Define

As soon as you have something, the natural impulse is to start drawing. Drawing is pleasant, it looks good immediately and, above all, it lets you postpone the decision. Writing a sentence that explains the product lets you postpone nothing.

So before opening any tool, I write down what somebody has to understand in the first seconds. And I write down who I'm leaving out, which is the hard part.

Why one sentence is so difficult

Closing doors is vertiginous when the project is yours, because every closed door looks like an opportunity you're giving away. Say this is for small product teams and it sounds like you're renouncing the large ones, the freelancers and everything else.

But until you leave somebody out, what you've got is more of a category than a product. That's where the sentences that say nothing come from: the platform that connects teams with their data could describe two hundred different companies, and that's exactly its function, to commit nobody to any decision.

And a sentence that works for everybody ends up convincing nobody. The person reading it never gets as far as this is for me, which is the only thing that makes anybody keep reading.

What has to be inside it

Three things, and none of them is an adjective. Who it's for. What specific problem it solves. And what that person does today instead of using it, which is what actually measures the change you're proposing.

That third part is the one most often forgotten. If you can't name what you're competing against, a spreadsheet, a notebook, doing nothing, you won't be able to explain why anybody should switch. And you're almost never competing against another product, you're usually competing against habit.

How I test it

The test I use is simple. I explain the product to somebody in one sentence and ask them to give it back in their own words. If what comes back is right, the sentence works. If they have to ask me something before they can repeat it, it isn't there yet.

There's a second signal, less comfortable: if saying it a second time tires you, it isn't the right one. You're going to repeat that sentence far more often than you imagine, to the people you want using it, to whoever works with you, and to whoever asks at dinner what you're up to.

And a third, useful for discarding quickly: if reading it aloud makes you want to add well, actually it also does, then the sentence is describing two products.

Words are design too

There's an idea that took me a while to get and now carries a lot of weight in my work: the text in an interface isn't something you add at the end to fill gaps. It's a big part of the interface, and a lot of the time the rest is boxes around some words.

When the words are precise, a good part of the design settles by itself. If you know exactly what somebody has to understand in the first seconds, visual hierarchy stops being a matter of taste and becomes a consequence.

If you don't know, no amount of visual work will fix it. You will be arranging something that hasn't been decided, and it shows: those are the screens that look correct and that nobody quite understands.

The mistakes I've made here

Confusing the sentence with a tagline. What I'm after in this step isn't something pretty to set large on the front page: it's a working definition I use to decide what to build and what not to. If it also reads well on the front page, good, but that isn't its job.

And writing it by committee. A sentence drafted between four people ends up containing all four sets of priorities, which is the fastest route to meaning nothing. One person writes it and the others attack it.

How I know I have it

When somebody who wasn't in the conversation can repeat it without getting it wrong, and when I start using it to turn things down. That second use is the real test: a sentence that doesn't help you say no to anything isn't deciding anything yet.

Questions people ask about this