Tailor your message to each executive's concerns

If you're not an executive, whatever you're working on, you're basically writing and telling a story. And when you talk to an exec about that story, you have to start with chapter one, which is what part of the company strategy are you working on?

Executive communication is actually executives communication. You're communicating with individual executives that all have different styles and different concerns about the business.

You want to de-risk that meeting not make it a big success or fail moment... You want to anticipate that, and if you don't have enough experience say presenting to the CFO or the CEO, I as the chief product officer do, so I can impersonate them and help you understand what they're going to care most about.

We don't want to make them work to understand what it is that we're doing and the value that we provide.