2 kinds of PMs: diagram-first vs document-first.

I run a small printing press off Asad Avenue in Mohammadpur, and I write verse on the side, which is to say my workdays end with two stocks of paper on the same desk. A blueprint sheet for the morning's khoshra, the rough sketch the engineering pod will build from on Tuesday. A cream foolscap for the chirkut, the typed memo the steering committee will read on a phone between meetings. The longer I work between them, the more I notice that the PMs I admire are doing the same trick.

Two PMs walk into the same problem. One opens FigJam, draws six rectangles, screenshots the canvas, drops it into the engineering channel, and ships in a week. The other opens Notion, writes a memo of six pages with assumptions, risks, success metrics, and an appendix of edge cases, and ships in a month. I have spent the last decade swinging between these two PMs, sometimes inside the same Tuesday, so I want to lay it out the way a printer would, with both stocks butted against each other on the same bench.

The PM who reaches for the diagram first compresses. Six boxes and three arrows is a forcing function, because you cannot draw a roadmap and hide a contradiction inside a paragraph. The picture either resolves or it doesn't. Engineering loves a khoshra; they get the shape of the work in twenty seconds, ask three sharp questions, and start building before the chai goes cold.

The PM who reaches for the document first accumulates. A good chirkut holds nuance the way a teabag holds flavour, and good memos read like teabags taste. They are full of why this and not that, the things you tried in 2024 that didn't work, the line legal flagged in February that you almost forgot about, and the one assumption that, if it cracks, sinks the whole thing. The sponsor on the other side of the timezone reads it once on a phone between meetings and forms an opinion you didn't get to argue. So does the regulator, although they read it three times and underline things in red ink. So does the next PM in eighteen months, who inherits your file the morning after you have moved on to a different desk.

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Each PM fails in their own characteristic way. When the diagram PM ships fast, the thing that breaks in production is the thing the boxes didn't show, which usually turns out to be a compliance step, a fallback state, or the migration of seventeen thousand legacy records nobody mentioned in the standup. Sketches lie by omission, and the lie is polite enough to slip past a quick review. The document PM has the opposite problem; while the memo is in its third revision and waiting on a fourth round of comments, a competitor has pushed something half finished to twenty thousand real users and learned more in a week than the memo ever will. Edward Tufte has been making this point for forty years about how words are evidence captured with a slow shutter speed, and the tradeoff was already old when he wrote it down.

So forget which artifact you prefer and ask instead who has to survive the artifact. An engineering pod that already trusts you doesn't need a memo, it needs a picture they can build from on Tuesday morning. A sponsor in another timezone reading on a phone between meetings will not parse a FigJam, but she will skim a memo if you have put the punchline in the second sentence and the rest of the page can be glanced past. Regulators want the memo and want it twice, with citations, and a future version of you at 11pm trying to remember why Option C was killed will thank the person you were today for having written it down even badly.

PMs who reach for the diagram first often come from design or engineering, and they have been rewarded their whole career for compressing complex things into legible shapes, so reaching for a memo of six pages feels like regression to school essays. PMs who reach for the document first often come from consulting, law, or, in my own case, editorial. I came up at Unb editorial and a small magazine that only the very patient ever read. You cannot edit a poem you have not written down, and you cannot defend a position in a Monday meeting if you have not already lost the argument with yourself in a draft on Sunday. So I reached for documents instinctively, for years, and I had to teach my own hands to draw boxes only after a kind designer in Banani sat me down with a marker and refused to leave the table until I had drawn one.

What changed is the audience. Engineering teams in 2026 don't want to read six pages, they want the shape. Strategic memos still matter, but they live upstream now, with the people writing the cheque, not the people writing the code. So the same PM should be moving between artifacts inside the same week. A memo to the steering committee on Monday, a FigJam canvas in front of the eng pod on Wednesday, a version of both, stitched together, for the all hands on Friday.

There is a family pattern I keep noticing in this city. On one side of mine are the chartered accountants, who have been running businesses out of ledgers since the nineties, with every transaction written, dated, and signed in by hand even after the bookkeeping software arrived. If a thing is not recorded, the family treats it as if it did not happen, and the books have outlasted three generations of dispute. On the other side are the artists, the people who run studios out of old Dhanmondi flats and fabric mills out near Tongi. The day's deal is cut by phone call between trips, with mood boards on the walls and a tab, running for years, of which cousin owes which favour. The deal lives in the conversation, and if you were not in the studio in Road 27 the afternoon the price was settled, you were not really part of it.

Both ways of running a business have lasted multiple decades along Mirpur Road, but they hit different ceilings. The ledger families scale, slowly, because the artifact survives every cousin who quits and every new accountant who joins. The artist families move fast and feel alive in a way the ledger ones don't, but they cap out at the size of one person's memory and tend to crack the year a key uncle retires or stops returning calls in the middle of monsoon. The artifact you choose to start with sets the ceiling on what you can ship past your own attention span.

The PMs I admire have learned to switch hands. They draw on Wednesday and write on Sunday, and they are, frankly, exhausting to work with, because they will not let you settle into one habit. What they ship survives the engineering pod, the boardroom, and the PM who inherits the file after they leave. I have worked with three of them. Two were passed over for promotion.