Lou: Hi, this is episode 53 of Write While True. Write While True is an infinite loop and that’s because we think of writing as an infinite game, a game we’re playing for fun and to get better at, like a game of catch. So in each episode, we’ll tell you something we learned about writing and then we’ll throw you the ball with a writing challenge or a prompt.
I’m Lou Franco.
Brian: And I’m Brian Hall. And today we’re talking about reader profile, the person or people for whom you are writing, which is a really powerful concept to spend some time on, preferably before you start writing, at least if it’s a big project.
I think this came up in the last conversation and your example was, I do B2B SaaS. If you’re in gaming, things might be a little different, something like that. I just want to talk more about that because of how useful it is to make those distinctions.
And I guess the basic point I want to make about reader profile, and we’ll get into what it is and how you do it, but it should make your writing easier to produce.
If you’re actually honing in on a particular type of reader, particular demographic, particular occupation, station in life, problem that they’re facing, it should make it easier to write your book, should also make it much more valuable for them than it would be if it was a general, generic book for anybody, blog post for anyone to read. So that’s what we’re going to talk about.
And I guess maybe examples are helpful here. So Lou, you wrote a whole book and I wonder if you could outline a little bit, who was your book for? How did you decide it was for them? And was that easy to do,
run into any issues along the way? How’d it go?
Lou: So in a way I’m lucky because my topics, things I write about only really make sense for software engineers. So I’m starting from a limited audience than just anybody. So like, if you were writing about, you know, business productivity or habits or something like that, just generically, you know, you’re writing,
I mean, one, you might think this is great. I have like a huge audience. Um, but, uh, but the problem is, is then, um, it, it gets hard to, like you say, hard to figure out what exactly to say to just anyone. So to start with my audience is software engineers, but even that it can be kind of big.
And so what I have tended towards is software engineers like me for whatever that means. So I, like I said, last, uh, last week, what that has kind of meant was a software engineer that works in probably in startups or something like that, um, in B2B software. Cause almost everything I’ve done is B2B software in teams, you know, with teams of people. So that, cause that’s the kind of, uh, software engineering I did and what I know the most about and what I might have something interesting to say about.
And so even honing it down that much, there’s, there, there, there’s like three profiles that I had a hard time narrowing it down to. So there’s the profile of someone, a software engineer, who’s just, you know, literally writing software.
So the coder or programmer, the person who’s making the software, then there’s their manager. So their direct manager, and I’ve been in both of those roles in my career. And so I felt I had something to say to, to both.
And then there’s the, uh, the CTO of that organization, who I also think is an interesting profile. And so, uh, so I had a hard time narrowing it down, uh, of those three, cause they all have some role to play in the topics that I like to talk about.
Brian: Yeah. I just want to use this example to highlight, here’s why this is useful. Here’s why this makes your life easier and makes your writing more useful to the reader.
To take the example of a general audience, or even if you got specific, but it wasn’t for software engineers, if you’re just writing for executives in general, entrepreneurs, perhaps busy moms, pick, pick your audience. You might have a metaphor that compares some sort of a problem to something that arises in, let’s say, version control.
If you want to use that metaphor with the busy moms audience or the executive audience, good, good luck. You have to explain first, what is version control?
If you know you’re writing for software engineers, you can just make the joke or make a comparison, very clever way to go. It’s that it unlocks the content as far as what you don’t have to say, what you can assume the reader knows.
And this just lets you go and get to the point and be more helpful. And at the same time, yeah, different, we could say priorities and concerns because your book is meant to solve a problem for people. The problem of tech debt is experienced differently by people at different positions in the hierarchy.
Lou: Right. And there’s also the breadth of problem or the size of problem that each could try to tackle. So like an engineer working on a task in a roadmap can’t do as much for tech debt as a manager could, or a team could, or certainly if it really came down to it, what a CTO could, just based on their authority and leverage and, um, ability to marshal resources.
So there’s definitely a difference.
Brian: So what did you finally hone in on and how do you feel about that decision in retrospect?
Lou: Yeah. So, so what I decided was that my, my bullseye reader profile, the one that I’m really writing towards is a manager of a software engineering team. So direct manager. So their direct reports are writing software. So not a, not someone more up the org chart, not a middle manager or, or the CTO that’s, that’s the person who I’m writing towards.
I think that person, you know, from experience and I’ve been this person, they still code some, so they’re sometimes in the code, they’re doing that even more now with AI. So, it’s not that weird to think that they might still code and, and they might be, I mean, it depends on the size of the org, but like in a, in a, in, in orgs that are in the hundreds of people, 200, you know, size, they definitely talk to the CTO sometimes.
So they’re not so far removed from the CTO as to not be, uh, need, need to know how to navigate conversations with them about technical debt. So I split the book into three parts.
