From burnout to balance: lessons in product, writing and culture with Harry Flett.

0:01And one of the most consistent customer reactions that we get when people first log into the tracksuit dashboard is this feels unlike any other dashboard that i've been i've got a couple of clips of customers swearing literally dropping f-bombs going oh hell i've never seen anything like this or like this is such a game changer and when you know you've dropped an f-bomb or a customer's dropped an f-bomb there's like something that you're kind of getting right and for us that's the experience that we're giving and when we kind of built tracksuit right from the very start our goal was to feel different.

0:36We said we're not going to have a blue line chart and a white background like every other dashboarding tool that's out there. Welcome back to Wild Hearts. I'm your host, Mason Yates, from the investment team at Blackbird Ventures. Fun is not an optional extra. In high performance, it's essential. That's from Harry Flett, the VP of product at Tracksuit, a company reshaping brain tracking into something fast, beautiful, and actually useful. Harry was one of the first five employees that tracks it, and since, he's helped scale the team and product from day one. In this episode, he offers a masterclass in leverage, the kind of leverage that compounds not just through software, but through people and language too.

1:17Here's just a snippet of some of the stuff we covered. The say-to-do ratio. Why trust is built or broken by the gap between what you promise and what you ship and how to close that gap. Freedom within a frame, the most misunderstood leadership principle in startups. Autonomy thrives when paired with clear constraints. The ambiguity to clarity loop. Product isn't just about ideas, it's about turning noise into precision and doing it faster than anyone else. You ship your organization chart. Why Conway's law should shape how you build your team, not just your tech. Costumes as a culture code. How green face paint, Shrek, and a full send story became a secret weapon to scaling trust and joy.

1:58This is such a fun episode with Harry. He's the type of character you'd want to work with. And so with that, let's jump in. Speaking of startups, what is the say-to-do ratio? The say-do ratio. This came from one of our investors, Mike Smith, who's on a board. He comes from a VC called Footwork over in the US. He's a serious operator. And he said that he looks for companies that have a high say-do ratio. do, whatever they say, they go and end up doing it. And that could be setting a target, hitting a target. It could be saying you're launching this thing and launching that thing. It could be solving this problem.

2:40And I love that from a company perspective. Do you do what you say you're going to do? And I think that's so true from a startup, an individual operator perspective, right? Like, do you do what you say you're going to do? So I'm a big believer in whatever you're putting out there, you've got to follow things through. That's like startups to a T, right? Do you measure your ratio? I wouldn't say I measure it. No, I think you measure it through your reputation internally. It's the trust that you build with stakeholders is you just know in a qualitative way. Oh, like Harry say do ratio is really high.

3:13Harry's a safe pair of hands. If you give something to Harry, like he gets it done. If he says something, he solves that problem. He follows up. And so I think it's confide in the trust that you build with your team, with customers. It's intangible in many ways. And actually, that can be sometimes the best way to think about it rather than measuring it. Has your say-to-do ratio improved over time? I think I've been a doer. I've been a say-doer all my life. If you were training someone to improve their say-to-do ratio, what would you, as a thought experiment, do to help them? I think you've got to think about it's easy to say things and it's easy to overpromise.

3:50I would think about helping people break things down from a first principle perspective to understand what actually is the thing that needs to be doing and go and say that. And that's the heart of product management, right? Product management is taking, the best definition I've heard, taking ambiguity and turning it to clarity. And it could be ambiguity from the technical side, from the customer side, from the business side. But that's your role as a PM. and honestly it's in a startup everyone's role as well is to help turn that ambiguity into clarity and so the best way to be to improve your say-do ratio is to get really clear on the problem to go and solve and say you're going to do that and then go and fix it what's the tim ferris always says what's the one problem that solves 10 hundreds of problems and that's kind of what i think about this is getting busy for the sake of being busy busy for the sake of being busy do you get burned out easily?

