Michael Rill

Einfach machen

Category: Leadership

  • The pivot fallacy

    The Reckoning

    It was  5:47pm on a Friday after a long week of work. Only the quarterly business review separated the team from a well-deserved weekend. Routine. But this one felt like a reckoning. The product team sat in uncomfortable silence as the VP of Product sketched bold new goals on the whiteboard. These weren’t the goals they’d been working toward. In fact, no one was entirely sure what had happened to the goals they had been working on.

    “This is what we need to do!” the VP declared, underlining the new vision with a flourish.

    After a long stretch of silence someone finally spoke up: “What about the initiatives we kicked off last quarter? Are they still a priority?”

    The VP frowned, already erasing a corner of the whiteboard. “We’ve pivoted since then. This direction is more aligned with our growth strategy.”

    The word “pivoted” hung in the air – again. Frustration simmered around the table. The engineers felt whiplash. The designers were demoralized. The product managers were overwhelmed. No one could deny the ambition in the VP’s vision, but they’d seen this play out before: a flurry of excitement, half-finished work, too many fragmented commitments and no measurable outcomes. Nobody could remember the last time they delivered something great they were truly proud of. 

    This time, though, one product manager decided to take a different approach.

    The Turning Point

    After the meeting, she stayed late at her desk, sifting through notes from the past few months. It wasn’t pretty. Goals had shifted. Timelines had slipped. Decisions were scattered across various messaging threads and impromptu hallway conversations.

    “If we keep running like this,” she thought, “we’re never going to get anywhere.”

    So, she did what no one else had done: she started documenting.

    She wrote a clear product plan—not just what the team was doing, but why it mattered. She outlined the objectives, the customer needs, and the measurable outcomes they aimed to deliver. She created a timeline, linked dependencies, and included a section for open questions.

    The next day, she shared it with the team.

    “This is what we’ve been working toward,” she said, “and this is how we’re tracking against it. If leadership wants us to pivot, we need to capture that too—but let’s make sure we’re not losing sight of our progress along the way.”

    The team was skeptical. Documentation felt like just another chore. But as the weeks passed, something remarkable happened.

    The Moment of Truth

    When leadership called another meeting to discuss new priorities, the product manager brought the document.

    “We hear where you’re coming from,” she said, “but here’s what we’re working on right now, and here’s how far along we are.”

    She walked them through the plan: the problem it solved, the expected impact, and the remaining steps. Leadership paused. The VP nodded. “You’re right,” he said. “Let’s get this across the finish line first.”

    For the first time in months, the team felt clarity.

    The document became their compass, keeping everyone aligned and focused. When new ideas surfaced, they weren’t dismissed—they were documented, reviewed, and prioritized against the existing plan. Everyone understood not just what they were working on but why.

    Momentum built. The team started hitting milestones. And when they shipped the product, it wasn’t just functional—it was impactful, solving a real problem for customers.

    The Power of the Written Word

    Without written plans, leadership fills the void with ideas—often brilliant, but chaotic and ever-changing. Documentation doesn’t kill ambition – it harnesses it. It captures the need for explicit structure to create a more inclusive environment, where the new starter has the same access to information as the “old guard”. 

    A well-written product plan provides a foundation for creativity and execution. It turns a team from reactive to proactive, from scattered to strategic.

    It creates clarity in the chaos, showing leadership where progress is happening and enabling teams to balance focus with flexibility. It turns pivots into informed decisions instead of knee-jerk reactions.

    In the absence of a compass, people wander. But with a product plan in hand, teams don’t just execute better—they aim higher and get there faster.

  • Rituals of modern product teams

    In case your podcast queue is running low, I highly recommend queuing up this presentation from Figma’s Config 2023 conference: Rituals of modern product teams – Yuhki Yamashita, Shishir Mehrotra (Config 2023) – YouTube

    The basic premise is that effective teams have established a number of rituals over time, and Yamashita and Mehrotra give a quick rundown of some of those rituals (screenshot below). I am fascinated by the organizing framework they use to categorize those rituals: Cadence, Catalyst, Context. Teams should make sure they have the right mix within their meetings (or updates – not everything has to be a meeting) and not confuse one with the others.

