As a Product Manager, communication is a big part of your job - whether you like it or not. Some days it can feel like it's the only thing you do, from explaining ideas to your engineering team to convincing your manager of yet another one. Leading through influence, creating alignment across teams, and documenting the requirements of a new feature - it all hinges on your ability to communicate clearly. No matter how good you are at the craft of building a product - if you can't communicate effectively, your success (and, in extension, the success of the product) will be limited. I have seen this many times over the years - great product builders who either left it to chance to properly relay their brilliant thoughts to other people or struggled with it and therefore barely made progress. I have seen Product Managers who are annoyed by the effort of communication and feel like it's a waste of time. Others know about its importance but can't figure out how to improve. No matter where you stand on communication, I guarantee you that you will benefit from listening to [Wes Kao](https://www.weskao.com/). She is an entrepreneur (Maven, altMBA), coach, and advisor who speaks about managing up, thinking rigorously, and clearly communicating ideas. She was invited to Lenny's Podcast and talked about becoming a better communicator. As part of that conversation, she shared a treasure trove of practical advice. These are my notes from "[Become a Better Communicator: Specific Frameworks to Improve Your Clarity, Influence, and Impact](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jtGsyz4jLs)" with Wes Kao.  **Take Ownership of Communication** - Reflect on how you might be contributing to communication issues instead of blaming others. - Focus on improving your communication skills to achieve desired outcomes. > I often see operators who explain things poorly and then are shocked and horrified when people are confused or there's skepticism (..). I'm a big proponent of asking myself, if I'm not getting the reaction that I'm looking for, how might I be contributing to that? (..) Instead of blaming other people for not understanding me, I think about how could I explain this more clearly? How can I be more compelling? How can I anticipate any questions that they might have? **Sell the Idea, then share the Logistics** - Avoid jumping into logistics before securing buy-in; people need to *want* to do it first. - Focus on 'sales' to excite people about doing what you want them to do before detailing the 'how'. >A common mistake that I see is overestimating the amount of buy-in that you have from your audience. Like jumping straight into talking about the logistics, the details of the how to do something, of the process, when in reality, your audience has not yet decided if they even want to do the thing. So what I see operators do in response then is go even deeper into the logistics and the how, thinking that, 'oh, if I just explain this more, then that person will want to do it.' When really a sales note is different than a logistics note. A sales note is meant to get people excited to do the thing you want them to do and to agree to do it. And only then, after they have bought in, does it make sense to share the logistics. **Lack of Clarity is the Bottleneck for being concise** - Concision is not about brevity but the density of insight and economy of words. - The bottleneck to being concise is being unclear about your core point. Prepare for meetings and conversations to improve conciseness. - The clearer you are beforehand, the more effectively you can communicate. >Being concise is not about absolute word count. It's about economy of words. It's about the density of the insight that you're sharing. And so you can have a 300-word memo that's meandering and long-winded and a thousand word memo that is tight and concise. >We've all heard 'don't bury the lead', 'cut to the chase', main point, [..]. All of these pithy aphorisms assume that you actually know what your core point is. You can't cut to the chase unless you know what the chase is. That, I found, is the bottleneck to being concise. >In meetings at work we are very rarely talking about the same thing many times. It's always something new. It's something that we are also probably likely processing ourselves and are in the midst of processing as we are in a quick turnaround time telling someone else about it. You're listening to the other person, absorbing, making sense of it, processing it, figuring out what you think and how you would react, and then trying to say something cohesive that makes sense, right? And then trying to be concise about it. So it's just a lot of different processes. And so ==the only solution I found consistently to being concise is preparation.== **Meeting Preparation** - Prepare for meetings, even just for a few minutes, to be more concise and focused. - Ground yourself by considering why you are in the meeting and what you want to share. >I don't mean spending hours and hours preparing for a weekly meeting. Even a couple minutes really makes a huge difference. Most of us are so back to back in meetings that we're doing zero preparation. It's like the meeting has started 30 seconds in and you're still unwinding from the last Zoom call that you were on. Most of us are in that mental state. If you even take 30 seconds to one minute to ground yourself on, 'why am I in this meeting?', 'What do I want to share and make sure I get across in the time that we have?' You're going to go in there so much more focused and so much more able to be concise. >(..) especially for more introverted folks. Sometimes you need to decide beforehand that you want to speak and you want to make sure you get a certain point across. So even deciding that beforehand makes a huge difference. **Signposting for Clarity** - Use signposting words (e.g., "for example," "because," "as a next step") to guide readers through your writing. - This adds structure, highlights key information, and helps regain reader attention. **Upfront Investment** - Invest a little more time upfront to improve your communication. - This small investment prevents questions and back-and-forths, saving time and improving clarity overall. >It takes a little bit longer to make a Slack message a little bit better. But net net, if you save a bunch of questions and back and forth and people asking you things that you don't think they should be asking, then by investing a little bit of upfront effort, you've prevented all that from happening. **Confidence Calibration** - Speak