4:48Very, very easily. Tell me more. I got feedback actually when I left my last role at Crimson where I learned to load and we can unpack some of that because that was a wild time where I think I really learned my operator chops. When I left Crimson, the COO at the time, a guy called David Freed, who I respect immensely, said to me, Harry, you're really helpful. You're really useful. Sometimes you like to make people feel good and be helpful and you lose sight of how to be high leverage and solve the root problem kind of comes back to what I was saying he said I would think about how you can transition from being helpful to being high leverage and being helpful is a bit of a drug and I'll tell you ways that this shows up today one way that I see so many operators and startups and myself get addicted to which leads to the sense of burn the sense of burnout is slack on this thing here right sometimes the way that you can be helpful or you think you're being helpful is an immediate response.

5:49When someone has a problem, you're that person that's on Slack 24-7. You're that person that's solving the problem in the moment. And it feels good because people say, Harry's so responsive. He helped me so, he unblocked me. I can keep going. And you think, man, I'm keeping things moving. I'm helping unblock stuff. We're getting things done. Great. But if you think about that, what are you actually creating? One, you're probably disempowering other team members because they don't get a chance to actually apply their own knowledge to become an owner because you're jumping in. I got this feedback from our first product hire, Laura, who said, Harry, man, you're killing me.

6:26You are replying so quickly that I'm never getting the chance to establish myself as an expert. I'm never getting the chance to apply my own knowledge. If you're going to scale yourself, you've got to let go and stop being so responsive. stop being so helpful it's that tendency to want to be helpful that is what i think drives me to burn out because it's an addictive feeling like moving the needle forward doing that extra thing and the journey i've been on over the last like three or so years with tracksuit and beyond is trying to learn how to build systems how to be able to step away and have things move forward but how to empower others to lead in their own domain.

7:10And it's a skill, man. I don't know if I've nailed it. Thank you for being so honest. To bring it back to the first question, you clearly have a high degree of empathy. And if you're on the edge of burnout, there is the risk that you have said more than you can actually do. And maybe you have superpowers. I'd love to learn them, but I'd love to at least understand what systems have you put in place to protect against that natural tendency to help. There's a great framework. It was shared to me by Rod Hamilton, CultureAmp co-founder. It's a decision-making framework. It's an ownership framework to kind of establish with people.

7:51And I've been starting to think about this and apply this a lot more. It's breaking decisions down into leafs, branches, trunks, and roots, I think are the terms. A leaf is a decision or an area that you own and I don't need to know about. A branch is a decision that you, an area that you own and you just need to let me know the outcome. A trunk is something that I want you to make a recommendation, but I'm ultimately going to make the decision. And then a root is something that I'm going to own all the way through. And it can be really helpful when you take your workload, your the outcomes you're trying to drive as a as an organization and start to work with your team to say here are the roots that i'm going to be owning here are your leafs that you can just run full speed at and you don't need to let me know and sometimes you can't map that out perfectly in advance but it's an exploratory collaborative process where you can start to like build up this muscle of calling what these things are out and then calling each other out if you overstep you're Like, hey, come on, Harry.

