June 12, 2023

Brevity is a superpower…

“When talking with leadership in your organization, brevity is a superpower.”

I can’t remember where I first heard this, but I use this advice almost every day in my work. There’s a hidden friction here, though.

If you’re good at building digital products, you care about the details. You build components that are extensible. You name layers thoughtfully. You run tests to ensure full coverage. You account for edge cases. That attention to detail is one of the things that sets apart great products from good ones.

So it can be difficult to boil all of those meaningful details down to a few key points in a meeting with leadership. You understand their value, and you want that value to be understood by others (especially when others = decision makers).

How do you alleviate that friction?

Three suggestions:

• Consider your audience. What details matter most to them? Your org’s legal team will probably be looking for different information than the CTO. Another engineer may benefit from the nuance of your testing regimen, but a project manager may not.
• Consider your bandwidth. How much time do you have? What’s the format? How many and which details you share will differ between a 30-second summary in an executive leadership meeting, a 5-minute demo for the whole company, and 45-minute post-launch project retrospective.
• Practice progressive disclosure. Start with broad strokes relevant to the target audience and sized appropriately for your bandwidth, then begin to fill in the more complex or less entertaining details as time and audience interest allows.

You’ll never get it right all the time, but the more you practice applying these filters to your communication with others, the more valuable conversations with you will become.

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Cheers,

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