In my day-to-day job as a product manager working alongside many different stakeholders across the organization, we have to answer a lot of questions and make a lot of decisions.

With the change to remote work and the transition over the past two years; we went through many phases of making ourselves more productive. We first figured out how we can be can keep collaboration high, we moved to virtual meetings. As many of you may know this comes at a heavy cost of being in meetings for pretty much your entire day. Many folks in the organization, including myself are finding ways to work more asynchronous. We’ve adopted the more amazon communication style where we’re writing long-form documentation that goes into much greater depth. This has its advantages and disadvantages; we’re able to work asynchronously; however, preparation for these docs still requires heavy back and forth – and leads to more meetings for many that are preparing. I’m now exploring ways to give more bite-size pieces that are able to answer questions very succinctly and have adapted to writing prompts to get back to people immediately while providing reusable content that others can consume while getting the context.

So what is a prompt?

A prompt is a brief document that helps directly answer a question. You simply write out a question you are looking to answer – no more than 2-3 sentences long.

Then simply write out your response, get feedback, and refine it. Try to keep the response rather direct, usually, the response shouldn’t be more than a page long, best if it’s only 1-2 paragraphs in length.

If you need to expand or provide additional touchpoints, you can link to other documents.

What makes an effective prompt.

Yes you can do this via slack, email, or a meeting, but a prompt strives

  1. Keep the question narrow
  2. Provide context on why you’re asking for this and why this is this important
  3. Keep it short – both the prompt and the response should be consumable within 5 minutes.
  4. Make it shareable – making it a google doc or some other central doc that is sharable makes it not only digestible by the person you’re intending to share it with, but also allows them to forward it to others.

Why I use a prompt

So to summarize why I think a prompt is so effective

  1. Sharable / Reusable – You’ll likely get the same question asked by multiple people, this gives you a way to send them the link to the response without having to answer the question and the follows ups that many people may have.
  2. Allows for collaboration and feedback – by making it a google doc or shareable format that allows for commenting, this allows others to give you feedback and clarify questions in line.
  3. Answers the question succinctly – Don’t be too long-winded, otherwise it’ll lose its effectiveness and no one will read it.
  4. Provides context and framing on the question you ask – By keeping the question tight, you’re not answering questions that others didn’t ask. By framing it and providing context, you’re also allowing it to be actionable by others.

For managers too

I typically write the prompts for myself whenever someone on my team has a question I think would be valuable to dive a bit deeper into, but it’s also an effective way to get input from others. Start a doc, write out the prompt, and share it with them to respond. This gains from the collaborative feedback.

Give this a try and provide me feedback on whether it’s been effective for you and your team in a remote-centric working environment.