9:01Like you said that that was a, that's a leaf. Like, let me do my thing. You're jumping in where you shouldn't be jumping in. Sorry, right you are, right you are. Like, I don't need to be involved in that. And so you start to get clearer on the outcomes, on the boundaries. And then you know when you do need to participate, when you do need to be involved and when you can just like, when you can, when you can step away. I love a framework. I'm going to steal it. How do you prevent burnout? Is that feasible? Are you just signing up for a life of cooking yourself? burnout can come from when you feel like you're not moving things forward when you're not really making progress when you're feeling busy but you're not really moving the needle on on things and so you know one way to prevent burnout i think is to get clear on what's going to drive momentum the other thing is to get clear on what gives you and what gives you energy and that can be energy inside of work but also outside i think people recharge in very different ways and sometimes people think taking a step away from work or whatever it might be might be what recharges them but there's you can recharge creatively you can recharge socially you can recharge physically and you've kind of got to figure out what are your reset mechanisms to help you help you help you go and then something i've started doing more of is sometimes you just have to step away and you have to see what breaks when you're gone and ultimately you're doing everyone a disservice if you don't step away and don't give people that space and if you don't check for yourself that like hey like the weight of the world is not on your shoulders like things can survive with you when you're not there so sometimes it's just about alleviating that mental pressure that you put on yourself to keep things going and you realize like you're not the bee's knees you've got plenty of people that are way smarter than you that are moving things along let things go a little bit and and it's that they can i think release the release the pressure valve on on burnout but it's still an easy thing to do and it's and it's hard when you're obsessive it's hard when you're obsessive when you're ambitious when you when you're having like the time of your life it's a natural tendency that's hard to step away from you tell me about a week where you were at your highest energy from a product or product team perspective for example a few weeks ago we we had a great week where we ran a celebration and a bit of a planning exercise looking forward and it's that past and future for me that makes a really good a really good week uh it's when you can stop and reflect on the outcomes that you've driven or what you've achieved and take a moment to stop and then it's when you can look ahead and get really excited about the future and the elements from a product perspective there is like i get really pumped up when you hear a great customer outcome or a customer story a customer success rep that's working with someone to unlock more budget secure more shelf space do something for our marketers and that's that path like historic looking hey we've we've driven an outcome here we've helped someone we've helped a brand marketer and then i can't stop thinking about what's next in the future so you're always thinking about what that next problem is and if you can get that balance between like here's the next hurdle for us to cross then that's that's super energizing and for me that future looking a large chunk of my time honestly is trying to find that next game-changing hire that's going to help push tracksuit forward and i get really pumped about those weeks when you land an epic person to join join the team and push things forward let's go deeper in each story so the first one is looking back on what's been achieved and being able to get the 10 000 foot view on where the product roadmap is going.

12:44Maybe you can share a bit more about that 10 ,000 foot view and the process to help you imagine where tracksuit should go. When you're in product, especially early stage, you've got to be able to operate at two levels of altitude. You need to be able to take that 10 ,000 foot view like you said and then also the details really matter. And it can be too easy to get lost in either one of those. There are worlds where, you know, at Traxuit, you can think about how we're supporting brand marketers and where we need to take this data moat that we're building and the forward vision. And then you lose sight of just what that immediate next step needs to be or the execution of it.

13:24And equally, you can get too wrapped up in what you're building right now and lose sight of that. And so at Traxuit, for a long time, I actually think I got this balance slightly wrong. And I've only just started to get a little bit better at this higher altitude thinking. For a long time, it's about putting the next foot forward into solving whatever problem it is. And to give you an example, when I joined Tracksuit, it was honestly a product person's dream. What Connor and Matt and the early team had built, I was employee number five. It's actually an ongoing debate with the head of engineering who came first.

13:58I signed my contract first, took a two-week break. By the time I turned up, he was there. so the the real question is it date of signature or is it when you first start at the business and we debate that data signature data signature that's what i'm saying so you win we'll call me we'll call me number five um and i'm glad we've got this on record for stew so i could say now in the public sorry this has been this has been said i'd love you stew you know when stew and i started conor matt nick hamish they had built this i always say they'd done the zero to one journey they had built this product it was selling like crazy i think we were at seven eight hundred thousand in subscription revenue in the first like nine months of operating we had some epic customers and logos we had users who were really engaged stew and i came in and we were like what do we do where do we where do we go from here like this is you know on a silver platter something that is just that we've really solved a problem and like immediately you start to get into the details of how do you put one foot forward in front of the other.

