One way to improve our learning curve on writing good documents (or creating good presentations) is to stop being overly reactive to executive feedback.
A better approach, instead, is to use executive feedback to better understand what good looks like. We can do that by digging into the why behind their feedback or by asking them. When we repeatedly do that, we’ll hone our gut for what makes a good doc. That’s most of the battle.
So, the next time you find yourself asking – “Will this doc work for x executive?”, consider the reframing the question to – “Is this doc clearly laying out my argument for someone who isn’t as close to the problem as I am?”
If the answer to the latter is yes, the former follows as the byproduct of a good product.
