Why docs eat slides for breakfast

Plus, how you can build a docs culture at your organization

In most of corporate America, PowerPoint reigns supreme.

Every meeting is accompanied by a “slide deck”. Participants spend the majority of meeting time “walking through” these decks one slide at a time.

If they’re lucky, they’ll get a “pre-wire” with a summary of the meeting plus the slides that will be covered. Most of the time, they won’t - and meetings are a steady march through prepared content.

How do I know this? Well, I spent 3 years of my life making slides and sharing them with clients.

Don’t get me wrong - slides have their place. They can be useful if you need to share a lot of data or walk an audience through a narrative arc. But they’re almost never the most efficient way to conduct a collaborative meeting.

Fortunately, there’s a better way to share content for collaborative meetings: docs.

In this post, I’ll define a docs-based culture, share a scrappy approach on you can build culture at a startup, and dig into the benefits (listed below).

Let’s dive in!

First, why PowerPoint captured most corporations

The idea of slides is nice.

Presentations feel collaborative, people can ask questions, and there are a lot of pretty visuals. Walking through a PowerPoint makes the presenter feel important, and the meeting participants don’t have to do much work if they don’t want to.

Everyone feels like they had a productive meeting, even if nothing was decided!

I believe this is one big reason why PowerPoints are so popular.

The other, more pernicious reason is that PowerPoints are very malleable. They give the presenter the ability to adjust their message mid-stream based on the reaction of the audience.

On their own, PowerPoints are lifeless entities. Most “meeting” PowerPoints are a series of slides with graphs and descriptive titles but not much on what should be done. It’s up to the presenter to take these slides and tie them together into a “so what”. Data can be interpreted in many ways!

Let’s say there’s a presentation on the launch of a new product. The presenter has prepared slides with data on the launch, and they show that it went worse than expected. The goal of the meeting is to decide what to do next.

With slides, the presenter can adapt the direction of the meeting to the audience. If the PM who launched the product is the most important person in the room, the presenter can run through the data in a way that minimizes the negative aspects of the launch. They could even ship the slides with really bad data!

In large, political corporations this trait is really, really valuable because it gives people optionality in the way they communicate. They can avoid presenting difficult conclusions to important people.

This all might be fine if slides led to better decisions. But the opposite is true. Slide-based meetings activate all sorts of biases, including:

• Groupthink: People give reactions to data in real time, and adjust their reactions to other people (especially important people)

• “Good presenter” bias: People who present well or are confident public speakers will be taken more seriously than people who don’t

• “Nice slides” bias: People will focus on the form of the slides (i.e., do they have nice charts and even margins) over the substance of the material

Startups don’t have time for bad decisions or lengthy “feel good” meetings - which is why a “docs culture” is a much better fit.

What does a docs culture look like?

Jeff Bezos has shared a lot on the topic, and is famous for building a “docs” culture at Amazon. This provides a decent template for a “docs” culture.

At Amazon, every important meeting is structured around a 6-page, narrative document. This document is supposed to frame the problem, include all key data, and provide a recommendation on what decision to make on the chosen topic. No slides are allowed.

At the start of the meeting, everyone spends 20 minutes reading through the document and writing down questions. The remainder of the meeting is spent in discussion.

Instead of “walking through slides” people read content, which lets them digest it all at once. The document stands alone, with no ability to modify its conclusions once it’s shared. Everything must be laid our clearly.

It’s a great example to follow, but Amazon’s “6 pager” format is too heavy for startups. 6 pages? Narrative arc? No one has time for that that.

How to build a docs-based culture at a startup

Fortunately, you don’t need to have these lofty rules and procedures to build a docs culture. Instead, start with a few simple guiding principles, and go from there.

First, slides should be used sparingly (i.e., only in all hands or similar narrative environments). This is easy to communicate and share.

Second, there should be one, standardized system for creating and storing docs. At Statsig, we use Notion (which is phenomenal) but other apps would work (including Google Docs, Word, or Confluence).

Aside: Why Notion is so great for docs

Notion is amazing for docs because it’s incredibly easy to format, extremely lightweight, and super collaborative.

Notion is also entirely searchable. If you have a doc that you worked on years ago and want to find it, a search returns the content of the doc in a pre-viewable UI - no need to go open the doc to figure out if it was the right one.

This gets even better with Notion’s AI features. These allow you to ask natural language questions about old documents, and get answers that span across multiple docs. This is a new kind of organizational memory!

We keep everything we’ve done in Notion, and it’s made building a docs culture way easier.

Third, every important meeting should have a doc associated with it.

What’s an important meeting? Any time you’re making a decision that requires input from multiple people / teams.