14:59And this comes back to trying to get really clear on the problem that we were solving. When we first started, Stu and I mapped out any business needs to do three things. It needs to acquire customers. It needs to keep those customers through giving them a good experience. And it needs to be able to scale. Stu and I sat on a whiteboard and we said, how are we doing on each of these pillars right now? And we said, there is no problem with acquisition. We're absolutely nailing it. In fact, that might be half the problem. It's going too well. Retention, it's early days. We've been going for nine months, but all signs look like it's going pretty positively.

15:34Really engaged customers. We'll see how it plays out kind of in our first year of subscriptions, what that looks like. Early signs are good. Scale is the scary thing right now. We're now growing so fast. This MVP of this product was slapped together with band-aids on we need to put one foot in front of the other to fix it and kind of keep up with that growth and we weren't really thinking big picture we weren't thinking big strategy it was how do we keep up how do we keep going with hamish mick connor and matt absolutely rocking and rolling um with some awesome customers on board and for a long time honestly the last over the last three years i would say 18 months of that have been in the details one foot in front of the other solving the next problem that's right in front of you and what i've started to realize is that when you're putting one foot in front of the other you've also got to know where you're going and i don't think we'd spend enough i'd spent enough time critically reflecting and thinking about where we are going we're just solving each kind of sequential problem.

16:38And this really started to manifest in the product team, I think, when I realized that I was giving too much freedom. And Rod Hamilton has said this to me a bunch. He said, Harry, you've got to give people freedom within a frame. And you think you're being a good leader by giving total autonomy, total trust and saying, hey, we're going after retention. I want you to go and figure out how we can move the needle on it on retention i always had this like pure such a pure naive view of like how to think about product right like oh we're just optimizing for an outcome let's go in hey team i want you to think about and come back to me with the best ways we can drive retention there are so many ways that you could do that actually the constraints breed creativity they need some direction that we're heading towards they need some milestone to work towards and that those constraints allow you to be a lot more creative with that.

17:35So the constraints can be a deadline. The constraints could be a segment that you're prioritizing, a market that you're prioritizing. It could be a feeling you want to give customers in 6 to 12 months' time. We need the product to be able to feel or give this kind of experience. There's still so much depth to understand what that might be and what the right sequencing is and really how you drive that feeling. But here's where we want to get to. and I wasn't doing enough of that I wasn't operating enough of that 10 ,000 foot view and so now I think I'm starting to get better at nailing the balance and that's kind of the early stage startup trajectory right is you have to put one foot in front of the other and then you earn the right to think strategically if you're bootstrapping you have to bring in that extra revenue to land that high you have to keep that custom you have to sculpt solve that scale problem And over time, you earn the right to sort of raise your altitude and start thinking more strategically and long term.

18:34How have you recently prioritized the 10 ,000 foot view with one step in front of the other? When I moved to this VP role, I actually was in, I got on DeepSeek. This was a couple of months ago when it was absolutely exploding on the news and everyone's trying this new model. And I said, there's a famous product management essay called Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager. I think it was written by Ben Horowitz of Andresen Horowitz. Really good. And you know, it was written 20 years ago. I said to DeepSeek, tell me what a good VP of product looks like and tell me what a bad VP of product looks like.

19:08And then I said, build me an optimal calendar. And then I said, within each of those activities, so it says, okay, 40 % on strategy, 60 % on execution. I said, great. Within those, what are the activities around strategy? What are the activities around execution? I just kind of kept pushing it and it started to give me some really solid, solid tactics. I don't think I've nailed all of these, but some of the way that you can stay connected to the 30 ,000 foot view or 10 ,000 foot view is talking to customers all the time, really trying to understand and say atop of their pain points, what's top, what's top of mind for them, what's working and what's not.

19:45It's looking out across the industry, you know, what companies are getting funding, What's gaining traction? What's general sentiment in the market towards other solutions? You know, customers, you've got landscape, you've got how your business is going, and it's like trying to combine all of these, and you can start to form that view. I would say the 10 ,000-foot view, it's a messy path there. You have to do lots of small activities, and then again, turn that ambiguity into clarity. But it's not a linear path towards figuring that out. It's a process of discovering. and what I've started to do as well is I've started to put thoughts out there into the world this is typically in the form of some sort of strategy document or slides hey team here's where I think we need to be going this is not foolproof this is my understanding or reading of the world and our customer needs and pain points today and people tell you that you're an idiot and that you're way off base and you start to refine and iterate what that 10 ,000 foot view might be You don't just dream it one night.