    Anyway, I highly recommend listening to (or watching) that talk.  

  • Getting things done

    More than twenty years ago a book came out by David Allen called Getting Things Done. For a while it garnered quite a cult following and it resonated with me as well. The framework was accessible as it had lots of helpful. tactical advice that was easy to implement, but it also had a lot of depth. Similar to the old PacMan arcade game: “A minute to learn, a lifetime to master”.

    Recently it re-entered my consciousness as the Get Things Done concept popped up twice in short succession, both times taking it literally and turning it into meaningful career advice. First, Andrew Bozworth wrote about it on his blog:

    Too often I see someone who is responsible for accomplishing an important goal doing the best they can in the face of immense odds. It may sound counterintuitive, but the mandate of such a job is not to “do the best you can.” It is to get it done. And if the way to get it done is to ask for help, then that’s what you should do.

    Boz.com – Get It Done

    Then President Obama put it in similar terms:

    I’ve seen at every level people who are very good at describing problems, people who are very sophisticated in explaining why something went wrong or why something can’t get fixed, but what I’m always looking for is, no matter how small the problem or how big it is, somebody who says, ‘Let me take care of that.’ If you project an attitude of, whatever it is that’s needed, I can handle it and I can do it, then whoever is running that organization will notice. I promise.

    Both times, the concept is so simple, that I feel a bit awkward turning those three words into paragraphs. Similar to PacMan this is easy to learn, but will be meaningful on every level throughout your career: Move something that is not “done” yet and get it into a state that is considered as done. No matter how small or big this is.

    Over the course of your career, the “Things” part will likely increase in scope as you gain more expertise and competence. And the tactics you have to employ to get them to “Done” will be likely change from individual contribution to some form of influencing. But the basic will always be the same:

    • Define what “done” looks like
    • Identify a path from “here” to “done”
    • Take ownership to make sure that we get to “done”

    There you have it. Decades worth of career advice applicable to all levels and stages in your career, captured in three words: Get Things Done.

  • The plateau of meh

    The plateau of meh

    Most successful careers contain actually quite a few plateaus once observed up close. Wikipedia entries of famous people fascinate me, because they show that their paths are not as clean as one might remember.

    There is a variant of the hero’s journey that is often overlooked, because it is far less dramatic and more mundane. One where the hero does not fight the fierce monster or rises up to the insurmountable challenge. Rather, one where the hero just has to endure a slog, has to dig deep to find motivation, has to live with the fact that between epic challenges and glorious victories there are a lot of days where things just go neither right nor wrong.

    Pick a random famous person that you admire and look at their Wikipedia entry. You will find stellar achievements at the top, but once you scroll down, you get to the career plateaus where artists fight petty legal battles with prior management, where uninspired albums and movies are released, and where whole seasons are just meaningless struggle. Wikipedia entry often do not gloss over those periods or artificially dramatizes them like a lot of biographies.

    Another example is the stock market: Over a period of 20 years, the ten best days make up for more than half of the stock market. That literally means that despite healthy total returns on 99.9% of the days nothing of substance happens or even worse, massive setbacks happen. Unfortunately, it is impossible to predict those ten days. The only viable strategy is to play the long game and stay invested in the market, endure the losses with the knowledge that you will make up for it in the long run.

    The meta-achievement of any career is making it through those plateaus of utter mundaneness, keep honing your skills, putting yourself out there, increasing the luck-surface-area, being ready for the next meaningful step without knowing when and what it will be. Because one thing is true: If you keep trying and learning, the plateau of meh is temporary.

    I was reminded by all of this by Jeffrey Zeldman telling the story of his career in the advertising industry and the messiness behind every success:

    The ability to keep coming up with more ads was why this Moses-looking dude had a roomful of shiny trophies, and I did not. If I wanted a career like his, I would have to seek deeply in my soul for the strength and willingness not to give up. Career aside, if I wanted to create meaningful work, I would need to develop the patience and willingness to watch people kill my darlings, and come back with newer, fresher, better darlings. […] But keeping a positive attitude when an idea I’ve fallen in love with gets rejected remains the second most important thing I can do on a daily basis as I practice my current craft. […] The well is never dry. We only run out of ideas when we choose to stop doing the work.

