How writing has shaped Harish Govindarajan's professional journey at Amazon
A senior project and engineering manager uses writing as a tool for thinking
I’m calling this column Leaders Write because it’s my core conviction that writing is a key leadership skill. My goal is to help you build your writing muscles. But I also want to enlarge your vision of how writing can fuel professional and personal growth. So every month or so I’ll be bringing you conversations with leaders who are using writing in interesting, inspiring ways.
I can’t think a more eloquent spokesman for the impact of writing on professional development than Harish Govindarajan, Senior Manager of Product and Engineering at Amazon. After a talk Harish gave recently about the role of writing in his work as a Product Manager, I asked if he would share more about how he came to integrate writing so thoroughly into his work and life.
When I taught writing at the university level, CS and engineering students were often frustrated at having to take writing courses, which seemed irrelevant to them. What would you say to these folks?
My firm belief is that if you want to be known for your thoughtfulness, your ability to think critically, if you want to be known for the way you communicate, there are multiple ways of getting there, but the fastest is to become a good writer.
After several years of writing at work, it has now become my default thinking tool, even for things beyond work. When faced with an important life decision to make, I find myself naturally opening a document and just writing down my thoughts. It’s become a way of life, so to speak. It helps me make better life decisions, not just product or work decisions.
But even if the decisions themselves are not better, at a minimum, I know why I made them. And the next time, I can go back and look at what led me to those decisions, and what I need to correct in my thinking. So it creates that reference point, that artifact that I can go back to.
Writing gets you to be a better thinker and communicator. It allows you to make better decisions across all aspects of your life.
How did you come to think of writing not just as a product but as a tool for thinking? Was this something you always knew or did you discover it along the way?
I discovered it along the way. I had to write because it was part of my job when I joined Amazon. Amazon has a culture of writing. Writing long-form narratives and reading them in meetings is the decision making mechanism at Amazon.
When I first joined Amazon in India, I joined an operations team where the leaders knew how to run operations but weren’t good writers. As the new MBA kid on the team, I was made the writer. The documents that I had to write were strategic documents that required a clear vision for the business and a roadmap to get there, which was hard for me to conjure up because I was just starting out.
For the first few months, I was the director’s scribe. Over time I started to develop a feel for how to think strategically and how business is run. From then on, writing became fun because I could write my own ideas, including the beginnings of what became large programs.
Had you written much before that?
I had a blog back when I was doing my engineering undergrad that I used for directionless musings. It wasn’t good writing, and no one read it. When I go back and read it now, it’s embarrassing. But the blog did have a role to play in my career. My first Director at Amazon saw it, and that is how he decided that I would be the guy who would write his strategy documents.
You said that your career has been shaped by writing. Can you say more about that?
Like I said, at Amazon, every meeting and every decision is driven by a narrative document. At meetings, the owner of this document presents what they have written, and the rest of the group just sits and reads the document for the first half of the meeting. So the first few minutes of the meeting is just silence and it can be almost awkward because everyone is gathered but we’re all just reading. The idea is that if the document is written well and if it covers all of the important points, then everyone can get to the core parts of the discussion very quickly.
The way it enabled my growth was that because of that foundation of writing, I developed a deep understanding of the decision making process at an executive level early on in my career. That enabled me to switch between job functions and still be pretty successful. Going from program management to product management to technical product management to a place where I can now lead an engineering team without ever having done that before—I attribute a lot of that to the practice of writing.
Tell me a little about your writing process.
It changes based on the type of document and the subject. But broadly speaking, I start with outlining the story I want to tell in the document, and evolve a structure to support that story. Once I feel good about that outline, I start gathering all the information I need. This often requires talking to a lot of people, brainstorming, digging quantitative and qualitative data, and so on. And once I have all the information, writing the document is a relatively quick process.
Having said all that, I will admit that I am still really bad at judging how much time a document will take me to write.
Also, I never write in one sitting. Part of that is just my attention span. But I also like focusing on one section at a time, taking a break from the document, and then coming back to it. The time off allows for thinking to crystallize, and some iterations on the content before I start getting feedback from others. Typically, I like to review the document at least twice with stakeholders, and make updates based on feedback, before taking it to the executive for the final review.