20:49It's an ongoing process of discovery. And it can be really hard to make time for those activities and habits that help you build that view. Would you be open to getting up either a doc or a slide to share how you've structured it? I could definitely try. Here's one mental model that I've been kind of working on. Actually with Kim Yul, who's our data science lead, an epic strategic thinker. He's much more than a data scientist. He's a product leader. he thinks really deeply about strategy and mental models but one of the things that kind of kenny and i have been thinking about are how do people get value from tracksuit and it sounds like a really simple question but you can end up with a very very long list of answers very quickly and it's hard to get get to see the signal through that noise and so what we've been starting to play with is thinking about the broad buckets of value that we can deliver to our to our customers and we break it down into strategy budget allocation tactics and then what we call budget defense strategy is helping brand marketers figure out the direction that they're going and if you think about how frequently this happens it typically happens every two to three years or is triggered by some new incoming hire.

22:10There's a new CMO, there's a new head of brand and they want to figure out, they want to reset, they want to figure out the direction of where we're going. The next is on a slightly smaller time horizon. It's we've got the direction, we've got to run a budget planning exercise for this year. Where do I spend my money to try to achieve that vision? You then start breaking it down to specific marketing activities within that budget on say a quarterly level to know if the activities, you shape the activities that you're doing. This could be briefing a media agency. This could be starting to execute on a specific campaign.

22:44And then finally, you've got all year round, nonstop, marketers are trying to prove that what they're doing is working and saying, hey, we need this budget. This budget is actually making a meaningful, meaningful difference. And Keniela and I have been starting to use this framework and kind of tease out the way that we can think about value and the way that we can lead in from our product strategy into various areas of this. And I'll show you this. What's been really helpful is this mental model of frequency and value. Some of these things happen all the time, but are of lower value to the customer.

23:21Other things happen infrequently, but are really high value. So things like strategy, you're doing once every two to three years, but if you can nail that, really high value. quarterly execution of campaigns happening all the time valuable but less so defending budget happens all the time and if you can defend or secure more budget your tracksuit subscription is paid for itself 10 20 100 times over because you've been able to keep that and like this is an example of an idea that has been forming over time and we didn't just wake up with this model and we're still sort of evolving and seeing how this lands with the team with customers with kind investors and diving into it so here's one small 10 000 foot view that we're kind of like tweaking and thinking about a lot and trying to then letter activities back up to i'll tell you what else i love about it the question so good answers come from good questions um and if you zoom out slightly just so i can see the question what are the workflows metrics you care about touching so Number one, you've jumped into the seat of the audience.

24:29In this case, it's the customer. And you are intentionally using the word deeply because it anchors you to focus on what actually matters here for our customers. And you're also touching on the product, workflows, metrics. So there's that cool relationship between how does our product matter or could it matter to who says thank you to us? every month with a bill. So I love how you frame that question. Yeah, there you go. Are you a writer, Harry? If I could, if there's one skill that I'm so passionate about, it is the importance of clear writing. I write all the time. And for me, it helps clarify my thinking.

25:16I should tell you where this came from, where I realized the power of it. Back at university, I started this tutoring startup. This was my kind of first taste of startup world. I was a founder. It was small, but it gave me a taste. I ended up selling the business, learned a shit ton along the way, dropped out of my master's program to actually run it. And it gave me a taste of what this world could kind of be like. And ever since then, I've been hooked. But what the tutoring business was, this was back in Dunedin in New Zealand. In the world there, there were these tutoring companies that would run these cram sessions they would teach six months of content right at the end of a semester over eight hours charge you 80 bucks and you as a student would get like you would smash through the entire course to revise ready for your exam get a booklet of notes and you'd walk out hopefully feeling way more equipped and i was sitting there in these sessions and i was really really appalled with what um the quality the quality of things oh really I was going to say that is so up my alley.

