My cofounder/CEO used to work for Jeff Bezos as a GM and the most valuable lesson he imparted to us is the six pager. Before a high-level meeting begins, everyone grabs a red pen and reads/annotates the six-pager for 20 minutes. The discussion that follows is between informed participants, and has more structure. It is a highly effective technique for decision making, and a practice I would certainly carry forth to whatever I work on in the future.
It seems all practitioners print out all of these memos to paper. Has anyone successfully converted this tradition to a digital medium or does that invoke the spectre of PowerPoint too strongly to survive?
In my daily routine, the thought of printing anything for work seems peculiar.
Thinking about documents is one area in which paper is still king. I've got two 27" monitors on my desk, but when I want really think about a document I'm reading, I print it out and grab a pen. Reading things on a screen feels like having a straight jacket on. I can't put several pages next to each other. I can't put my finger on a page so I can flip back to it later. Marking anything up is an ordeal of UI getting in the way. Tablets aren't any better. Writing on glass feels wrong and the lack of friction makes it hard to write small text legibly. And their small size compounds the problem of not being able to refer to more than one page at once.
> Reading things on a screen feels like having a straight jacket on
I feel the same, but at some point I started to do everything work-related digitally because people would often comment on this. The craziest one was someone pointing out this would lead to ideas that are too complicated.
Someone will forget their laptop, or won't have wifi, or the power will die, or the link doesn't work or won't have the right pdf/doc reader, or will respond to that notification they just got distracting everyone with their clickity clack, etc.
Making the presenter bring everything needed to have a distraction free conversation is a feature, not a bug.
I work at Amazon. We've tried digital on my team. It's way worse. People make more nitpicky changes and the inline-edits/auto-suggest thing makes it easy to rat-hole. Stick to paper, imo.
I think it varies by team. On my team, we don't use hard copies, comments are written electronically, and we have the usual post-reading-time discussion.
I work at Twitch, a Subsidary. We do the 6 pager process a lot (esp when working w/ amazon). We do it with shared collab doc editors though. It's an interesting twist.
Digitally has 2 big benefits:
- You can see when someone is commenting on a thing and skip down so not everyone dog piles on the same thing.
- In lower level meetings you are very unlikely to have a note taker, so in digital form everyones notes are in one spot. In the paper form of the meeting you either collect / decipher everyone's notes, or you have argue/defend/explain your doc while also taking notes.
Paper is better for:
- Keeping everyone focused. You don't pop that laptop until you're done marking up the doc, people often don't even bring laptops to paper doc meetings.
- keeping comment arguments from forming in the margin in the digital document.
Some parts of amazon are trying to do it digitally, esp those that are remote.
Which tool do you use and how do you run the meeting ? For example is it everyone speaking and writing simultaneously..or is it people writing during the 30 minute study time, etc ?
Amazon standards is you show up and dedicate at least 30 minutes to reading. You wait till everyone is done reading, and try not to pressure people to hurry.
The reason you do it in the meeting is that for more senior people, you have to block them off time to think about the document. Asking people to schedule another block of time to give feedback on YOUR problem is rude. As you get more senior you end up in way more meetings. It's hard for more junior people or ICs to understand in a lot of cases. If timing is hard, have them schedule you in a different slot.
You can tell in say google docs where everyone is reading wise. You can also see all the comments so you can also judge progress.
Ask questions in negative every 5-10 minutes "Does anyone need more time".
Once everyone is ready, start the meeting by going through comments from top to bottom.
After that it runs like a normal N-Pager meeting, or tech review or whatever.
I will say that with say google docs you can use suggestions and other things or say "I'll work on that". And just move on. It's rarely important to rabbit hole on the english, esp on engineering docs. If you're writing a actual PR or marketing doc, sure.
The tool is inconsequential, pick whatever works for you and that has enough adoption that you aren't spending 15 minutes getting everyone accounts at the beginning of the meeting.
The features I find useful are:
- Cursor Position of readers (minor)
- Comments
- Suggestions (like google docs), helps with minor edits
The rest don't matter. Hell you don't even need suggestions. Comments are really about all you actually need.
The latter. The first half of the meeting is "quiet time" where the reading is done and reviewers take notes. The second half is where discussion occurs.
If I have a particulary gnarly function I didn't write that has no comments (it happens more than I like) I'll print it out and use colored pens.
It's a once/twice a week thing but nothing is as effective (I tried using my 2018 ipad/pencil but I just don't really like writing on it, the lack of surface resistance is wrong).
Random question -- how do you print code? Do you copy the file into a text editor? I've looked a few times and it seems like Sublime and VSCode both don't have a print feature...
I mean, just save the file as .txt and open it in Notepad, TextEdit, or whatever is the default editor in your desktop environment of choice. Should have a print function.
Otherwise you could stick it in <pre> / <code> tags in an html file, open it in a browser, and print from there.
Have you tried an ereader? I have one that's 8", has a frontlight, and runs full on Android, I use it after my no-tech nighttime threshold and during meetings. But I especially use it for any long form reading I have to do.
I was about to include this in my original question and decided against it, but I don't like marking up the original document. I would much rather have a separate set of notes.
I have (a cheap Kobo something or other), but it was completely useless for handling most pdf documents and slow enough when navigating a document to get really annoying. It also didn't have any support for annotating or making comments. I've kind of had my eye on this: remarkable.com, but I can't quite bring myself to spend that much. What do you have/recommend?
Still not the perfect device, you can see some criticisms in the review above, but it's my favorite I've seen so far. Forgot to mention it has an SD card slot in additon to 16GB internal storage, compared to, say, the Kindle Voyage which has 2GB and that's it.
Still waiting on the dream of color eink monitors, but in the meantime this will do.
EDIT: It also has a togglable faster refresh mode, which doesn't clear the screen as well but is much easier to use for scrolling/panning around.
A lot of folks still do printed narratives, but some teams (mine) are digital now. This has become over more prevalent as our teams get more distributed.
Six pages seems a lot for discussion. I prefer two page briefs, in part because it takes less of the participants' time but mainly because it requires more refinement and focus by the author.
In my experience at Amazon, we never wrote a 6-pager if a 2-pager would do, for exactly the reasons that you indicated (and also, we found that breaking complex things into smaller chunks was more effective in many cases.)
Is not this how the case based learning happens in all of the world's top MBA schools such as Harvard, Stanford etc? The class participants were given a case study in the previous class which they'd need to discuss in current class. I also know that Amazon hires probably more MBAs than other top Tech companies and maybe there's a correlation between these MBA hires and narrative style discussions at Amazon meetings.
It's notionally similar in that at b-school you read the case and then discuss in class, but in practice it's a very different activity. Real doc reviews at Amazon are far more rigorous.
