My experience of 6-pagers in action

Don’t read this without first reading Ian’s post above!

I was privileged to have Ian on my team when I joined my current company. Being a many-year veteran of Amazon, Ian was both a 6-pager proponent and fluent in how to write them. I’ve described some of his 6-pages as “angels singing” and I figured I’d explain why.

I remember one of my first meetings at the company. The topic was around some particular decisions needed in the hardware space. While I’m comfortable with infrastructure and hardware at a high level, this was a very nitty-gritty decision and I was a new leader who had very little context in the matter. So I show up to this meeting kind of dreading it; I figured at best I would be bored and at worst I would say something completely stupid on the matter and make an ass of myself.

I arrive at the meeting and someone from Ian’s team hands out this document. “We’re going to take the first 20 minutes to read this, and then we’ll discuss.” Skeptical, I dug in and started reading. And while yes, the topic isn’t the most scintillating, I soon found that the structure of the doc was easy enough to follow. It walked me through the current situation, the options, and the recommendations.

By the time it came to go through the doc section by section and discuss, I felt something unexpected. Here I was, on a new team, in a somewhat unfamiliar area, and I was able to easily follow in the discussion, and even ask a reasonable question or two (and we all know how much senior managers love to be able to ask a question that makes them feel smart in a meeting!). We left the meeting with a clear decision that was well-documented and understood by all the attendees. I wasn’t bored, and I felt good that I had a much better understanding of one of my organization’s projects.

Cue the angelic chorus: from that point on I was a convert.

In practice, not all six pager meetings are so easy, and not all six pager docs are so well written (it certainly helps to have someone like Ian editing them). But we’ve kept the process up in my org, and when it goes well the meetings are very much like the above. The group is able to all start on roughly the same footing of understanding. We are able to discuss the decisions in an informed way. And we have a record of the document to remind us of the inputs we used in making that decision.

It’s head and shoulders better than powerpoint, and I highly recommend reading Ian’s post carefully and trying it out in your organization.