26:15Oh, but it is if done well. The structure of that is, I love that. If done well, right? Right? The thesis there is so, so strong. And they were selling out. You were getting 80 students in a room for 80 bucks a pop. But I was in these tutorials and I was sitting there thinking, the tutor's getting that wrong. If everyone learns this, they're going to lose marks on this. What's going on? And I got to the point where I was like putting up my hand being like, I'm really sorry, but that is blatantly incorrect. You know, people are going to suffer off the result of this. And I decided to go and scratch my own itch and said, I could have got lost in like all the hopes and dreams.

26:56I was like, I'm just going to try and organize a tutorial amongst some mates. I'm going to charge them 20 bucks instead of 80. And I'm going to do my own version of this and teach people this finance course that I was kind of doing. And I rented a little classroom. Got about 30 people. Loved it. But in that process, the very first thing I had to do was like, I've got to organize my thoughts. If I'm sitting up there in front of 30 people for eight hours teaching six months of content, I'm going to have to write some stuff down. I'm going to have to, like there's an output that I have to give them.

27:27And definitely wasn't perfect first time around. But I realized when I went to go and write that booklet of notes for that initial tutorial, that it wasn't clear in my head what I was trying to communicate. I didn't have the first principle building blocks to understand the concepts in this course. And that tutoring business evolved. I ended up going from running tutorials in finance. Friends at the time said, can you do this also for accounting and for marketing and for the stats course? And then do you do law and you do medicine and health science? so i can do some of those papers but i'm not a lawyer i'm definitely not a medicine student but i've got some really smart friends that i reckon could could crack this and so over time i built this business called ace tutor little did i know i was building my first brand and i kind of it's ironic now realizing that i spent about three years trying to build a business that stood for something that evoked a certain emotion that was known for something and then to come at tracksuit and be building product and technology for brand marketers to do the same at a much more sophisticated level than my kind of crappy little student-run startup down in Dunedin.

28:33But through that, I got really, really, really passionate about writing, about taking complex subjects and clarifying your own thinking and explaining things. And there is, I kind of stumbled upon this thing, I forget what book it came from, but they called it The Curse of Knowledge, which is as soon as you know something, that knowledge becomes a curse because you forget what it was like to not know it and as soon as you go and communicate that to anyone else you forget that they don't have the knowledge that you have and so you need to help kind of get them there you're an expert now but you're communicating in a way that is to another expert to someone that understands that domain that's not that's not what what's going on and so when you're standing in front of you know by the end 80 people for eight hours teaching complex statistics concepts, you have to go back and say, what would a student on that side know from the very beginning?

29:30And can you build them up? Can you remove that curse of knowledge? And I think little did I know at the time, but I was learning to flex this product muscle of, again, taking complex things and distilling them down and finding the signal through the noise. And then even now today at Tracksuit, I'm a serial writer. I'm writing all the time to try and clarify this concept even though slides you could argue could be a form of writing started as a long memo with a few kind of diagrams along the way and so i think writing encourages clarity and is one of the most critical critical skills for people to develop in the world of startups it comes across in how you communicate to customers how you write those emails but but Like more and more writing is about expressing ideas and clarifying your own thoughts.

30:20And I'm a big fan of writing, you know, a memo about something, sometimes for my own purposes, sometimes not to share. I think it's one of the most powerful skills that you can, that you can learn. So walk us through some steps to organize one's thoughts. There's a really powerful principle. It came from a Lenny newsletter article. Lenny, the kind of product guru, the guy that's like single-handedly helping oil. He's really kicked off educating product managers and sharing best practice out there. And I read an article for him that stuck with me. It's called the Minto Principle. And the Minto Principle is, in most writing, there's like a classic narrative where you set the scene, you walk through some options and alternatives, you explain the pros and cons, you tell the story, and you enter the recommendation.