    Sticking To It – Automattic Design

    Photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash

  • Managing Your Career Without a Manager

    Interesting post by Saswati Saha Mitra about how to take charge of your career in the absence of a manager/ leader to provide you with direction. Interestingly, the categories she lays out are also good ones to use as a manager to provide guidance to your team:

    • Craft: It was clearly vital to continue expanding my hands-on knowledge of how to do research and communicate its impact. With so many new tools and ideas emerging in our field all the time, I needed to dedicate some time to keeping up with them.
    • Connections: I also wanted to deepen the relationships I was making within WhatsApp and Meta, and to build a strong peer group that could help me learn how to do my job better.
    • Stretch opportunities: These are side projects that might fall outside of my daily remit, but would advance my growth by pushing me to explore new and interesting areas.
    • Organizational intelligence: I wanted to continue deepening my understanding of how Meta works and makes critical decisions.
    Managing Your Career Without a Manager | by Saswati Saha Mitra | Meta Research | Medium

  • Companies are not families

    Good New York Times interview with the new Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy. Near the end he dropped a nice nugget:

    And I say you’ll never hear me say we’re a family. We’re a sports team, and we’re trying to win the Super Bowl. And so we’re going to put the best players on the field we can. And if you go down the field, and we throw you the ball, and you drop it a bunch, we’re going to cut you.

    We spend the majority of our waking hours at work and with the people at work. But I always die a little inside when I hear teams talk about being a family. While it might be an alluring thought, it is neither realistic nor appealing. Family is about being bound together and in the best of cases about shared values and unconditional love.

    Work ultimately is always at the base level a transactional relationship. You work and get compensated for it. At work, you are replaceable. Everyone is. To your family, you are not. A workplace is replaceable. A family is not.

    In that regard, I’d rather aspire to establishing a community at work. One that promotes values like caring, love, a sense of belonging, respect, empathy, joy, and fairness. These might all be attributes shared with families, but there should be a clear line separating work and family.

    High functioning teams add layers on top of it like shared values, growing together and standing up for one another. But ultimately, it’s a loose band that last for a few years until it doesn’t. And that’s OK.

  • Staying Clear of Golden Apples

    Staying Clear of Golden Apples

    Rick Klau once gave one of the most influential intro presentations to Objectives and Key Results: How Google sets goals: OKRs / Startup Lab Workshop – YouTube. It’s an evergreen talk and has gotten nearly 1.2 million views over the past nine years. He recently followed up with a post What my OKRs video got wrong. In that post he mentioned that one of his key learnings is “What you and your team say no to is at least as important as what you say yes to”.

    It reminded me of a story that I often tell when introducing OKRs. It is about Atalanta, a heroine in Greek mythology. If you have watched Disney’s Brave you will notice similarities with Merida, the main character.

    Atalanta was a strong, independent woman, and she was the fastest runner in ancient Sparta. To her father’s chagrin, she did not care to get married. Her father did not agree to that plan and set up a contest in which young men would race to win her hand in marriage.

    To keep her freedom, she asked to be allowed to participate in the race herself, i.e. race for her own hand. Her father, not thinking she had a chance of winning, agreed to the deal.

    At the same time, there was a young man called Hippomenes, who fell in love with Atalanta a long time ago. The race was his chance to marry his love. He knew how fast Atalanta was, so he prayed to Aphrodite. Gossip and intrigue are nothing new, and Aphrodite didn’t like Atalanta. So, she gave Hippomenes three golden apples and told him to drop one at a time during the race to distract Atalanta. To her demise, she was so fond of those golden apples that she stopped to pick them up.

    After each of the first two apples, Atalanta was able to recover the lead, but when she stopped for the third, Hippomenes won the race. It took all three apples and all of his speed, but Hippomenes was finally successful, winning the race and Atalanta’s hand.

