How to Treat Your Writing Like a Product

Apply product management methodologies to your writing and you may find yourself more disciplined, inspired, calculated, and successful.

Author's note: This was originally published on Medium in The Writing Cooperative on April 27, 2022.

Introduction to ‘product’

Your writing is a product — a product of your imagination, your upbringing, your experiences, your tenacity, your opinions, and your feelings. It is, quite simply, a product of you.

Products are all around you: things you can touch, taste, feel, see, smell, and hear. Medium’s software platform is a product. That computer or smartphone you’re reading this on is a product. The apps on your phone are products. Your most recent meal was a product. The music you’re jamming to is a product, and the streaming service on which you’re listening to it is a product. Whether hardware or software, someone, somewhere, created those products. And though many products succeed, many fail. But why?

Good products provide value — period

Products succeed for many reasons (these are just a few):

1. They fill some void in the marketplace. In writing, this translates to an audience’s (or customer’s) life, even when it’s a gap they didn’t know existed. Think about how your story fills a void.

2. The teams managing them take failures in stride, learn, and iterate on their earlier versions. How open are you to feedback?

3. As more information is gleaned about what the market wants, what the team (you, the writer) can do, and where you want to go, a product vision emerges of how the product will evolve and mature. Do you have a vision for where you’re taking your writing?

4. Their outcomes and impacts are measurable — both quantitatively and qualitatively. If you can analyze it, you can make informed decisions. When’s the last time you looked at your metrics?

Bad products don’t innovate, weren’t needed, or were poorly timed

While many products succeed for a time, if they don’t innovate to keep up with market (customer) demands, they may ultimately fail. Look at the story of Blockbuster vs. Netflix (granted, this is more of a business case evaluation than a specific product, but still a good comparison).

On the other hand, some products were never needed to begin with, so the market adoption didn’t happen. Here are some great examples.

There’s one more category I want to highlight: products that weren’t introduced at the right time. Let’s talk about Google Glass. First introduced in 2013, the product wasn’t widely adopted by the mass market, perhaps because the majority of consumers weren’t ready for that level of technology yet. Does it (or something like it) have a future? Sure. But the initial launch was deemed a flop.

How this applies to your writing

As a writer, you have a unique opportunity to treat your work like a product, and depending on your aspirations, there will be choices to make. While I mentioned above great products provide value and innovate, I don’t believe all writing needs to ‘keep up with the Jones’s.’ If you don’t want to write commercial fiction, or you don’t want to take a traditional publishing route, by all means, follow your own path.

However, keep in mind your work should:

• Be original

• Add value — even if it’s to a niche audience instead of the mass market

• Be developed iteratively — it’s never perfect the first time

• Be measurable (e.g., sales metrics, views, reviews, ratings, engagement rates, etc.)

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While the process of product development varies widely by industry, the general framework for success is somewhat replicable, even in writing. I recommend an introduction to Product Management and a review of the three mindsets of product development: Design Thinking, Lean, and Agile.

Venn diagram of the product creation process — by Kimberly Shyu

Quiz question: what’s the common overlapping theme in the diagram above? If you spotted ‘Learn,’ you’re correct! To succeed in your creations, you must be willing to learn at each step. Let’s dive deeper.

1. Take time to design

In product

Empathizing with the customer by exploring and testing design concepts in a collaborative way enables the greatest opportunity for learning. No great product I know of has ever been developed in a vacuum and put out to market for a wild success ride. It requires talking with people, understanding what they want to see, where they want to see it, and how they want to experience it. Great product minds wonder, ‘How should it make our customers feel?’

Great product minds wonder, ‘How should it make our customers feel?’

In writing

Sitting down to write can feel overwhelming. Realize you are not likely to build a great product in a night. Start with a general idea of where you want your story to go. Explore the concept, the characters, the setting, and the plot. For non-fiction, explore the message or academic material you’re trying to convey. This is a great sticky note time! You can use free tools like Mural or Miro to help organize your thoughts.

For whom are you writing? What comparable books (or articles) are in the market today? Where might you add some creative flair to make your idea stand out? If you don’t like plotting and prefer a pantsing method, go for it! Run your idea by a few people and get their early feedback. In the past, I’ve written a synopsis and sent it to a few people for feedback before writing the novel. This was a great way to pump the brakes on one idea in favor of pursuing another, more promising one.

2. Take a lean approach

In product

Product managers make tough prioritization decisions daily. Demands from many stakeholders — inside the business and from the customers — can seem daunting, ambiguous, and frustrating at times. Developing a clear product vision to which you can align the team makes all the difference. If a feature sounds ‘cool’ but isn’t actually needed to produce a functional, lovable product, it doesn’t get prioritized right away. Removing unnecessary work allows you to focus on delivering value.

For example, if I’m opening an ice cream shop on Main St. and need to open by summer (two months away), I’ll probably focus on a limited list of flavors/ menu items so I can make sure my team is fully trained and can deliver the best possible experience for my customers… I know they have a choice of where they get their ice cream. Next year, I’ll add more options, and so on.

In writing

Try a writing sprint. Define a goal for your week. Create specific tasks to complete. I use a tool called Trello to organize my lists of tasks on my backlog, in progress, and completed—more on this another day.

Every single day spend X amount of time (you choose) writing something related to your idea — it could be a character board, a plot outline, a chapter, or even a paragraph. You could also use writing prompts to write something totally unrelated and get those creative juices flowing. The point is — do something valuable. Feel productive. Celebrate your successes. Getting into a rhythm with your writing is as important as establishing other routines for productivity.

The point is — do something valuable. Feel productive. Celebrate your successes.

3. Adopt an agile mentality — and measure outcomes

In product

Agile is a software development methodology. Its core tenets are to be flexible as you follow the discovery and development lifecycle. Set a hypothesis at the beginning, test it, learn from it, and iterate on it. Measure results. Expect to learn things you didn’t see coming. Value and incorporate feedback, and be willing to change, as long as it aligns with the product vision.

Expect to learn things you didn’t see coming.

In writing

Know your first draft will need to be revised. And your second, and beyond. Seek feedback from beta readers who will provide actionable ways you can improve your work. This is a form of measurement on your early drafts — what’s worth keeping, what should be revised? Fix those things. Repeat the cycle.

Once you’ve published your work, review and analyze the metrics. What can you learn from how people react to your product? Most importantly, how will you incorporate that learning into a future product?

Your project is an open book

Summary

Think like a product manager:

1. Know the vision for your product (whatever you’re writing)

2. Understand your audience

3. Design the core elements and message — the part that adds value

4. Be lean by removing unnecessary pieces of the story, characters who don’t matter, sub-plots that don’t add value, etc.

5. Approach the drafting and editing phases in cycles, with feedback at each loop — be open and receptive to developing your work, and your talent

6. Measure your results

Applying a cyclical framework to your writing might be just the thing you need to feel accomplished at each step of the process — one in which your product is evolving for the better, as are you.

#noregrets