One is really about the individual contributor, but also thinking about how, uh, that person works with their manager. Then the second part is about the team. And then the manager is really a focal point there on, on how they’re driving the team to do team wide, uh, debt practices. And then the final part was with the, about the executive, but I tried to think of it and I tried to express in the book that this was for engineering managers to understand how to talk about tech debt with their executives, like what kinds of things might convince them. So, uh, I don’t think I narrowed it all the way down to my bullseye, but the bullseye is the focus of, of the bullseye reader is the focus of each of the sections.
Brian: I think that sounds pretty elegant, honestly, throughout the entire book, even if the focus is on a different part of the organization, you’re still speaking to more or less the same person about that part, about that role or that function. I want to go ahead and out myself as having done not a great job of this with my first book. I don’t think, and it’s not for having failed to think about it.
So my book, it’s about conversion would be what I would call it, but the target reader wouldn’t necessarily know what that word means. So I spent all this time doing conversion optimization, website experiments, analytics, UX folds into it. How do you get more people to sign up for your app or purchase your product on your e-com shop?
And I did not want to write for an audience of my peers. If I had, it’d be a very different book. It’d be more technical. It’d be a lot more snarky and bitter, probably because that tends to be the personality of people in this field. I didn’t, there’s enough of that out there. And so I wanted to write for someone who maybe could use my help, but couldn’t afford it. And I narrowed it down to either a sole junior marketer at a small company or a solopreneur business owner who somehow is in charge of marketing despite not being a marketer.
And I wanted to give them the book that tells them, here’s what you need to know about your website, user experience, analytics stuff, given that you probably don’t want to think about this stuff.
I want to tell you the minimum that you have to care about so you can stop caring about it. And I think that’s, that’s fairly clear. I think that’s a promise that suits the, the needs of the profile.
And at the same time, that’s sort of a vague, broad, made up reader profile. Anytime you’re putting and/or into it, I don’t think you’ve quite nailed it. And in retrospect, if I’d had the courage, maybe to write for an even narrower segment, I could have written a shorter, but denser, punchier, more useful book. And I could have had a much better time of marketing it because I could have said who it’s for without a 20 word compound clause. So that was my experience, live and learn.
I’m getting better.
Lou: Yeah. I think one of the things to also think about with the two, like the Venn diagram of what, of the two people you’re talking about doesn’t overlap that much, I think. So the, the junior marketer and the solopreneur, and there’s maybe not a good, I’m going to call it aspirational bridge.
Like, so one of the things, and I’m kind of, it’s kind of thought as well, you were saying like, you know, a lot of ICs want to be engineering managers. A lot of engineering managers want to be CTOs. So, uh, so they might, you know, see, it might be okay with reading some stuff that’s a little out of there.
It’s not really for me, but they’d be okay with it because they think they should, they should want to know that stuff. Whereas, um, so if you did have to have, uh, you know, an and/or I think it would be good to, to try to think of a, well, if it, if it turned out that, that your and/or were a group like that, or with an aspirational bridge or something, then I think that might be okay.
It’s the first time I’ve actually thought about that. So, but I think cause I was, while you were talking, I was thinking about what, you know, what’s the difference. I have three groups. You have, there’s two groups.
Brian: I think it’s a really good point. Yeah. For, for your group, each group interacts with and cares about, and maybe once was or will be the other group. And with mine, it’s just kind of a disjoint set of random people who have a similar level of experience and similar responsibilities, but it ends there and, and you can do better. One can do better.
And in the future I expect to, which maybe is a segue to what’s a takeaway.
What, what can someone go do about this concept? The idea that, okay, if you narrow your reader profile, it makes the book easier to write and it can be denser with useful information because you can make assumptions about what people know. So what, so what, what do you do?
I want to propose that the next time you sit down to write, narrow it all the way down and write something, whatever it is, a blog post, social media posts, book chapter, write it for one person and stop short of addressing them by their first name, but literally just picture somebody who either has the problem that you know how to solve or is really interested in the topic that you’re exploring, write it for them to read. And the point of the exercise is to see how it feels.
Did that make it easier to write? Did you find it just kind of flows? Did you find that where ordinarily you might dither over word choice or whether to explain, did you find that those problems just kind of disappeared? I hope so.
I think it’s worth a shot.
Lou: Yeah. That’s, that’s a really good idea.
I think you would definitely, solve the tone problem that I think you were talking about, which is when you’re talking to a specific person that you know, there’s usually a way you talk to them. So you won’t, it won’t feel like if that way is formal, well then that’s the way you’re going to talk to them. But if that way is more casual, you might be able to develop a, you know, a casual tone if that’s what you’re going for by picking some, the specific person you’re picking, being someone who you’re in that kind of relationship with, where you would have a more casual conversation.
Brian: And it is okay to write that way. And people tend to really enjoy things that are written that way.
Lou: Definitely. Well, thanks, Brian. Uh, this has been episode 53 of Write While True, a podcast where we love infinite loops as long as they are fun.