How to make others care about your communication
Four Questions That Make Your Messages Easy To Understand
Adding context to your messages isn't just good practice — it's essential for effective teamwork. When sharing information, always include the "why" behind your message.
Four Questions That Make a Difference
When communicating with colleagues, consider:
What makes this information important?
What are the implications?
Why share this now?
What actions (if any) are needed?
Think about it from both sides. When a teammate asks for your input, you naturally want to understand the purpose before investing your time. Similarly, as a busy product leader scanning through messages, you value knowing whether something requires immediate attention or is simply informational.
Putting It Into Practice
Compare these two approaches:
Basic message:
"Usage metrics declined 15% during February."
Improved message:
"FYI: February usage dropped 15% month-over-month. This appears to follow our typical holiday-season pattern, similar to last year. No immediate action needed, but worth keeping in mind for our planning discussions."
By providing context, you respect your colleagues' time and increase the likelihood that your communication will achieve its intended purpose. This small adjustment makes a significant difference in how your messages are received and acted upon.
What I read
As usual, I will list some of the best articles I read on the Internet. I will keep a list of the best articles (currently >800) at https://www.digital-product-management.com. These are today’s picks:
Delegation Matrix for High Performance Teams: A matrix that provides four types of decisions/actions for high-performance teams.
RAG, Agentic AI, and MCP: Good explanation of the principles.
Capture authentic customer voices from the web with AI: How to get real user voices from across the internet with backlinks to the discussions.