice (“it was decided by zombies to launch…”). A context where we often see passive voice is in bullet lists in Powerpoint presentations because passive voice is shorter. - But remember—if it doesn’t make things clear to the audience, brevity is not helping matters.

3. Avoid acronyms and jargon

In any organization I’ve worked with, there’s a natural tendency to establish internal jargon and acronyms that you cannot know until you’ve been introduced to them.?

At XING (a professional social network), we often spoke about optimizing VOMP (Visitors of my profile) or in many ecommerce companies, people refer to the PDP (Product Detail Page). While the latter may even be considered common knowledge among ecommerce folks, company specific acronyms like VOMP counteract clear communication.?

If such acronyms are used with full confidence in bigger meetings, it can discourage people from asking for an explanation because they assume that everybody else knows it (even if they are certainly not the only ones who are confused). If somebody dares to speak up and ask for clarification of acronyms, make a point of applauding the fact that they’ve caught you using insider lingo.

I experienced such a situation while ramping up XING’s development in Porto and helping with the onboarding of colleagues. Even though all of our new colleagues were seasoned tech professionals, they just couldn’t make sense of many terms used in our company all-hands. I was really glad that one of my Portuguese colleagues, Catia, went so far to create a list of all acronyms in use at XING and what they mean.?

Sidenote: This also served as a nice preparation when a few years later we wrote our own version of the Fanta 4’s “mfg” (a German hip hop track making fun of common German acronyms) for an internal celebration. So we should avoid acronyms—or at least use them consciously (for instance by actively introducing the acronym at the beginning of a presentation).?

But we also need to be careful with our professional jargon. Yes, Product people I’m looking at you! Let’s not hide behind our product lingo, referring to product framework specific terminology when speaking with our sales colleagues or assume that just because everybody in the company likes to talk about MVPs there’s a shared understanding of what that actually means.

Once more: It’s your responsibility to make yourself understood and just because you think that you have the right understanding of the term MVP, you should make sure that when speaking to colleagues they understand the implications in the same way as you. And if they don’t, it’s not their shortcoming, but yours!

4. Avoid weasel words

A weasel word is an adjective, adverb, noun, or verb that indicates quantity or intensity but lacks precision. Think of words such as “deeply,” “most,” or “tends to.” Using these words is common in product writing, but they are either meaningless (can you explain the difference between “caring about the users” and “deeply caring about the users”?) or lazy. If you know that “most users” responded positively to a new feature, you could either say how many because you know the exact number—or you are bluffing.

Here’s what you can do to reduce the “weasel density” of your communication for more clarity:

• Try to just delete the word. If the sentence still has the same meaning, keep it out.
• Make more specific statements.
• Quantify whenever you have exact numbers.?

Check out Josh Bernoff’s blog post for good examples.

Be intentional about using informative data

Clear communication is not only about words, it’s also about how you present data and numbers to make yourself understood and avoid ambiguity.

I will keep this short because Simon Cross did an excellent job and gave actionable advice in his blog posts on “The Perfect Chart” as well as in his entertaining Product at Heart talk on extreme clarity.?

Here are three of his recommendations:

• Know the difference between percent and percentage points.
• Include the before and after numbers as well as the percent (or percentage point) change.
• Qualify your units with a timeframe (“we reached 1,000 signups” -> Was it per day? Per hour?)

Listen to understand, not to respond!

This is another attitudinal recommendation for clear communication (and for being a good person to talk to in general): Try to really listen to what your counterpart is saying instead of already putting all your energy into crafting your perfect response.

Yes, I’ve said above that it’s your responsibility to make yourself understood, but in order to do this, you need to pay attention to your counterpart to “meet the people where they are” as Teresa Torres said in her Product at Heart talk last year. Because only if you listen to understand their position will you be able to communicate with them in ways that are clear to them, not just yourself.

Final thoughts

With this post I’ve covered the last of the four types of clarity that matter in product collaboration: Directional clarity, situational clarity, role clarity, and clear communication.

Here’s an overview of my recommendations:

To recap, we’ve covered why clear communication is crucial in itself, but also as a foundation to put directional clarity, situational clarity, and role clarity into action. We’ve outlined some ways you can evaluate communication for clarity and considered some tips that can help you to communicate more clearly.

I am aware that (clear) communication is a massive topic and my blog post will not cover this topic exhaustively. Because of this, I am curious to hear from you in the comments: Do you have other tips for how PMs can improve clarity of their communication?

In the next and final post in my mini-series, I want to look at additional responsibilities for Product Leaders with regards to providing clarity in product collaboration.

This blog post was initially published on my website. Check it out for my posts since 2016 and to find out how to work with me.