The Power of Two Way Writeups

I was listening to Lane Shackleton, CPO of Coda, talk on Lenny’s Podcast earlier in the week and he talks at one point about how they use “Two Way Writeups”.

And I began to smile and tune in as I’ve used this as one of my core strategies for a few years now.

So what are “Two Way Writeups”?

Two way writeups are when a person initiates a topic or proposal and then sends it out to a group for inputs. Then each person in the group is expected to have read the proposal and provided their input before the meeting where they discuss.

In a way it’s similar to Amazon’s approach of “document-driven meetings” in which the organizer needs to prepare a well thoughtout writeup and send it out beforehand. But it goes a step deeper.

Because everyone is expected to provide their opinion. And to provide an opinion this of course forces everyone to have read it.

And the way that Coda’s product team uses it even goes a step beyond that.

Each person needs to not only provide their inputs but they also need to rate 1-5 on whether they think it is a good idea. And then they need to justify why.

Plus they even align on what questions should be discussed at the meeting (as you see below).

There’s a really good post that Lane wrote here about it.

Now let me explain why I think this is so powerful.

Why is this input before meetings important?

Lane gives a very good example in the podcast that I resonated with. He talks about how one day he wrote up some product proposal and got everyone’s inputs on the two way writeup.

And one of the quieter folks in the room had given a score of ‘1’ meaning he thought it was a horrible idea.

Lane had apparently thought the proposal was a great idea and would fly through without problems so this really surprised him.

And when he read through the explanation it gave him a different angle into the problem that he hadn’t thought of. And the insinuation was that this person had a very good point.

And perhaps the product proposal truly was a bad idea for this reason that Lane hadn’t thought of.

But what would have happened if there was no two way writeup?

Well pretty simple.. this quiet person would have arrived at the meeting, kept their mouth shut, and this product feature would have sailed through and been implemented.

And if the guy was right, then it would have failed.

Part of why I like this so much is that its part of what I call “the democratisation of inputs”

The democratisation of inputs is when you get a well rounded set of inputs from your team regardless of power dynamics, regardless of whether a person is loud or quiet, etc.

And in my experience it leads to much better results than the traditional way of just discussing in a meeting the old fashioned way.

Because what happens in your typical meeting?

Well the loud folks talk the whole time and the quieter folks stay quiet. Or perhaps the most senior people talk and the junior folks stay quiet.

Therefore the outcome of the meeting is not defined by what is the smartest & best answer… rather it is defined by who spoke up.

And that is crap in my view.

Now for my personal story and atypical insight into this

So I’ve had a pretty intense health issue that has been like a roller coaster ride for about a decade since early 2014, which I expect to be fully finished with in a couple months.

I will save you the details but essentially one of the things it does it that when it worsens it takes away my voice.

But when it gets better my voice gets stronger (more resonant). And note that this is with zero conscious effort from me.

Now back in early 2014 my health had gotten really bad and I felt like crap, couldn’t sleep well, didn’t retain information well, and my voice was very weak. It is the reason I moved from being a commercial person my whole life to becoming a product one.

I needed something ‘chill’ to do till I figured this health stuff out.

And so I asked to switch from a senior commercial role to being a Senior PM in Lazada’s tech organsation in Vietnam back in mid-2014. It was two levels lower on the org chart and I managed nobody.

And at first, quite honestly I was probably a pretty crap PM. Because my brain just felt fried and my voice felt so weak and strained.

And when I sat in meetings… I’d just stay quiet even if I had something to say. Because it felt uncomfortable to talk physically.

Then in early 2015 my health and voice started improving

This was one of the biggest ''holy shit’ moments in my life. And its the one that made me realize that entire libraries of ‘self-development’ books are just full of shit.

Basically as I got healthier my voice got stronger (as well as my cognitive functions).

All of a sudden the old Ken was coming back. The one that had existed for more than 30 years before my health issues.

In my natural state I think pretty quick, can use humor to land quite direct messages smoothly, and am not afraid to debate anyone.. because that’s what I’d done my entire life.

