The Power of Writing 1-Pager
If your answer to one or more of the following questions is Yes, you should write a 1-pager document.
- Have you ever had a project assigned to you and you don’t know where to start?
- Have you ever wanted to solve a problem that your team faces for quite sometime and not sure how to do it?
- Have you ever wanted to create a vision for your team or the area you own and not sure how to do it?
- Have you ever felt overwhelmed by the complexity of the projects?
- Have you ever confused on how to align so many cross functional teams that you work together on a problem/project?
- Have you ever felt that you have many questions in mind and you want to get answer to those?
- Have you ever had many ideas and you want to get feedback from your team or other colleagues you work together?
Here is Why?
Regardless of which problems you have that I’ve mentioned above, you should open an empty document and start creating your mind map for that particular problem that you want to solve. Human brain works with structure. You remember via mapping neurons, you create new neural networks to the existing ones and this is called learning. However, our brain is not capable of seeing everything from high level and work on it without an seeing the complete image, or at least this is how my brain works.
Step 1 — Write everything in your head mixed up on paper!
Start writing everything you have in an unordered and messy fashion. The things you should write are the ideas you have, the questions you want the answers to, potential solutions to problems, feedback requests, name of the people that you will collaborate, teams you will work or might work, tools that you might leverage, risks and gains, references and any additional thing you might have.
This is a lot of things and complex, so let’s tidy up a bit!
Step 2 — Create a structure
After putting all the things you have, start creating a structure. I have a format that I really like and want to share with you.
- Name of the problem/project
- Problem Description — Explain the problem clearly, articulate it well so that everyone can understand why are we even talk about this.
- Impact /Goals— Why are we doing this? What will be the gain?
- Metrics — How are we going to measure the impact and success? It is time saving, money (reducing cost, increasing profit), sentiment (making customers happy), reliability (less down time, less SEV’s), developer experience (get rid of developer pain point, increase developer velocity)
- Timelines — Guesstimating the effort. This is not a commitment, but just a back of the envelope estimation of the potential timelines and milestones. That will help leadership and other people to have an idea on when to expect this project’s completion.
- References — Put link to other resources (1-pagers, tech specs, architectural documents), wikis, posts, online sources etc)
Of course you will have a technical specification document or architectural or product design documents, or any other documents. You don’t need to have a pages long 1-pager. It is a better practice to have a 1–3 page long main canonical document and link other relevant documents and sources into this one.
Step 3 — Make it a live!
The 1-pagers are Canonical Documents, which means they are the single source of truth for the given project/problem and they should contain all the information related to that project. The documents is the entry point to the domain and problem/project. If some new joiners starts the team or enrolls the effort, they should be able to onboard with that document only. Of course all of the resources and links are also critical, but they are linked in the 1-pager.
Step 4— Share and get feedback
The last step is sharing this document and asking for review and getting feedback. Asking for feedback and being open to constructive feedback is a totally different topic, but this is a must have step. After creating the document, you need to gather people’s ideas about that and start updating your document. By this way, your document will get mature and succinct. Eventually, the document will be completed and you will come into a position where you can start iterating on the project, which means if you are a developer you can start implementing, or if you are a designer you can work on the design etc.
In conclusion, writing a 1-pager document is a powerful way to organize your thoughts and ideas, and it can help you solve complex problems more effectively. Give it a try and see how it works for you! You can share your experience and comment. I would strongly encourage you to try it if you never done it before.
