Write Things Down Without Robots
Writing it out isn't about the doc.
A take with no equations? Sounds risky, but let’s give it a shot…
In the ancient past, biz writers read their documents more than all other readers combined. LLMs changed that. Now, the Reddit Regressions frequently generate memos, design docs, PRDs, etc, etc with only light editing by the responsible parties.
I don’t like it.
All Change Is Bad, and the kids really must get off my lawn.
Biz writing is not about the document itself. A newspaper article or a book is its own end, but that’s not really the case for the memo. The point of writing it out line-by-line is to think through the problem and its solution step-by-step. Maybe other people will read it and be convinced, but primarily, the author organizes their thoughts, folks add a few comments, and then it serves as the basis—an outline—for a live discussion where the decision actually gets made.
The traditional biz doc represents, if not an engrossing read, how a person thought through a problem. It might lack all the other elements of “good writing,” but it has the most important one: the author wrote it to say something, and they thought it through.
The LLMs make every doc, wiki, PRD, etc, read like a high school essay on The Scarlett Letter—naturally, because they are written for the same reason: a box must be checked. The main difference is that the pre-LLM high school essay usually has an endearing personality and a visible human struggle to make word count: “I think it is bad what they did to Hester Prynne, really. I certainly wouldn’t like it were it done to me, the Golden Rule and all…” The LLMs have that repetitive, exhausting quality sans voice.
Writing it out is the best way to convince yourself that the idea you had really works, when you consider all the information carefully. When drafting, you end up thinking things like, “Oh, wait, I forgot about the subscribers who are still grandfathered into the 2007 plan.” Writing moves information from RAM to Disk, freeing up working memory to analyze your 2-am-brilliance critically.
“Write an argument for…” or “Write a PRD for a new feature that does X, Y, Z” are silly prompts because if you haven’t written it out, you haven’t convinced yourself the argument or plan is true or a good idea.
“Tell me why this rough doc is wrong…” is a much better prompt. The Robots have good thoughts once they are dealing with real output, and are great at catching questions you forgot to ask.
They’re terrible at generating biz docs from a paragraph and data—which isn’t really a knock on ‘em. They got a paragraph prompt and had to write a whole essay, and their topic isn’t an important 19th-century novel, but the packaging of an HR SaaS product.
It’s a tough assignment.
Thanks for reading!
Zach
Connect at: https://linkedin.com/in/zlflynn