And so in 2015 in meetings I was speaking up a lot and was a lot more persuasive than I was just a year before.

And this all happened 100% effortlessly.

I went from being being a Senior PM in charge of nobody in mid-2014 to…

…being a VP of Operations Product by early 2015

…to being SVP of Operations, Marketplace and Finance Product in early 2016 (about half the Lazada product team with ~12 PM’s in my team).

But was I trying harder? No. I was actually making less conscious effort and it felt easier than when I was a PM managing nobody.

The reason for this?? My ability to speak up and make myself 'heard' had returned.

Actually to be honest… it’s the main reason why I was promoted two levels in a year in a function (product management) that I had barely even heard of only a year or so prior.

Because of the increased resonance in my voice it was just a lot harder for someone to cut me off. They’d need a very powerful voice to do so otherwise it would sound overly aggressive and make the group uncomfortable.

And so no longer did I have to sit idly by if I disagreed with someone or thought they were droning on too long. I’d interrupt in a natural way and turn the group back on (my) course.

And I cannot begin to describe to you just how MASSIVE this is when you are managing a team. The only way you will ever understand and believe me is to have it happen to you.

But by mid-2016 my health was in decline again

This is where another ‘holy shit’ moment came. You see all the improvements and gains I’d talked about in the paragraph above started to vanish as my health deteriorated in 2016.

I was using an experimental DIY method to fix myself and didn’t yet fully understand how it worked.

Actually i wouldn’t fully understand it till about late 2021. And that meant I was in for an absolute roller coaster during those next 5 years. hahaha

But anyway in mid-2016 I started losing my voice again and all the old problems started returning.

I’d try to speak up in a meeting and get cut off frequently. Or if I did speak, the lack of resonance in my voice had the effect of many folks only half listening. It was extremely frustrating.

I was starting to realize a set of patterns that over the next 5 years would become like absolute unwritten ‘laws’ for me. You know the ones that really mattered the most and not the BS you see in aisles of self-help books.

I was seeing how the true ‘rules of the game’ worked.

Your voice and ‘speaking up’ is extremely powerful to moving up in a large ‘traditional’ organisation

I somewhat lost my voice and then gained it back several more times between the years of 2016 and now. And the pattern started to become so clear on how it worked.

It started to blow my mind… “How could people not see this? How could society ignore just how influential the voice really is?”

I started to notice it in all the senior leaders around me. Some of them were truly smart and great managers.

Others just had really strong voices and the ability to outmaneuver others in meetings because they could cut others off and ensure that they had the last word.

When you tune into the ‘dynamics’ of the meeting just as much (or even more) than the content of the meeting for 5+ years like I did… it will absolutely blow your mind as to the conclusions you will make.

You realize that many meetings are not ruled by who had the more logical argument.. but rather by who knew how to maneuver the group dynamics the best.

And so during the times when my health was bad I began developing strategies to nullify the impact that these types of folks have.

I developed strategies for when my voice was weak, but realized they were great all the time

I started getting quite creative over the years as I’m a strategist at heart.

I’d ask to collaborate on documents rather then participate in physical meetings or as a pre-cursor to them (ie. two way writeups).

I adopted a way of using Clickup that eliminates the need for 80%+ of meetings through tight online collaboration of teams.

etc etc

And in the process I just realized that even though I’d developed these techniques to kind of be my crutch when my health was bad…. they were just great ways to work.

It was a great way of empowering folks in my team and getting the best outputs.

And I realized that even though my voice has gotten a lot stronger and I expect it to be stronger than most people in the near future…

I don't want to play that 'game' that I despised so much for years... even when I can win it.

I wanna change the rules of the game.

You see for me the lesson is…. even though you understand how to manipulate some outcome and potentially can… it doesn’t mean you should. Because it doesn’t make the team better.

Rather make it your goal to disarm those that manipulate meeting dynamics and empower those who are at the mercy of them.

And ‘Two Way Writeups’ are a great tool in this arsenal for doing this.