    Adapted from Christina Wodtke‘s Execution is everything

    If only Atalanta had set clear goals and stock to them. She would have stayed single, footloose and fancy free.

    Atalanta’s story is surprisingly timely. We all are running into golden apples every day. So much to do, so little time. However, unless we focus on a few things, we spread ourselves too thinly and what feels busy is actually distraction. OKRs help discern the trivial many from the vital few.

    The most obvious example is the selection of key results. When introducing OKRs a lot of teams start with more than five key results for each objective, because those are the metrics they are tracking. Over the course of one or two quarters most realize that focusing on three-ish key results per objective helps them focus their energy and get more done by saying no to more things.

    In other words: If at all possible, avoid the temptation of golden apples!

    Image: Herp Atalanta and Hippomenes.jpg – Wikimedia Commons

  • The dogs won’t eat it – Choosing OKRs well

    The concept of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) is deceptively easy.

    • Objectives are ambitious, qualitative and time bound goals of a team. Each objective is typically supported by ~3-4 key results.
    • Key Results are measurable achievements that contribute to those goals. They are business outcomes and typically expressed in terms of adoption, engagement, cost, performance or quality.

    An OKR describes both what a team wants to achieve and how it is going to measure its achievement. “We will achieve $Objective as measured by $KeyResult1, $KeyResult2 and $KeyResult3.”

    At the same time, coming up with good OKRs is hard. One has to identify the few key metrics that really matter and to commit on outcomes (e.g. growth) rather than output (e.g. launching a new feature). That requires judgement, uncomfortable leaps of faith and a willingness to experiment.

    Jeffrey Zeldman tells a great anecdote in the context of Marketing that illustrates what happens if you choose your Key Results badly: The dogs won’t eat it.

  • Momentum from Day One – Getting Onboarding Right

    Momentum from Day One – Getting Onboarding Right

    Creating a good onboarding experience as a manager is tricky at the best of times. It’s even harder when you are forced to work from home against the backdrop of a global health crisis. It is harder to recognize the challenges of new hires and it’s harder for them to ramp up and integrate in the absence of ambient hallway chatter.

    At the same time, it is possible and achievable. Looking back at my own onboarding journeys, I’ve learned a lot from the good, the bad and the ugly. Most learnings are transferable into distributed settings.

    Let’s look at the bad ones first. Once, my new boss told me in our first meeting that he’s moving teams – I just relocated to the other side of the globe to work with him. That was also the job where I did not have a computer or a phone for the first week – particularly funny as I worked for a telco and had to read printed PowerPoint decks for the first week. Another time, I was put into “stealth mode” … without ever re-emerging. Or that time when I did not have a project to work on for the first two months – it was called “being on the beach” and it drove me up the walls.

    But there were also the great experiences. When my new boss walked me through everything by himself – not just giving me the opportunity to ask questions, but guiding me through what he considered important. Or when I arrived at a desk with a brand-new machine including access to all relevant systems. Or the onboarding buddy, who took it as a matter of personal pride to make sure that I had a great start.

    First impressions matter. Starting on the right foot and getting momentum is a great confidence booster for every new starter. At the same time, without guidance, new hires have to work twice as hard to learn what they need to be productive. When working from home, it takes a more deliberate effort to give new hires the necessary experiences and exposure for a solid start. Always remember that it is a bigger deal for them than it is for you. They will remember it, one way or another. Your job is to make sure those will be good memories.

    Below are a few ideas that I collected over the years.

    Get the basics right without fail

    I once attended a conversation with Ben Roberts-Smith, a recipient of the Victoria Cross, the highest award in the Australian Army. He shared his view on what separated elite units from other teams: They get the basics right – 100% of the time, without fail, no excuses.

