Put the Answer First, Nobody Has Time for Your Story

| 2 minutes read

Most people communicate like they write a detective novel. First the setup, then the clues, then the big reveal at the end.

Your audience doesn’t want that. They want the answer first.

How often have you gotten an email and stopped reading after the second sentence? How often have you stopped reading after the first or second slide? I do it all the time. In times of reels and lowering attention spans, you have to lead with the answer.

There is a structure called the Pyramid Principle. Fancy name, simple idea:

  1. Start with your conclusion.
  2. Then give 2-3 reasons.
  3. Then back those up with facts.

What I changed

My debugging messages used to be like:

“We profiled the endpoint, checked the database query, looked at the connection pool, and after a lot of digging we found the N+1 query was causing the slowdown.”

Now I write:

“The slow endpoint was caused by an N+1 query. The database was hitting 200 queries per request instead of 2. Here is how we found it and what we changed.”

Same information. But now people know the answer before they start reading.

For presentations, I stopped using topic titles like “Market Analysis” and started using message titles like “Market growth of 15% supports expansion.” The slide then just explains the title.

The one-line test

Before sending anything, I check: can someone read only the first line and know what I want?

If not, my point isn’t sharp enough.

This sounds obvious. But most of my emails failed this test before I started doing it. Give it a try tomorrow.