accurately about your level of conviction and avoid stating hypotheses as facts. - Be confident when you have strong reasoning, but don't diminish your expertise when sharing insights. >You can avoid a lot of problems if you speak accurately about your level of conviction and about the actual amount of evidence that you have for something. It's okay for something to be an initial hunch. Say it's an initial hunch. Don't act like this is something that you are super sure about. >It's equally a problem if you're underconfident. I have some clients and their CEO asked them to share some recommendations with another team because they've run something before. And so they share all this amazing information. And at the end, they're like, 'oh, but you can ignore everything I just said. Make your own decision, do what you think is best. If you want to just ignore everything, that's totally cool, too'. You just didn't have to say that. You could say, make your own decision, take all this into account, but you don't have to diminish to that degree. **Anticipate Objections** - Anticipate potential objections (MOO: Most Obvious Objection) before presenting your ideas. - Addressing these proactively strengthens your argument and shows preparedness. >A lot of times we're surprised by the questions that we get, especially in meetings where we feel blindsided. That was unexpected. And then we're on our back foot. When really, if you thought for even two minutes about what are obvious objections that I'm likely to get when I share this, you often immediately come up with what some of those things are. Are you going to be able to anticipate every single objection? No. But can you anticipate the obvious ones? Absolutely. And this is where knowing your own argument in and out, including counter arguments, becomes so important. **Managing Up Effectively** - Share your point of view and recommendations proactively with your manager, rather than just asking for direction. - This demonstrates strategic thinking and reduces your manager's cognitive load. >I realized that many senior people are actually the best at managing up. That's partially how they got to be so senior in the first place. >The more senior you get, the less likely that your manager is going to give you really well-defined tasks and problems on a silver platter and ask you to solve them. You're going to be dealing with more ambiguity and you're going to be dealing with sometimes a mandate like 'make this number go up' or 'create this division'. (This is) where you need to manage up and make sure that your leader, your manager is in the loop about what you are about to try and what you're about to do and make sure that they're aligned. >When you just ask your manager, *'hey, manager, what should we do?'* you're putting a lot of cognitive load on your manager to need to think about the problem, think about potential solutions, craft the solution, and then tell you what to do. Whereas if you instead said, *'hey, manager, here's what I think we should do. How does that sound? Where do you see gaps? Am I thinking in the right direction?'* you give them something to build off of. And that reduces the amount of mental lift that they have to put forth. >Sharing your point of view more readily, backing it up with evidence, that's a wonderful way of making your manager's life easier. And also showing that you are an active, rigorous thinker who is thinking strategically about the business. You're not just waiting to be told what to do. You're not expecting them to figure things out and then tell you. You are actively looking around the corner, trying to solve problems, forming hypotheses in your mind, observing and noticing things. >Sharing your point of view doesn't mean that you have the perfect answer. You can share that, *'hey, I've noticed this problem popping up in a couple of different places. Here's what I think might be happening.'* **Giving Feedback well** - Prioritize behavior change as your goal. Focus feedback on motivating improvement, not expressing frustration. - Trim unnecessary negativity and focus on how the change benefits them and others. >I realized that a better way of giving feedback is thinking about motivating the person's behavior change. The goal is behavior change. So if that's the goal, trim everything else that you were about to say that does not actually contribute to that goal and only keep the part that will make the person want to change. Help them understand the benefit to them as well as to the people around them. Usually for me, that's trimming 90% of the initial stuff that I want to say and really keeping only that 10%. And that's made a really big difference. Whenever I am giving constructive feedback of any kind, I always keep that in mind. And when I don't do it, I almost always regret it. **CEDAF Framework for Effective Delegation** - Use the CEDAF framework for effective delegation. - The CEDAF acronym serves as a personal reminder for effective delegation: - C (Comprehension): Ensure the person you are delegating to fully understands the task, the desired outcome, and has all necessary resources (e.g., software logins). - E (Excitement): Explain the task in an engaging manner, highlighting the 'why' behind it or its importance to the project to foster motivation. - D (De-risk): Proactively identify and mitigate obvious risks associated with the delegation, such as setting smaller initial steps or clarifying potential points of confusion upfront. - A (Align): Give the delegatee a chance to ask questions and confirm their understanding to ensure you are both on the same page before they begin. - F (Feedback): Create the shortest possible feedback loop to check on initial direction and progress, ideally starting within the delegation conversation itself. **Note Great Examples of Communication in a Swipe File** - Create a "swipe file" to collect inspiring examples of effective communication (quotes, designs, strategies). - This trains you to recognize and analyze what works well, improving your own communication skills. >I have a file, an Apple Notes file called Smart Things People Have Said, where I will basically paste in phrases, words, things people have said that I thought were well articulated or sounded really intelligent or sounded strategic. And I don't actually go back and look through my swipe file very often. I think other people do. But for me, even the act of adding it to my swipe file, I've already gotten value from it because it's training me to be more alert to noticing when something is working well.