Let the Docs Do the Talking

Years Ago when I was a student, I really hated anything related to the Documentation process, at that time I have a bad idea about it. In the collage days most time teams who working on the same project be like 4 people, and they are friends who having meeting and talks all the time, the projects itself was not very complex compared to real-world projects. So, documentation at that time was just paper that nobody will read. Even if someone want to know something, they will just ask the friend in front of them instead of open a poor written document and search for an answer. Maybe we were too lazy at that time to write well written document, most of the documents the students ware delivering were something like template document who you need to just fill it after coding.

Anyway, While I should admit there are things needs to be improved in the collage documentation process, but what I really dislike is the people take that attitude into the professional work.

There are many things I consider as documentation like Design document, meeting Agenda and Action items, COE, Deployment Notes, … etc. Actually, anything needed to be well-written for historical or communication purpose can be considered as document. That means even emails can be considered as document.

Why Documentation is way more important in the real-world problems?

Time Efficient

Talking about communication, it's way easier to use technical document instead of book meeting with everyone and talk to them, maybe you can do it when you have a team with ~5 members. But when the size of the team increase it will consume a lot of time, some will be on vacation, some don't really have clear context and some be busy at that time with other stuffs. So instead of forcing people to communicate with everyone you can easily send a well written document to them, it will include all context they may need. People with context will skip it when reading, while others can take their time to understand the context.

Compared to the normal chat, Document in most cases are more organized and has clearer language, also Document will avoid having many calls/pings related to any issue.

Feedback handling and Timeline Visibility  

One that I like the most is it's so easy to give feedback on a single point, highlight it for discussion, then publish the action item regarding this point, that done very smoothly during document rather than having calls. When someone added comments, you can easily see if it's fixed or not on the next version of the document.

Reference applicable

Anyone can reference to it or search it in the future, this help a lot in the timeline estimation, Requirement clarification and tracking, onboard new people, …etc.

I don't remember how many times I need to check a document to remember what exactly was the requirements. But believe me you will need it a lot when you handle many threads at the same time or even when you will check a new task.

When I should write a document?

Document is something people will need in future -even for archive purpose-, I haven't any case when people shouldn't write document, the correct question for me is: how long time people should spend writing document ?

There is one rule I follow, and I believe it's making much sense, the more important a document is the more time you should spend on it. For example, an architecture/business document that will affect many people for months or even years can take days or even weeks. An investigation document for minor incident with no really lost should take few hours, a recap for a call with external party should take few minutes and so on.

What should a good document looks like?

Here is my thought about a good document, Some apply on all document and another apply only on long document:

• A good Title isn't enough: it's nice to have a good descriptive title, but no matter how the title is good, it Must have an introduction section defining what is the purpose of this document. One of the most annoying things for any reader is going through all the document to discover what is the goal of this document.
• Assume People with no context: Never assume readers will have any unmentioned context, something like the current case and the motivation for this document isn't something readers will know. Remember people with context can skip this section, but people with no context can't imagine it, for example a writer can mention a number assuming the reader will have context about if this number is good or bad.
  
• Define Who will read this document: defining who is the audience for this document is very important, different rules will need different way of abstraction.
• Separate between What is critical, and what is less significant: normally any document has core critical sections and another that less essential or optional, can the reader easily catch the critical sections? Separation can be done using text formatting, orders and even separate the extra content in separate files.
  
• Support the Claims/POV with facts: remember this is a technical document, something like saying X is better than Y requires an approval or justification, the document should include facts or state facts supporting the writer's POV, anything else should be avoided.
• No-meeting mindset: one of the most common root cause for bad document is the writer always rely on the discussion meeting or someone will contact him/her if he/she does not get it. There are things not mentioned in the document but regularly have been discussed in the meeting, for me if not mentioned in the document then it should not bring to the table in the meeting. When you write a document, you should have a mindset that no one should contact you regarding this document, else your document is missing important info that should be included.
• A Second eye is always better: there are difference between the document that is reviewed by someone and the document that does not. If the document is long enough, it's a good idea to ask someone else to review it for you before publishing it to the team/company.
  
• Use domain/business standards: it's always better to use wide-usage knowledge that anyone in the field or business know instead of re-create the cycle again, something like Vocabulary, template, charts, …etc.
  
• Learn from people mistakes: when you have a document that everyone mentioned it's a great document, it's highly recommended following the document style. On the other hand, when people mentioned some documents is bad, hard to understand, or misleading try to understand why people think that about it and try to avoid these mistakes.
  
   

The Art of Effective Business Communication

In today's digital age, businesses have access to a multitude of communication channels. But with so many options, reaching and engaging existing users can feel like navigating a crowded marketplace. This article delves into the power of strategic marketing communication for fostering loyalty, driving up engagement, and ultimately boosting your bottom line.

Communication in this age can mean many things include notification, emails, SMS, calls, even social media posts, home-visit, or meeting. Business communication mainly focuses on the communication when the sender is the business and the destination is the user of this business.

There are mainly 2 types of business communication:

• Operation Communication: it's expected communication, like notify the client about the order state, renewal date, … etc.
  
• Marketing Communication: it's business related reasons, for example to notify the user about new items added to the business.
  