31:08Business writing is often about flipping it on its head. It's about starting with the recommendation when you're trying to communicate something to someone, giving them the so what up front. And then your goal is to almost preempt the question. You say, here's what I think we should be doing. And they go, oh, but what about this? And you realize the next paragraph, you've actually solved that question and solved that question and solved that question. I think Amazon does this with their six pager. They call it PR FAQ. I think that's right. Where it's the same thing. They start with a press release.

31:38like what is the thing that we're going to be sharing out in the market that's that's the outcome of the recommendation and then they break down like how they got there over time and that flip and how you think about it absolute game changer for like how i was thinking about writing and communicating the other one to be a good writer i might even share my screen as well and show there's an article that i read all the time it's about five paragraphs long it takes you 20 seconds to read and it's got this weird some almost hypnotic effect where i read it and it makes you a better writer because it's such a clear example and i'll pull it up it's literally called i think it's called the day i became a better writer and it's written by a cartoonist called um scott adams who did dilbert do you know dilbert once you read this article you've read this article so i come back to this all the time i'll share my screen again you got the day you became a better writer and like it's almost worth reading this out i went from being a bad writer to a good writer after taking a one-day course in business writing i couldn't believe how simple it was i'll tell you the main tricks here business writing is about clarity and persuasion the main technique is keeping things simple simple writing is persuasive a good argument in five sentences will sway people much more than a brilliant argument in a hundred sentences.

33:01Don't fight it. Simple means getting rid of extra words. Don't write he was very happy when you can write he was happy. You think the word very adds something. It doesn't. Prune your sentences. I won't read the rest but you go through this and I come back to it and it's so, so simple. Maybe my final piece that I love on this. Your first sentence needs to grab the reader. Go back and read my first sentence to the post i rewrote it a dozen times it makes you curious that's the key write short sentences avoid putting multiple thoughts in one sentence readers aren't as smart as you'd think these like i read this all the time and i often realize just how bad or how sloppy i've become it's like a never-ending process of reminding how you can kind of refine what you're talking about but i think again as a product person when you're trying to describe the problem outline the solution It's writing and organizing your ideas that can help bring clarity.

33:56How much time would you dedicate to writing a first draft versus editing that draft? Depends what the purpose of that document is. If that document is a strategy memo where you need to get the entire company bought in to the direction that you're going, 90 % of the work would be on editing and refining. 10 % is on that first draft. If it's a brainstorming document, it might be the other way around, potentially depending on what the purpose of that brainstorm is. But I would say in general, it's the revisions. Your first idea is really your best idea. Your first version is really your best. It's actually the time that you spend refining and iterating.

34:41I think that's what product management is, right? You put out a product, you put out a feature. It's the wrong framing to think that whatever you first release is going to be perfect, is going to solve it. Actually, it's can you get value out of the door quickly so that you can learn and refine. The same is true for writing as it is for building great products. I'm curious, in that writing process, there's always that dance between going high level and then you find yourself going low level. And I'm curious, like, if there is a framework that you lean on to help you take a step back to then organize and recategorize what you've written who's your audience that's the framework who who are you writing to are you writing to the exec team that needs the 10 000 foot view are you writing to an engineer that needs to know the high level view of where we're going but then really wants to understand the details you've got to be really cluant clear on who your audience is and the result might be the same document written four or five different times because you're presenting to a very different group of people and that'll dictate this balance between high level and detail fluffy language is something that i can run into you're training me to be a better writer what do you think that's symptomatic of fluffiness is often filler you're often trying to do two things with fluffiness you're trying to accentuate a point you're trying to really hammer something home and sometimes you you think fluffiness or more is better, or you're kind of dancing around the point that you're really trying to make.