Why Every High-Functioning Software Team Needs This Atomic Writing System
Stop me if this sounds familiar…
You’re staring at a Google Doc. It’s empty, of course.
An all-too-familiar feeling of frustration and paralysis washes over you as the cursor taunts you… just blinking.
You stare harder at the screen, hoping the words will summon themselves. Nothing!
You’ve recently started working on a new feature. Something a ton of users are going to see (and scrutinize.)
Everything about the task at hand seemed reasonable so far. The project deadline? Crystal clear. Design? Nailed it.
But… There’s one problem you just can’t shake: What do I actually write?
Even more frustrating, you know there’s an inescapable back-and-forth Slack thread of small revisions in store from your teammates.
You shake your head and sink back into your chair, feeling defeated.
There HAS to be a faster, better way to write product copy that simply works (without wanting to pull your hair out!)
Good news — there is.
I created a simple framework for our team to use, so no one is faced with a totally blank page again.
The Problem: Creating First Drafts Seemed Much Harder Than It Needed To Be
In chatting with some team members my first week at Tailwind, I learned that the process for creating any piece of writing was pretty repetitive. There would be a general discussion about what needed to be written, and then someone would try to translate that conversation into an outline or first draft.
The feedback on the first drafts was often pretty similar: get clearer on the goal of the piece, its specific audience, and the value it provides to the audience. For product copy, the conversation often centered on who was going to see the copy, where they were going to see it, and what it needed to help them do.
As a product designer, I’m always curious about how to do better creative work (like writing) so immediately became curious about how this process could be improved. From my background in content marketing, I knew that if you can get to a good first draft quickly, the entire writing process is exponentially faster, and the final product is exponentially better.
But…getting the first draft down on paper is often the hardest part of the writing process.
I also knew that all good writing shares some common characteristics:
- Clear structure
- Understandable sentences
- Succinctness
Given this, I began to wonder, how might we get to good first drafts faster for any kind of writing?
Our Solution: An Atomic Writing Guide
I began by thinking about how I could break down these components of good writing into clear guidelines.
As I listed them out, I realized they fell into categories naturally similar to those from Atomic Design. Certain components were true across any piece of communication, and others were true only for certain kinds of writing, like product copy.
I quickly created a checklist of these components and ordered them by specificity. I began with the biggest core requirements of good communication, like focusing more on value than features, then added in specific requirements for things like good email subject lines. I kept myself from diving into too much detail so that I had to focus on the most important aspects I needed to cover. I also wanted to provide examples of wherever I could, since having a clear model for what to write is another way to speed up the process.
Applying my own insight about getting to first drafts fast, I had a call with David and Justine from our marketing team to go over what seemed to fit, and what could be improved. I wanted to get feedback from people who were writing lots of copy on a daily basis. My goal wasn’t to create an exhaustive procedure everyone had to use, but rather to give everyone an easy way to get the basics down for every first draft.
Why It Works (Hint: Friction = The Enemy!)
Most feedback on written communication has to do with the rhetorical effectiveness of the content, i.e. does it get its point across and move its audience to the right action? This effectiveness is largely determined by how closely the piece speaks to the needs of its audience and how clear its message is.
By getting specific on these aspects before writing, and then ensuring they’re reflected in the piece, it’s much easier to create outstanding content. The Atomic writing guide removes much of the friction that occurs when someone tries to do this from scratch (as is often the case on small teams). It’s particularly helpful for teams where people work cross-functionally — when someone isn’t writing every day, having a quick checklist to fall back on is a huge help.
The guide isn’t meant to be exhaustive, and it’s supposed to change and grow over time.
This approach will allow the team to adapt it as they need to, so they can make this process work for them, instead of needing to work for the process. Iteration will also prevent too much uniformity — you don’t want 50 landing pages that look identical, and you don’t want every email to sound the same.
“Make the change easy, then make the easy change.”
Though the guide is brand new, my hope is that by sharing it early with the team and making easily accessible in Slab, our team wiki, people can begin to own different parts that are relevant to the kind of writing they do every day.
This will eventually make it easier for any new team member to quickly write good content, no matter what kind of role they have.
No More Blank Page Frustration! Experiment With Your Own Atomic Writing Guide.
This Atomic Writing Guide will immediately show you if your writing has the basic components to make it effective, and it will also make you much faster at translating abstract goals into specific messages and other types of copy. It frees up mental bandwidth so you can focus on being creative and compelling, rather than getting stuck on what audience you want to address.
TL;DR:
- It’s common for small software teams to reinvent the writing process for every piece of content. This is slow and ineffective.
- By breaking good writing down into specific components, you can get clear on what matters before putting pen to paper, and you can have a map for how to make sure your piece is effective as you write it.
- Your first drafts will be faster, better, and you will be able to focus on being creative instead of just getting the job done.
You can see Tailwind’s Atomic Writing Guide here. Copy the document, try it on your team, and leave a comment with your feedback!
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