Stakeholder meetings are full of opinions. It's important to have the ability to parse what someone’s point of view is, how it aligns with the company goals, and the CEO’s opinion. This is where the POV Doc can help; a document to share your personal perspective on a work topic. This is similar to a “working with me” doc but applied to a subject or topic. Having a clear point of view is important for everyone, and as a stakeholder it’s important that clarity scales. If you don’t, it results in trash for the team often figuring out how to parse your opinion:

• “Is this a directive from you?”

• “But another stakeholder told us something else”

• “How urgent is this?”

I've written a few to help teams know how I feel and what I'm thinking about a particular topic with the hope that it doesn't feel like swoop and poop. Essentially, it's a pre-read doc or scalable documentation on an opinion. This is very useful for people you don't work with day-to-day who may not know your POV on something.

POV Doc workflow

Even if you never share it to a soul, write POV Docs for yourself. It will at the very least firm up what you personally believe. After writing down your point of view, create a version in your company’s knowledge management software to share with colleagues. You may realize at some point the POV is helpful to publish to the world. This may be your POV on a certain industry topic that would be valuable to share. Ensure there isn’t anything confidential with work on it and permission to publish the it.

Though it results in manual updating, I break the three documents out separately:

• Private POV: Obsidian

• Internal POV: Google Docs (what we use at work)

• Publish: Stashpad Docs or my website

Goal of the POV Doc

The goal of a POV Doc is scalable input. I don’t seek out to share opinions on everything. A POV Doc is a way to loop yourself in and share a POV on what you feel is important. The hope is documenting this information gives more people access to your thoughts without having to set up meetings or run things by you. If written effectively, the POV Doc serves as a guide for teams to make considerations based on you as a stakeholder—self-serve feedback.

Tips on on content

I’ve been working on forming more structure around POV Docs. This allows for more consistency when writing multiple ones. Though it’s okay to write freeform I advise against it as it may not give people clarity on the takeaways. It might tell people what you think but not how they should think about it.

My document structure:

• Overview: Preface and caveat what the intent of the doc is

• Principles on the topic: How you are guided by your POV

• Hypothesis: Concrete examples of what you think will happen based on ideas you have

• Sources cited: Links to articles externally or peers wrote

Tips and tricks:

• Provide examples of what your POV looks like in action

• Include media and images to make it a richer experience

• Be the first critic of your POV. Proactively share where potential misalignment may be

That’s it! You’ve created a POV Doc that clearly articulates your strong opinions about a topic you find important. Invite others to collaborate on it and I bet you’ll see a great dialog. The document’s value is not the artifact itself. It’s what results the team creates with it.