“Writing as reporting, I happily automate, or I use the models all the time to make that as simple as it can be. But writing as thinking is something I never will automate.” Tara Seshan · Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

I really strongly believe that I do two types of writing at work. One is writing as thinking, and the other is writing as reporting. Writing as thinking is me writing a like a brief about why we should build a certain product or why we should take a certain strategy or why, like maybe a spicy take. But writing as reporting is things like, oh, I'm summarizing the status of what our team has been up to this week and I'm sending over a report about it. Or this is our plan for this particular launch or announcement or something like that. Writing as reporting, I happily automate, or I use the models all the time to make that as simple as it can be. But writing as thinking is something I never will automate. I really strongly believe that, at least for me, the act of going through and outlining something, turning it into some level of prose, cutting it and editing it, continuing to iterate on it is one of the most important steps for me to get my ideas in line. I think most people actually will paint with a really broad brush. Like, I will never use the models for writing, or I always use the models for writing. And actually, to me, like that brought both those broad brushes are wrong. I think you should use the models as much as possible for writing as reporting. And in as much as you think with writing, as I really do, and I think a lot of people do, you should not use it. You shouldn't replace your thinking with it. But my briefs in the past, because I write so much as a way of thinking, is that I will write a, I will go into a hole, write a brief for a new idea or a product, spend a ton of time refining that particular idea, shop it around with people and have them attack the ideas in it as much as possible. Coals, make it stronger, and then take it to the next person and do the same thing. And so, at Stripe, this is something I did many, many, many, many times over, whether that was like to kick off a new product area or to suggest a big change in direction or to analyze a problem and suggest like a path forward. And Stripe is incredibly oriented as a writing culture. And there are many people like Jeff Weinstein who are also very into writing and sharing briefs at Stripe. Stripe is one of the few places where like a brief will go viral inside the company. And so writing as thinking there is really prized. And that's where I did like the majority of that writing work. At OpenAI, I think I still write as thinking all the time. But the shareable artifact here is not really a long doc or a sort of proof of work in that way, partially because times have changed. And a long doc is not a signal that you thought through something because you can easily produce a long doc that indicates that you haven't. And so actually the point, maybe one of the biggest changes I've experienced personally in my day-to-day, which has been a big, maybe jarring change, is I used to think in a document and then do some translation of that into a presentational artifact. And that would be my indication that I had thought through a problem and this is what we're going to do. And the team moves in that direction. And now I am way more on mocks, not docs or prototypes, not docs. And if I have something that people can try and interact with, or even better, I have like results where we tried this, we ran an A-B. Here's like the results. This is why I think we should go in this direction. That is a way better communication tool than like the doc itself. And so I still write hundreds of docs all the time, but I do it for me. And I no longer do it for other people, really. Like that no longer is the best way to talk and communicate. That is probably the biggest change I've experienced personally in this era versus the previous era.