If one team is making a decision independently, they don’t need to have a doc. If a cross-functional team is making a small decision that’s very easy to reverse, they don’t need to have a doc. But if there’s a collaborative decision to be made that’s not easy to reverse, there should be a doc.

Fourth, you should have a standardized format / set of expectations for these documents. This is company dependent, but you’ll generally want to have 4 primary sections:

• Goals: What are you trying to accomplish in this meeting?

• Agenda: How are you planning to use the time alloted for the meeting?

• Recommendation: What should be done?

• Context: What does the reader need to know about the situation to provide useful input? This can be bullet points, a few paragraphs, or even a few pages, depending on the audience & complexity of the situation. All relevant data should be included in this section.

Depending on your org, these docs can be shorter or longer, more narrative or more focused on sharing data.

Fifth, you need to have an expectation around when docs are shared. In my experience, there are two good options: Share at least 1 day before the meeting, or share at the start of the meeting (with 10 - 20 minutes of dedicated reading time).

Everyone who needs to weigh in must have read the doc before the meeting starts. If an important person hasn’t read the doc, the meeting shouldn’t proceed until they’ve read it.

Finally, people should leave questions in the doc and someone should take notes in the doc as the meeting progresses. This provides a record of what people thought & gives everyone an opportunity to ask clarifying questions (even if they aren’t particularly outspoken).

Why docs eat slides for breakfast

#1: More time is spent thinking vs. polishing

In many ways, docs are harder to create than slides. Writing is really difficult! In a written document, you’re forced to communicate information clearly and succinctly. Your thoughts must stand alone on the page, without supporting context.

It’s easy to make a powerpoint, because you can mechanically throw data into slides and add flat commentary. It’s hard to write a doc, because you must include something of substance. When you’re preparing docs, you spend much less time worrying about formatting and much more time clarifying your thinking.

From a productivity standpoint, this is the biggest “pro” of docs vs. slides. You’ll probably spend the same amount of time working on each, but if you’re working in docs, less of the time will be spent on superfluous activities.

#2: Ideas are judged on substance, not style

With docs, the person leading a meeting is primarily judged for the quality of their writing, not for their presentation skills. This means that “good presenters” don’t get as many bonus points. Of course, you’re introducing a new bias for good writing, but good writing is generally predictive of good thinking (unlike public speaking)

Docs also create a more inclusive environment for attendees.

Every attendee has full context, meaning every attendee can contribute. Docs make it easier to ask questions, since questions can be included in the doc itself instead of being interjected during the meeting.

In writing, “title bias” is also less pronounced. A CEO’s question looks exactly like an intern’s when it’s written in a document.

#3: Meetings are discussions (not content dumps)

When everyone reads through the content before the meeting, the substance of the meeting becomes a discussion (vs. a content dump). No one is held hostage by someone sharing information they already know.

Purely from a time-saving standpoint, this leads to far more productive meetings.

#4: Pre-reading leads to better questions

When people have time to read through something and examine arguments, they are more thoughtful and more informed. This generally helps elevate the quality of questions.

They also get all the data before the discussion starts, so questions that are answered in the materials can be avoided all together. This saves time.

#5: People are forced to have strong opinions

When you're writing, you can't "voice over" your conclusion. Docs force people to take a stance on what should be done next, rather than adapting recommendations to the audience.

The person preparing the document should be the closest to the data since they’ve spent the most time examining it. Their opinion should be weighed highly. Too often, in presentation-based cultures, the person who spent the time conducting analysis is bowled over by the highest paid person in the room.

#6: Organizations build long-term “memory”

If you try to revisit a slide deck after 6 months, you won’t get much from it. But if you open a document after 6 months, everything you need is right there.

When you write in a way that gives full context to readers, it doesn’t just benefit the people joining the meeting - it also helps future readers who are trying to understand why certain decisions were made.

This gives organizations the ability to retroactively evaluate their decision making to improve decision quality over time. It also helps new people onboard. If they need context on why something happened, just have them read the doc!

I’m almost 2 years into my time at Statsig, and I can easily go back and find docs I wrote in month 2. Slides in SharePoint or OneDrive can’t compete with this kind of historical repository!

Closing thoughts

If you work at a company that uses slides, that’s okay. I spent a long time in that world and learned a lot from it!

If you’re in this situation, there are ways that you can instill some part of a docs culture: asking people to do a pre-read, creating slides that stand alone, requesting an explicit hypothesis on next steps over email, etc.

Still, there is something fundamental about docs that creates a culture of substance. Writing nudges people towards better thinking, slides nudge people towards better formatting.

Thanks to Statsig for employing me (note - this is a test for Statsig SEO).