While Operation Communication is straight forward, Marketing Communication on the another hand harder and need more resource.

Why Marketing Communication?

There are Major reasons about why we need Marketing communication, but the common thing between them is they are all related to one fact: until this moment, it's easier to reach the existing users than trying to find new users. There are many machine learning model who collect a lot of data about the user to make reaching to new users became much easier but until now the Click and conversion rate for most of these methods not efficient. So how we can expand our service using the user who already pay for this service?

• Cross-selling: users who pay for one service can pay for other service.
• Increase Total amount or frequency: users can pay with higher frequency/amount/tier.
• Increase Retention Rate: users who paid then stop.
• Increase Conversion Rate: users who signed up but never pay any service. 
• User Based Marketing: users refer the application.
  

Communication Plan

Conversion Metrics, How Sender considers the communication as success?

The Most important thing to do is to answer the questions: How can we consider this communication as success or fail? How to measure the target metrics? What can be happened as side effect ? 

There are always metrics that business want to improve, like total transaction amount, but there are many metrics that effect this metric. And most time Sender can't hit all sub metrics in the same time, knowing that sender needs to only target smaller metrics to maximize the result in most times.

General Target likes 'payment increased' is something not very practical, Sender need to define some logical Target based on Market and historical data, and this target by its default should be hard but achievable at the same time. Additionally, when sender should measure it is also essential, should business expect the result after a couple of hours or a couple of weeks?

Lastly, business need to be aware of the side metrics, this helps in understanding if the communication has good or bad effect. For example, if communication Z improved the retention rate of users who paid for service X. but there is a side effect that the retention rate for service Y dropped. Should business consider this type of communication as success or fail?

Know The Customers

The key word in successful communication is to know all possible info about the customer, can business have good idea about the user age distribution, gender, finance state, device type, active hours, time zone, ... etc. This information will determine later many things, include how frequent business should communicate with different users, when, which language and channel it should use, ... etc. 

The more info the business have, the easier the communication will be, something like when it should communicate, the message's words, and the way of the communication, a lot of these question's answers are variable of who is the user.

Business who hasn't this information will be pushed to the corner and will just use generic approach that will never maximize their matrices.

Communication Bandwidth 

Any type of customer has a limited bandwidth, understanding the user base make The communication much more effective. For example, different ages have different resource include time, money, … etc.

No-Cost Communication Mystery  

There are many Sender that calculate the Cost of the communication by only its direct cost. So for example something like notification, emails, (and SMS for Telecom company), looks like 0 cost channel they can send as much as they can without any budget constrains.

While this in the first sight looks true, the hidden truth is the cost of the communication should never be measured only by its direct cost, But also with its direct impact. Something like keeping sending unrelated communication to the users make the future cost increase. User who used to receive many Communications will not give them attention. Actually in some time it will block this type of communication, for example user will block the notification, email, or SMS or ignore it, Spam system will filter more of these communications. Finally, the needs of Communication channel with much higher cost will be needed for larger group while it was required for only small group in the normal business.

Who should receive this communication?

Determine who to communicate, how, and when isn't an easy job at all, actually anyone can see companies with large data analysis team to answer this. Even with a lot of data, the Sender will not be 100% sure about the best way to reach the user to maximize the data.

The smaller groups make the communication much effect in most cases. Building data lake that include users profiles and their action history, training advanced models to group slimier groups, identify these groups and find Common things between them, defining the best way to communicate with them, …etc.

All this work need a lot of time and effort but in most cases, it really worth it, it gives the users the feeling this communication came from close person to him which make it harder to ignore.

A/B testing

Defining How to validate the number is also important, someone who claims that after sending notification to user, X of them tends to convert, while some say X is good or bad. My most significant question here is X compared to what? If for example People tends to convert by Y without notification and Y>X no matter how X is high it still has bad impact, and this type of communication should be eliminated.

A/B testing will answer this question, Sender will divide the target group to 2 random different groups, and only send to one group of them. Why? Because the Sender needs to avoid the external dependency as much as possible, sometimes external factors (for example a holiday, long term growth, or pricing changes) affect the whole trend much more than the communication. To make sure metrics will only measure the effect of that communication Sender needs to have 2 similar groups, comparing the metrics in both groups give the business much more Insight.

How to divide the main group to 2 similar groups? Simply by assigning people randomly from the main group to one of the 2 groups. Sender shouldn't and should never try to divide the group based on any common things.

Should the size of the first group equal the size of the last ? No, the most simple way is 50-50%, but there are many other ways like 80-20%, it mainly depends on how confidence sender is sure about the experiment, and both groups must have large group of user to ignore random error.

Should we only divide it into 2 groups? No Sender can divide it into more groups, but more groups means the experiment became more complex. Also, you need to be aware of 2 things: 

1. Control group is mandatory : sender must have a baseline to compare with
   
2. Each group size can't be very small -else random errors will give you wrong result and Sender will never be sure about these result (degree of confidence).

Should we run the test more than once? It's generally good practice to run the experiment more than once, time and events can affect the results, but make sure to adjust the sizes of the groups based on the recent results.

The results of one study -mentioned in references - proved that push notifications sent after A/B testing have a 10% higher click-through rate than those without A/B testing.