A Marchful of Medium: A Blog Post A Day & Lessons Learned

Jedediah Baker

Every weekday during the month of March this Medium account (@YammerProduct) has posted a piece by a different member of Yammer’s Product Team. It was my job to make sure this happened. Today, it is my turn to author a post. And, to repeat a phrase I heard from many of my teammates as I met with them to discuss what they’d write about, writing is hard. But, as I also told them: shut up and do it.

Managing a rigorous schedule of content-production is not something I’d ever had the pleasure of doing before, and I’ve definitely learned a few things about work, writing, and myself in the last thirty-one days.

Working Like a Network Really Works

Trying to wrangle a few dozen people into each writing several paragraphs is difficult enough, but collecting what they write, making a schedule, keeping track of drafts, and then getting the word out about progress can seem very daunting indeed. Without Yammer, I wouldn’t really know how to begin. Thankfully: Yammer.

I created a group (I called it Blogstravaganza!), made everyone a member, and created a document for each person to dump their thoughts into. I wrote up a schedule and placed everyone, chatting with people to ensure the day I picked for them would work. As all of that was contained within Yammer, my workflow was seamless and I could make progress from anywhere. As the month progressed, the open nature of Yammer allowed me to praise people as they successfully completed their blog posts, while also subtly shaming those who were dragging their feet.

Yammer the company encourages non-hierarchical contributions and decision-making, which sounds great on paper but in practice is pretty scary, because it means your coworkers might do what you say even though you’re not their boss. And, amazingly, they did! Being in charge of this project meant that I had to tell people that what they wrote needed more work or that they needed to stop fussing over it, and the final say stood with me. Professionally (and personally), I grew along with our back catalogue.

You’re a Better Writer Than You Think You Are

Nearly every single person (including me) who wrote a post over the last month told me they couldn’t write or that they were a terrible writer. To which I’d respond: nonsense! But unfortunately just that thought, that belief, is enough to stop people before they even put down their first word. Which is what I’d encourage them to do. And then they would do it.

Turns out the secret to writing is just to write.

Everybody was able to get a few paragraphs down. Then I’d sit with them to discuss direction and determine a focus, or we’d have a chat online about it, or I’d simply say great, keep going, don’t stop, never stop. And once they’d taken it as far as they wanted to go, I’d take it off their hands and take it the rest of the way: editing, moving paragraphs around, adding words here and there, removing words, and just generally polishing it up.

By the end, we’d created an interesting, unique piece that couldn’t have been written by anyone else. From nothing. Which is amazing!

Your Coworkers Know A LOT of Stuff

The lessons above aren’t the only things I learned this month. I also learned that my manager never read my resume, that stickers are the future, that you can learn more at a startup than a huge company, when to test copy, and how to keep the feeling of a small team alive. I learned about inhibiting & promoting pressures, art school, enterprise design, accessibility, and NASA. I learned how to win arguments about product design, how to manage customer feedback, how NOT to listen to executives, how to be the research, and how an app gets built. I learned about the specifics of interviewing for designers, the differences between working in Redmond and working in San Francisco, the similarities between running a startup and being a product manager, why a robot can’t make product decisions, and how to sell more Coke.

All of those ideas came from the people I work with every day. And many of them are things that the people who wrote them didn’t think anyone would care about. But that just goes to prove my last point:

You Are Fascinating

We tend to forget that we are unique, that the things we know and the things we’ve experienced have come together in a very specific way that nobody else shares. The knowledge you have and the way that you express it is special, and there are people out there who will be interested in it.

So shut up and do it. Just write. And share. And relax. And repeat.

Jedediah Baker is a UX Writer at Yammer. Past roles include a singing railway cat, a strange fish, a headless cockney ghost, and a ghost in a bunker in NFLD.