    Being exceptional is not about complex techniques. It is all about making sure that basic procedures were trained over and over so that everybody could rely on them.[footnote]Same with professional athletes. They are able to execute over and over and over throughout each season.[/footnote]

    For onboarding, the basics are as follows:

    1. A welcome mail to your new hire before they start. Give them the opportunity to ask questions, help with logistics (when to be where, what to wear,[footnote]Dress code can be quite anxiety inducing and nobody wants to take a gamble for their first day in the office[/footnote] …) and effectively transition them from the recruiting to the onboarding stage.
    2. Basic equipment is ready before day one. Desk, computer, displays, chair, logins and everything else that is necessary for them to get started. In work-from-home settings, ship the equipment well ahead of time. Also let them know if they have a company allowance to spend on a home office setup. Every person who starts a new job is excited to get going. Make sure they can.
    3. A team member welcomes the new starter. Traditionally that would have been in the lobby. These days it’s a phone or video call first thing in the morning. Welcome them to the team, guide them through their initial steps and answer first questions. This is just an intro. Go easy on them and don’t overwhelm them just yet.
    4. Welcome mail to the team. Include a photo[footnote]If the new starter is fine with it.[/footnote] and a short blurb that covers their background, something light-hearted and what they will be working on.

    That’s it: welcome email to the new hire, equipment ready, greeter at the door and a welcome email to the team. For every new starter, every time, on their first day, with a smile.

    Invest in a starter document

    Standard checklists for the first day, week and month are a good starting point. Take it to the next level by creating a custom starter document for each candidate. The purpose is to help them hit the ground running. It also signals that you put thought into that person’s experience. Topics that the starter document covers are:

    1. What success looks like: Write down your expectations for the first 30 days. Outline what you expect the new starter to be able to do, have completed or responsibilities they have taken over. Don’t gloss over it, but put thought into it and write it down. In remote settings skew those goals more towards building relationships. Google’s study about successful teams revealed that a key driver of success is psychological safety. Team members should feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of others. You can only get there if you know the people and the culture of the place. That’s more difficult in distributed settings. Set checkpoints around building relationships, getting to know people and learning how the organization works.
    2. People to engage with: A list of people to have conversations with and suggested topics to talk about. Not everybody is a social butterfly and born networker. That’s why it’s important to have suggested topics to talk about. It can make the difference between an awkward chat and the start of a great collaboration.
    3. Critical documents to familiarize with: These can be wikis, strategy memos, notes from the last code review, etc. Any artifacts that show what is important for the team and how the team operates.
    4. Mentoring: To set the new team member up for long-term success, encourage establishing a relationship with somebody more senior outside of the team. While the best mentoring relationships evolve organically, it helps to kick-start the process and identify a potential mentor. Ideally, they are 2-3 years ahead of them. If the gap gets bigger, most people develop a rose-colored nostalgia filter and become less helpful (“We were hungry, broke, and miserable. And we liked it fine that way!”).
    5. Core meetings: What are the regular meetings that this person should attend. Those meetings are a good opportunity to experience team culture, get context and get exposure to other team members. Be mindful of invites in work-from-home arrangements. In the absence of ambient hallway chat, a new hire will never find out about a meeting if you don’t explicitly let them know.

    A starter document takes time to compile. It is an investment and that pays dividends in terms of getting your new team member started on the right foot and building meaningful relationships right from the start.

    Assign a starter project

    A big driver of job satisfaction in the initial few weeks is the first project that a new hire works on. Set them up for success. It should provide the right mix of challenge, learning, contribution and opportunity to shine. Having a starter project can be the difference between second guessing your job decision and creating a feeling of belonging and emotional safety.

    It should be the exception that you don’t have a starter project. In those rare cases, explain that you are still identifying a project and that you want to set them up for success rather than keeping them busy. For the first few days that can be OK. But after a week, there should be a project that they can dig into.

    Let them own the onboarding document

    The onboarding document is a team-specific collection of “all the things I wish I had known when I started here”. Below are some ideas for inspiration:

    1. Checklists for the first few days
    2. Link to professional development framework, career paths, expectations for each level, …
    3. Highlight projects: artifacts from the best projects of the last 2-3 years.
    4. Common data resources: how to access tools, industry data, telemetry, repos, …
    5. Helpful links in the company intranet. The lunch menu always makes this list.
    6. Link to the company org chart.
    7. Printer instructions and how to fix common problems with your machine and how to contact the help desk.
    8. Most commonly used acronyms.
    9. How to get to the office, where to register the car for parking, …
    10. Company discounts: most companies have deals with local businesses. Either list them here or link to them.

