 Good day, welcome, and thank you for your time today. My name is Shantanu, and I will be taking you through one of the crucial elements of effective PM communication. A little bit about me. I have over one and a half decades experience in building businesses and managing leadership communications. Today, we talk about effective PM communication. The need, what does it look like, and how do we communicate it well? But before we dive into this, let's look at two samples together. You see two styles, style A and style B listed here. Let's take a few seconds to read through it and then discuss which styles jumps out to us. Well, when asked, most people find style A jumping out to them. But why is that? Let's explore. To understand that, let's start off with what is the goal of a PM communication. Professor Larry simplifies the goal in a beautiful one-liner. Help the audience understand better something they want to understand well. Think about it, the problems, the products, the space in which we work in. Leaders are aware of that. They know it well. They just want to know better, and then they want to know what are you going to do about it? If you distill this down to four operating principles, we can break them out in this way. Find value in the content. Your communication needs to add value to the knowledge set, and then they care about the subject. Second, they can hook in quickly, get attracted to it. Third, it should be easy to read. And four, there should be a call to action, and they should lead with a good feeling and almost a gift back, which is a key takeaway for them. Well, at this stage, you must be thinking, this sounds good, but is this actually important to me? Well, let's explore that. Why is effective communication important? Well, without effective communications, PMs should just expect low clarity, limited collaboration, and no closure in all the PM stages. If we look at clarity, low clarity means confusion throughout the ranks, limited progress, and low motivations rule. In short, there's not going to be any innovation in such a climate as well. Low collaboration means all systems failure. There's no progress if people don't work together. Closure means the final output, the deliverable. There's not going to be a launch or much benefit to the ecosystem. So at this point of time, you must be thinking that this seems important, but then is it really that difficult to achieve? Well, let's examine the blockers to achieving this. The blockers essentially stem from us being human in a complex and ever-changing world. If we break this up into three buckets, we can consider them as the preconceptions of the audience, our short attention spans, and the fact that we are essentially jaded from reading and listening so much. The preconceptions are possibly the most complex aspect because it stems from our insecurities and our motivations. Short attention spans is pretty much a human feature now, less of a bug. And the fact that we have to read, listen, question, answer, it's not so normal to us as reading. Sometimes we believe it just happens with no thoughts of improving on it. Well, at this point of time, you may be thinking that this makes sense and I do want to level up on this, but can I not use the traditional styles? Well, let's explore the three traditional styles. Let's start off with the student way of writing, aka the five paragraph essay framework. We know this doesn't work in real life, but let's explore it anyways. It's a three-section framework, introduction, body, and conclusion, sharing relevant details in each paragraph. But does it meet the operating principles? Well, not really. Readers have no hook to latch on, they find it boring and get distracted, and that's a communication failure. An interesting fact about this framework is that when we used it as students, the teachers got paid to engage in this. But our stakeholders and leadership are not paid for this. They are paid to solve business problems. What you communicate may or may not be prioritized. Let's try the second framework, the news article approach, aka the inverted pyramid framework, where it sensationalizes content over actual content. It doesn't really work in a business format though. It follows a typical four-paragraph structure, executive summary, background, additional details, and conclusion with relevant details in them. But does it work? Not really. The main questions do not get answered, and the audience may leave feeling incomplete without any tangible thing to latch on. Well, let's try the third and the most popular framework, the problem-solution framework. It has a four-paragraph structure as well. Problem statement causes effect and solution with relevant details in all. The advantage of this framework is that it shares the problem upfront and can be effectively used in many situations. But does it work in totality? No. Audiences need to have a good prior understanding of the problem space to understand the content. They could also feel that this is a low value as it shares a local problem instead of a macro problem. At this stage, you may be thinking, it does make sense, but is there something better out there? Well, introducing an audience-based communication framework where the value is in the audience. Let's put their understanding before everything else. To answer their questions in a seamless flow, no three-part framework has been very effective. What to change? Which clarifies the reason for existence-style questions. What to change to? Introduces a clarity on the direction and how it will help the system. How to change? Answers to details around implementation and the cost to change. With full credit to the logic-trinking-processed TOC framework which has introduced this way of looking at things. But then, let's dive into each area to know more. We'll start with the first block. What to change? While we answer the audience question from the start, we need to prioritize hooking them in. Which is why I broke this up into three buckets. First, the opening. The most crucial in any selling page. Here's where we hook the audience, show the possibilities of value creation and pull them into diving into the content. Hence, I propose here a detailed full-line structure of implementation. Second bucket is the problem statement. Which presents critical business context only to help understand the pain areas. All the other details go to appendix or later conversations. Detailed business impact. This is where the leadership decides their engagement. Is this big enough for their focus? Or should they delegate it away or just end it? Please use visuals and data to show the impact and mention the prerequisites to gain their trust. Moving on to the next section. What to change to. This is the place where we introduce clarity on next steps, the direction, and how the specific direction will help the larger ecosystem. It follows a full bucket structure. The goal, where we share the aligned goal from earlier and introduce operating principles to decide the target state. The next bucket is the current state, which summarizes from the earlier communications. Third would be the target state, where we show how the target state you propose meets operating principles, and then we summarize the key aspects of that vision. Four, a phased approach, where we show the principles used to phase out the product into meeting the final solution, and then we actually share the actual phase. It's very important to share how each phase will develop the business further, and that's where the prioritization exercises happen. Moving on to the third area. How to change. This is a section where we answer the details around implementation and the cost it'll incur to change. This follows a full bucket structure. What's the goal? Which we summarize from earlier communication. What things do we need to change? These talks about the areas which need to change and the impact on the surrounding areas. The surrounding systems, processes, and goals. The cost to change. This is where we dive into the people process techniques to meet this goal. And then success metrics. How will we know how we're doing? Now, at this point of time, many people start believing that we need detail scoping to achieve this, especially the cost to change. But that is not really true. We can start off with some high level scoping from the key SMEs, and then use the leadership's help to delegate actions to key members for detail scoping. Well, at this point of time, you may be thinking, this is great, but does it really work? Well, let's see. Yes, it does. Remember, the value is in the audience understanding and not the communication itself. This framework helps in defining an opening statement which hooks them in early. They find it easy to understand as they gain clarity in a waterfall thought process. They leave with a better understanding and a strong call to action. And all of this combinations adds value to the audience and leaves them thirsting for more. Well, with this, I wanted to create one takeaway slide with the understanding that if you take one thing away from today, it's what Professor Larry has explained as one-liner. The goal of communication is to help the audience understand better something they want to understand well. And this audience-based framework allows you to achieve that in a systemic manner. Thank you so much for your time today. I would love to get your thoughts and ideas on furthering PM communication. I wish you the best in your PM journey and I'll see you later. Thank you.