Articulation

The single most reason why product makers don't grow to their max potential in their career path is lack of articulation.

Articulation = Clarity + Expression + Language

The more clear you are, your ability to articulate increases exponentially.

It is our inability to articulate that we are unable to tell the world the beauty of our jobs and the mysteries we solve every single day.

As creative problem solvers, our job is to deep dive into problem space, figure out insights, imagine the solution in our head and work with a team to engineer the imagination. Product making is a team sport. It cannot be done alone. So if you cannot make someone feel your understanding of the problem and solution, they wouldn't care much about what you care about. As a skill, articulation is a necessity for product makers like you and me.

Here are some way to grow your articulation muscle 👇

• You must know 10x to say 1x. Enhance your exposure to know more.
• Quantity matters. More input and more output gives you fabulous opportunities to say more, tweak how you say it and pay attention to how people receive what you say.
• Practice synthesis and insighting. What makes a person more articulate is their ability to pull out nuggets from what their assimilate. Try and express what you are learning in a tweet or a post. It forces you to be articulate.
• Don't let an idea die within you. Put it out there. It is ok if it dies after seeing the light of the day.
• Raise the stakes of what you say with emotional relevance and actionable steps and help someone out who needs that right now.

My personal articulation gym is social media. I have never cared about metrics and engagement. It helps you put out your thoughts in an articulate manner and see if it makes sense to like minded friends out there. One of the greatest tools that shows signal and noise on your face. To me, social media is a betterment platform.

Writing, podcasting, sketching, video making are great forms of expression. Top it up by planning, thinking and articulating, you will get exponential returns as a product maker.