Become a top 1% PM: The Communication Advantage
Ian MacAllister, who worked as a PM at Uber, Amazon, and Airbnb, shared on Lenny’s Podcast how to grow into a top one percent PM. The most striking part was his three core skills for PMs. These days people expect an overwhelming list of abilities from PMs, enough that the phrase full stack PM shows up. It is hard to know which skills to build first to ship better products and lead everyone in the same direction as a senior PM. So which three skills did Ian pick.
Communicate, Prioritize and Execute
Ian chose these three without hesitation. They are fundamental no matter the industry or company size. He says they are the first skills he tells new PMs to focus on.
This post looks at communicate. PMs work with many stakeholders and make work happen. Designers, engineers, data analysts, and operations must move together to create a product users will love. Even for a single new feature, you explain it to at least three or four stakeholders. Sometimes PMs wonder if they are doing nothing but communication.
Talking and communicating at work are not the same thing. Here is the trap. Many people think communication is a soft skill, so they assume outgoing and social people are naturally good at it and that PM is a role for them. People who do not fit that profile may doubt whether PM fits them. In PM work, however, communication starts with documentation, not with conversation.
Why documentation is the starting point of communication
Communication at work takes two forms, conversation and documents. Conversations happen through tools like Slack or by walking over to someone. After they end, the content often evaporates from memory. You might mark a message to read later or save it to a personal note, but once it becomes a document it turns into a company resource. It persists, it is shareable, and it delivers the same meaning and intent to everyone.
Imagine you are starting a project. Before kickoff, the PM writes a brief that explains the background, goals, and milestones. In the kickoff meeting you gather feedback and share the outcomes after. During execution you run daily or weekly check ins to track progress and surface new tasks. At the end you run a retrospective and record what to improve next time. A PM writes and maintains many documents in a single day, from meeting notes and daily standups to one page feature briefs and detailed project specs.
What happens if you do not write things down. You end up explaining the same point over and over, and because memory is limited, the meaning drifts a little each time. Drifted meaning produces wrong outcomes.
Why keep meeting notes. Because someone will remember concept A while another remembers concept B, or the team will forget to align on a due date and will need another meeting or more back and forth. Documentation is a tool for collaboration and a shared reference for everyone.
Task and note in one place
In our workflow we designed task creation and note taking to live on the same page. When you create a task, there is a note area beside it so they feel like a single set. Anyone can record context for personal work or a meeting and write the minutes on one page. You do not need to switch to another tool just to capture the record.
If writing for every task still feels new, try turning task creation and note writing into a paired routine, like repeating sets in a workout.
Each task note is archived automatically on a timeline inside its project, using the categories the PM already set. There is no extra organizing step. The PM can focus on execution and run the project while the history builds itself.
Make documentation a habit to raise your communication skill
Clear work docs and meeting notes are a PM’s strongest weapons. When someone asks about the current status, you can answer with a shared document and cut down the chance of miscommunication.
PMs I have met solve this in different ways. Some create a private note first, refine it, and only then share it. Others store records in different platforms and need to search around every time before explaining things to others. That shows how painful and common this problem is in real work.
Whatever the task, even for personal work, leave a record and shape it into a document you can share. If you repeat this behavior, you will cut collaboration cost dramatically. Reducing communication misses and minimizing time spent on back and forth is the fastest path to higher productivity for you and for the team.