Specificity as a competitive advantage

Scaling Product Manager impact via specific communication

Product Managers spend all of their time communicating. This includes everything from one-line aspirational visions to detailed requirements, from meetings to documents or presentations. Therefore, stellar communication skills are a must-have for PMs.

However, one aspect of communication that is rarely talked about is specificity. Using specific language means using words with a single meaning, and leaving nothing to the imagination. The audience shouldn’t have to read your mind or guess what is being asked of them.

If communication is the hallmark of a great PM, specificity is the hallmark of great communication. This is because specificity brings clarity and thus multiplies and scales a PM’s impact.

Here’s why:

When specificity is lacking, three main things happen:

1. ↪️ Wrong direction: teams can go in a direction that you hadn’t intended. For example, you had intended to build a bird but the team built an airplane.
2. 🚫 Inaction: no action is taken based on your feedback or direction because the recipient doesn’t understand what you’re asking for.
3. 🗣 Unproductive conversations: meetings are met with silence because no one has understood the implications of what you’re saying, or people are talking past each other without getting anywhere productive.

These consequences can be dire because they are fertile ground for mistrust, misunderstanding, and even disengagement. Like COVID, ambiguous communication is an invisible virus that permeates teams and wreaks havoc on the outcomes a team is trying to achieve. Essentially, a PM cannot be effective without specificity in their communication.

The following examples make this clearer:

Nonspecific: This product is for millennials.

Specific: This product is for women between 20–30 years old, living in Seattle, who care deeply about climate change and being fashionable.

Consequences of ambiguity: each individual defines millennials differently and therefore may be pursuing conflicting goals and ideas, resulting in slower progress towards an end goal.

Nonspecific: I need feedback on my product review deck.

Specific: I’m looking for feedback on whether there’s something I’m not considering, what risks I have missed, and whether the flow is logical.

Consequences of ambiguity: colleague gives you no feedback or feedback on something you don’t care about, such as formatting.

Nonspecific: Person X is difficult to work with.

Specific: Person X values precision over speed, which directly contradicts with the team’s ethos and the stage of the product’s lifecycle.

Consequences of ambiguity: colleague doesn’t change behaviour and problems persist.

Nonspecific: This design isn’t hitting the mark.

Specific: This design does not express the brand’s light-hearted and fun voice. How might we test brand perception of the current design with our target audience?

Consequences of ambiguity: designer doesn’t understand what’s wrong with the designs and what aspects need reconsideration, resulting in no effective changes.

Nonspecific: We’re going to change our team processes.

Specific: We’re going to shift from Scrum to Kanban and meet twice a week instead of once.

Consequences of ambiguity: team members can’t provide constructive feedback on whether a new proposed process would work, what they disagree with, or ideas to complement the new process, resulting in no buy-in from the team.

So how do you get better at becoming more specific?

First, let’s use this definition to help us understand what we’re aiming for: specific language uses words that have a single meaning, leaving nothing to the imagination. This is our benchmark in every piece of communication, whether it be written or verbal. However, it is most important in the artefacts we produce (vision, strategy, goals, requirements) as they are our main source of leverage.

Tactics for becoming more specific:

1. 👀 Observe. When have you left a meeting confused? When are you unsure of the next steps? When do people have blank looks in meetings? When do they repeatedly ask the same questions? Ask yourself: what led to this? What level of detail would have brought more clarity? What framing would have elicited more useful responses?
2. 🤷‍♀️ Define. When you begin a document or a conversation, define key terms upfront. Not in the appendix, not on page two, but on page one. Tell people what’s what from the get-go and then go about your business.
3. 🚀 Work towards an outcome. Ask yourself: what outcomes are you hoping to achieve? Then ensure that each detail builds up to that outcome and will result in the action you are hoping for.
4. ✍️ Write. Every “specific” example above contains 2–3 times as many words as its ambiguous counterpart. This is not a license to be verbose but a benchmark to use when practicing specificity in your communication. Amazon banned PowerPoint presentations and switched to six-page documents eighteen years ago to enforce specificity and detail. Do this for yourself. Create thinking documents for yourself and add as much detail as possible (in a readable manner, of course, don’t word vomit).
5. # Translate words into numbers, where it makes sense. Sometimes there’s nothing as specific as numbers. Instead of “we want to grow our business next year”, state “we want to triple our revenue by the end of next year”. People will be able to debate the word “triple” and have productive conversations about what that number should actually look like.

How do you determine the right level of specificity?

1. Ask for feedback: calibrate yourself by asking peers, especially other PMs, for feedback. Some will need more specificity, some less; a one-size-fits-all approach won’t work.
2. Observe feedback: watch for blank stares or meandering eyes, this means attention is lost and too much detail was provided.
3. Repeat questions: if you’re being asked the same questions again and again, you haven’t been specific enough. Recognize this and address it head on.
4. Unfamiliar topic: when the audience isn’t familiar with the topic being discussed, err on the side of more detail; sound bites won’t work.

When there is specificity in communication, every conversation becomes more productive. Teams move faster in the right direction. This is a direct business impact of specific communication and one that a PM can directly influence. Therefore, if improving your communication skills is your goal, start with specificity and see your impact multiply.