4 Reasons Writers Are Natural Product Managers

A piece of published writing is a product

Dear friends,

Last week, I was chatting with a few peer writers who are thinking about building products. I can’t help but notice the parallels in these two processes. So I want to share some thoughts based on my personal experience.

Hope you enjoy this.

Vivian

---

4 Reasons Writers Are Natural Product Managers

A piece of published writing is a product. Both have a target audience, a process to get from nothing to something, and both improve on the first iteration. As writers perfect their craft, they build skill sets that make them good product managers (PM). 

Being a PM doesn’t require a particular education. In many start-ups, the CEO dubs as the sole product manager until the company has a marketable product and attracts first dollars from investors. 

I’ve been a PM for a few projects. Now, as I develop my writing practice, I see parallels in the process of product management and writing. 

I also notice good PMs and good writers share some core qualities.

Develop a taste for insights 

Writers are constantly researching. They notice anomalies more than others, jot down notes after conversations, talk into voice memos when a thought visits. They translate daily observations into exceptional essays and capture what others miss.

Similarly, PMs have an intuition for problems and a passion to solve them. My role as the PM for the AI-enabled journaling app, Jo, started with my interest in how technology can infer our emotions and act in a way to support us. And if our mobile phones, which know us better than our closest friends, can be an assistant to help us learn about our values and build habits that make us happier. 

Same with the writing process, the initial phase to build any product was to gather insights. I grilled everyone I met about what they learn about themselves from past experiences. I read papers on state-of-the-art algorithms that learn emotions from the text. I tested different mobile apps that assist us to build habits. I took many screenshots of these apps that outnumbered my kids’ photos.

This information capture is always happening in the background. I tracked bits and pieces in a product board, not so different from Notion, my note-taking system for writing. I organized, tagged, and synthesized these insights, looking for the next feature to add to the pipeline. 

Use storytelling to influence 

To make Jo from an idea on paper to a fully committed project, I had to get everyone’s vision aligned, from engineering to management to legal. PMs influence through data, reasoning, and storytelling.

I preached the Jo story to everyone who crossed paths with it. The story is: our interaction with computers is changing. We have more tools than ever at our disposal but we feel less satisfied. The solution is to build technology that is aligned with human values. Jo will contribute to this change.

This story sets a clear mission for my team and inspires our everyday work. 

As a writer, I know a good piece of writing resonates with people’s feelings and transcends everyday details into a purpose beyond ourselves. Good writers make good influencers.

Focus on feedback when building 

In the old days, companies built products in stealth mode till perfection then launched to the world. Now the best practice is to ship quickly then iterate. 

One of the biggest lessons I learned is we kept Jo in the lab for too long. We built Jo for 18 months before real users interacted with it. When we launched, we realized too many hours were spent perfecting standardized features. If we had received feedback earlier, we would focus on features that differentiate Jo from others wellbeing apps.

The same thing happens in writing. Authors used to spend a few lonely years writing a book before it saw the light of day. But now writers are encouraged to get feedback from the very beginning, sharing half-baked ideas as blog articles and on Twitter. Gone are the lonely days. Your writing only becomes better the more you build in public. 

Bias over action

Knowing when to launch a product is like knowing when to stop editing and start publishing. Similar to good writers who curbed their fear and hit publish, PMs are biased to ship.

Few companies died because they launched a suboptimal first version product, but many companies ran out of money when they launched the perfect product too late. 

If you're a writer, you're already good at research, telling stories, getting feedback, and consistently publishing. This means you already have what it takes to be great at building products. 

What product would you like to build first?