Clarity Over Completeness

In tech, we love to mythologize the six-page memo. I’m certainly guilty of it. It’s been the gold standard for a thoughtful, thorough document that distills complexity and invites structured debate.

But here’s the truth: no one’s reading it.

Not because people don’t care, but because they literally don’t have time. Back-to-back meetings. Slack overload. Multi-tasking, upon multi-tasking. The long-form memo gets forgotten, skimmed, and at worst, misunderstood. What actually moves things forward isn’t depth or thoroughness. It’s clarity.

A single slide. A sketch. A paragraph. A usable prototype or mock-up. The simplest possible artifact that allows a team to start reasoning about a problem or a solution and react in an honest and genuine way. This kind of tool turns into a collective compass for a group. As long as it generally points north, it can help you find a way to a decision or path forward.

One of my favorite paintings is a Picasso line drawing of a mother feeding her child. There’s very little to the picture, but so much of the scene comes through as you gaze at it. The picture starts the conversation about the emotion and the characters and lets you continue much of it in your head. But the little details that are there are very clear.

So it is with a lot writing on the job–you don’t need 1,000 words when the right 20 will do.

So here’s the shift: Write and create to advance the conversation, not to perfect the document or artifact. If it gets people thinking, aligning, or building — it’s done its job.

Simple is clear. And clarity brings alignment and speed.