    The onboarding document should cover all those questions that one might be embarrassed to ask, but that everyone has.[footnote]Basecamp has published their Employee Handbook, which is a good source for inspiration. Clef has done the same. [/footnote]

    Starting an onboarding document is always hard. Start small and have the team collectively create a first draft, the 80% version. Then ask each new starter to be the custodian of the onboarding document for the first 30 days. Let them fix links that went out of date, add the stuff they found useful and clean up the structure when things got out of hand. Ask them to present their changes at a team meeting. That way, everyone benefits from their changes. Over time, that document will get better and better.

    Check-in often

    Throughout onboarding, stay in touch with your new team member. Now that we are all working remotely, this is critical. They haven’t built their network yet and might feel lost. Include them as much as possible to avoid unpleasant surprises.

    Be available and respond in a timely manner. In addition, put formal check-ins into the calendar after the first week, the first month, the first quarter and the first half year. Schedule them well in advance, listen carefully and answer their questions.

    I recommend assuming some of the responsibility for new hires to hit their 30-day goals. It’s much harder for them in remote settings, especially if the company is not a traditional distributed company. Pay attention and do your part (e.g. inviting them into meetings, making sure they get exposure, warming up contacts, …). Otherwise your new team members will have to work that much harder.

    Last, but not least, encourage your new team member to come up with things that should be fixed at the 30-day check-in. After a while all of us develop blind spots with the status quo. Having fresh eyes to point out things that are broken is an opportunity to reverse-engineer a better onboarding process.

    The 180-day check in might seem odd, since the new team member no longer feels “new” and is fully immersed in the team. Reflecting on the first few days with a bit of distance means that people are no longer starry-eyed and bushy-tailed. I had quite a few people tell me “When I started, I thought it was my fault that [X] didn’t work, but now I know that this part is broken and needs to be fixed.” [X] might be a system, a process or the attitude of a fellow teammate, who forgot how challenging the first few days on a team are.

    Last words

    So, there you have it:

    1. Get the basics right without fail
    2. Invest in a starter document
    3. Assign a starter project
    4. Let them own the onboarding document
    5. Check in often

    First impressions matter and a good onboarding experience makes the difference between a highly engaged, confident and productive team member and an unnerved employee that feels disconnected. They need to work twice as hard to recover from a failed start. While the bar is raised in the middle of a global health crisis, a good onboarding experience is still achievable. Companies like Automattic and Basecamp who have been working with distributed teams by default show the way.

    Always remember that this is a much bigger deal for them than it is for you. They will remember it for a long time.

    Photo by Braden Collum on Unsplash

  • Less is more … difficult – writing summaries

    Less is more … difficult – writing summaries

    Writing is hard and writing a summary is no exception. If you are working on proposals, general research or strategies, at some point you have to summarize your idea. As Pascal once said “I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.” A summary takes time to get right.

    The investment does pay off as it makes your work easier to digest, improves structure and highlights your very best insights. It’s not uncommon that only the summary gets read. That’s actually a good thing. But it raises the stakes to get the summary right and you still need to put in the work – your summary will only be as good as the underlying work. But there are a few tips and tricks that helped me in the past.

    The basics

    What is an executive summary

    The summary is where good strategy projects start and end. It synthesizes the results including the recommendation or the implications of the work. Taken from the Wikipedia

    An executive summary […] summarizes a longer report […] in such a way that readers can rapidly become acquainted with a large body of material without having to read it all. […] It is intended as an aid to decision-making and has been described as the most important part of a business plan.

    Wikipedia – Executive Summary

    Three functions of a summary

    The summary can serve you in three ways. Most obviously, it summarizes your work into its most concise and compelling way. But there are two more applications:

    It can help you manage a project. Writing a hypothesis at the start of a project in the form of a summary helps you identify the main components that you need to understand to make a recommendation. Those can then become workstreams. Keeping your summary updated throughout a project helps you maintain focus and course correct where necessary. By the way, Amazon’s method of starting projects with the press release is this theory in action.

