I'm an Amazon product leader and I agree 100%, I'm already in back to back meetings all day long, emailing me a doc to read "in advance" puts all the stress on me. I'd rather you put time on my calendar and let me read quietly, and let me give you immediate feedback rather than me having to draft yet another email in reply to poorly explain my questions and/or my ideas.

I also block time in my own calendar, I have to write, a lot, and I have to work with my team on docs and other outputs. I block my calendar for those times, if you want me to read you know clearly when I have time to read with you, just grab a free slot on my calendar (in my timezone please lol). I am happy to provide the time, enjoy learning new things, enjoy sharing my thoughts, and often I can help find the right next person to read with you, or sponsor a leader to read with you.

Now all this said, I do find it a bit intense, to read "on the spot" and provide feedback, that said I will often provide feedback and suggest a follow-up meeting so I can noodle on the topic some. Meanwhile the author can spend time getting other input, improve the doc, and come back with a stronger story.

The best part for me: On-boarding!

When new people join I share major docs that were important to my team's plans, and some of them date back several years! I can share the doc with the new hire, ask them to block time for read + Q&A. It saves time getting them up to speed on our thinking, and we can discuss "so where are we on this journey" rather than spending time telling the full story for the 1,000th time.

When I joined Amazon I was an "Orator" style product manager, I would "tell the story" over and over, sometimes with some power point. And it was successful, however I feel like me and my teams are many times more successful with a strong doc process. And in the end decisions are memorialized, we don't have to go back and hash them over and over.

I was an entrepreneur for 25 years of my career, and CEO all those years. At Amazon I feel like I get the best of both worlds, the ability to innovate, invent, and the ability to do it at scale without pitching 100 VC's my next idea.

Interesting the way you termed docs as useful for Onboarding. I've found myself doing this a lot with our new SDE/SDM/PMs when they come to me for advice on how to propose initatives. I usually send them a top hits list and tell them which doc is appropriate for what scale / audience. Thanks for giving me a better way to phrase this!

That's pretty counterintuitive - surely if I book half an hour on your calendar and ask you to take half an hour beforehand, isn't that being more respectful of your time than booking an hour on your calendar? Surely in the worst case you could achieve the same thing by blocking out the half hour immediately before my meeting yourself, but you gain some scheduling flexibility as well.

If your schedule is busy enough, you may literally not have half an hour free between now and the half hour being booked. Calendar UIs are pretty good at making it clear whether you're finding an open one-hour slot and less good at making it clear whether you're finding an open half-hour slot where there's a free half hour at some prior time. And they also won't put a hold on that half hour, so multiple people might send meeting requests that implicitly expecting the same prep window.

You can potentially build a culture where it's normal for the recipient to decline invitations if they can't find a prep time, but it's much more coordination overhead.

Also, there's an advantage in having the document fresh in your mind, instead of shuffling into a meeting with people grabbing sodas etc. and immediately hearing "So, any comments on section 1." (The article mentions this: "Some people read the document but forgot what it said because they read it days or hours before")

Maybe another way to put this: "respectful of time" does not mean allowing the recipient to cram as many things as possible into their working day; it means allowing the recipient to decide how many things they can pay full attention to. If they don't have a full hour to dedicate, the better answer might be "Let me find you someone else who can provide you feedback" (or declining some other commitment in order to prioritize your document) instead of showing up for half an hour.

I’m a director level person — anywhere from 60-80% of my working hours are allocated in advance, and I have a hard limit where I stop working. So time is precious.

So if your expectation is that I’m doing work to prepare for your meeting, you best be confident that it aligns with my priorities and make that expectation clear.

It’s often a rude awakening for new PMs and salespeople. Lazy people, or people who have worked for micro managers, like to push trivial decisions up for various reasons.

Book an hour because that’s how much time you’re actually asking for. Don’t additionally give someone with a busy schedule the task of booking another appointment on their own to prep.

I think the key insight is that if you have some free time. Being able to schedule your prep is convenient. If your day is going to be packed full 110% of the time anyways then you may as well let the scheduler of the meeting schedule your prep at the same time.

But I have always thought it would be nice to be able to have calendar constraints. Some simple like "I need 1 contiguous hour for lunch between 11 and 15" to more complex "I need travel time between meetings" to automatically rescheduling meetings across people to avoid fragmentation issues. This could be a potential additional constraint. "This 30min meeting requires a preceding 30min of prep". This would be more flexible to schedule so could help busy schedules align. Then every day before I leave the tool can stabilize my schedule for the next day, any maybe I end up doing tomorrows prep today to allow things to bin-pack better.

I don't have an hour before hand. Just book the time on my calendar and you don't even have to show up, gcal lets you do this. This is how I get most of my document reading done for people. Sometimes I find other time to do it. Sometimes I don't. But having the person show up and code on their laptop while I read makes me really feel guilty, so it guarantees I don't get pulled onto something higher priority (this happens to me a lot).

Also if the person doesn't feel it's worth their time to do me the favor of making the appointment or to get my feedback, then are they really going to listen anyway, or are they just having me review it because their manager said they had to?

It sounds like I would have a distinct disadvantage if I was at Amazon. I am a slow thinker, and questions and ideas often come to me a day or so after reading some document. If I had to come up with all my responses within 20 minutes, I'd be effectively cut out of the conversation. Maybe that means I'm not L8 material.

The effective ICs that are that high level get involved in the whole doc process earlier than The Final Review anyway; people are collaborative about those before The Official Meeting, and asking to take a pass at the doc before The Review With So-And-So isn't weird.

It is said in the article that documents can be provided early. So you could read the stuff twice, first the day before so you have the time to think and then at the meeting to refresh your memory. So no, you probably won't have a disadvantage because of your careful thinking.