Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash
Anytime you sit down to write, you need to be thinking about what you care about.
What are you communicating?
Why do you care about it? Why does it matter to you?
Until you figure that out, you’re not giving others any reason to pay attention to your communication.
It’s OK if you’re not clear about your writing goals in your first draft. But by the time you finish your writing process and are ready to hit the send button, you need to know why your message matters. And find simple and clear words to express it so that others can understand it.
But even if you have an intentional message - you’re clear about what you’re saying and why it matters - there’s an elephant in the room:
It’s possible that the people you write to might not care about your message. In other words, just because you made your whys clear doesn’t mean they’ll resonate with your audience.
Then what do you do? As a tech professional, you cannot simply change your team. You have the product manager, designer, engineer, researcher (or another function) that you have. And you have to work with them. That means if you cannot change the people who you’re working with — the ones who are on the receiving end of your work — then, you have some research work to do.
Go and figure out what your colleagues care about. Get specific, get examples, and understand them deeply.
You can then talk about what they care about in your communication, and share what you care about in a language that speaks to them by blending it in with their areas of interest.
What are your ideas? What writing challenges fascinate you?
👋🏽 I’m Mel…
I’m here to empower tech professionals by:
🙇🏻♀️ Doing career coaching (DM me to book your free discovery call)
✍🏽 Writing on Medium and Substack
🩷 Hosting webinars, making warm intros, and building community