    Last, but not least, the summary is a rough outline for the narrative of the rest of your work. As such it provides you with an initial structure and the underlying logic. Having the summary first, will save you a lot of time later when you need to get the narrative right.

    When to use one

    So when is the best time to write the summary? Always! Start with the summary even if you don’t know all the details. This is your hypothesis or “one day answer”, i.e. what your instinct tells you after the first day of research. It will also tell you what you need to find out. Maintain your summary throughout the project and adapt it to new insights. Fine tune the summary at the end of your project to get it right. Over the course of this process the summary will change a lot as you learn, but it will make sure that you stay on course.

    As with everything, it takes practice and is uncomfortable at the start. And reading your first draft at the end of a project always is a mix of pride, because you got a few things right from the start, and utter cringe, because of how naïve you were. That is OK and part of the learning process.

    Below are a few concepts that helped me in the past.

    Structure, structure, structure

    Rocks and pebbles

    A lack of structure only confuses your reader. So, how to create a good one? A visualization might help. Imagine a roaring river and your job is to get your reader from one side to the other without getting their feet wet. To do this, you have to identify the rocks in the river that you can step on. Each is supported by a number of pebbles that give it stability. The rocks are your main points. The pebbles are supporting facts. Good summaries work with four to six rocks, each supported by three to five pebbles. Those numbers work well in my experience. You might need less, rarely more.

    Situation, complication, so what

    The tricky bit is now to know what kind of rocks you need. As any good story has an introduction, a middle part and an end, a good summary includes a description of the situation, the complication and a recommendation. The situation is a matter-of-fact description of the status quo. It should be uncontentious and give the reader sufficient context. The complication illustrates why we are looking into a situation. It tells the reader what the problem is. Last, but not least there should be conclusion or recommendation as in “What should we do about it?”.

    Break your writer’s block with Hulk speak

    Getting your structure right is hard. Often we get side tracked by finding the right words or shortening long sentences while we still haven’t cracked the overall structure. What helped me in the past is to revert to Hulk Speak:

    WRITING IS HARD
    YOU THINK TOO MUCH!
    WE HAVE A SOLUTION
    THE HULK SUMMARY!
    CHANNEL INNER HULK VOICE!
    BULLET LIST!
    FEW WORDS
    SAY IT. EFFECTIVE!
    NOW, SMASH CAR!

    Smash your writer’s block with The Hulk Summary

    Try it out and force yourself to less than five words per statement. It’s amazing how much it drives clarity. It forces you to use simple words and choose them carefully – you don’t get that many.

    Be brief

    Don’t be comprehensive

    It is tempting to give into the urge to show your sweat and write down all the good insights that you found out over the course of your research. Don’t. Just because you did a lot of research, doesn’t mean that your reader has to pay for it. Rather select the few relevant things that your reader should know. What is it that really matters. Very often that requires a healthy distance to your text. A good night of sleep and some fresh eyes in the morning can help cutting some of the unnecessary bits from your summary. And sometimes it is necessary to start new, ignoring your existing work and just tell the story again. Yes, you can reuse some of the old bits, but first we need to write down your cornerstones.

    Kill your darlings

    Use as little words as possible and as many as necessary. Over the course of a project your summary will breathe. It will expand as you learn more and it will contract as you make hard decisions and kill your darlings.

    This is one of the hardest parts. As you go through the motions of your project and update your summary on a regular basis, it will inevitably grow in length. At some point you have to be brave and cut. It will hurt, you won’t like it, but it is necessary. Don’t make your reader pay for all the good research you have done. Make the hard decisions about which pieces are critical and which are optional. Delete the optional ones. Set yourself arbitrary word count goals and cut, cut, cut. If you don’t want to do it, have somebody else read over the summary and cut the things they don’t think are necessary. In most cases you will disagree, but there is a good chance your editor is right.

    I recommend listening to them, follow their advice and implement their feedback even if you don’t like it. Then let it sit for a day or two and re-read the new version. Often you will realize that the new summary actually works, is more compact and just needs to be slightly tweaked.

    Photo by Rod Long on Unsplash