The power of writing

Writing is hard. It takes work. It takes thinking. It takes time. I have found myself often running away from it. Welcome to Amazon, where you cannot escape writing. Where writing is a daily act. And so is reading.

Walking (or now Chiming) from meeting to meeting comes with reading documents. Not slides. Documents. The Amazon 6 pager has been famous for a long time. The Press Releases. The FAQs. This is my second time experiencing it. Enter a meeting, read a document, add comments and engage in active discussion. Leave having learnt a lot and had your questions and concerns addressed. I want to use this space to talk about why writing matters and how it can be a powerful tool for professionals and organizations.

1. Writing will force you to think at a deeper level. I have been a powerpoint guy all along. Powerpoints makes you think too. What are you going to talk about? How will you structure the narrative? What visuals and videos fit the most? However, even though powerpoint presentations are great for building excitement, they are generally light on depth and details. Writing a document forces you to think at a much deeper level. It can be writing to propose a new idea, writing a plan for a launch, or writing to highlight your team's accomplishments last quarter. It provides a lot of clarity and completeness to the discussion.
2. Writing helps the audience understand what the why, the what and the how better. Let's say you were pitching an idea to launch a new music or podcasts app. It will require thinking through the market, users, use cases, unmet needs, the industry, song and artist economics, technology and many more areas. Writing will force the presenter to think through each of these areas in sufficient detail and present information or insights in a clear, concise and convincing manner.
3. Writing and reading forces more participation, discussion and equity. The goal of meetings and discussions is not just to disseminate information and to engage in active Q&A. Often, the presenter is trying to find gaps and holes in a plan through feedback. Sometimes, a meeting is about aligning on a topic. Writing makes for better discussion for many reasons - the audience is forced to understand what is presented through active reading (often during the meeting), participants can ask questions and get answers through comments (without waiting in queue and often missing out in shorter meetings) and everyone gets a level playing field irrespective of your position or level in the organization.

Having said this, it is important to remember where to draw the line on when to use documents and when not. Should every discussion or meeting have a document? What is the bar on writing? What level of depth is required in the document? Every team and organization and individual should find an optimal balance on this. Too many documents for every discussion can slow an organization and too little can lead to bad or expensive decisions. The one-way two-way door decision making can also help you think through that.

Finally, writing is not just a tool that can help professionals and organizations. It can also be a helpful tool for all of us for personal reasons. Writing can help organize thoughts and ideas of any type and has found uses in the world of mental health too. Happy writing!

About me: I lead the personalization product team at Amazon Music and we are hiring for product, science and engineering roles in SF, Seattle and Berlin. We are very remote friendly and offer a great compensation package with benefits (read news on recent pay raise by Amazon). Reach out to me directly for questions.