What does it mean that define your output types?

Know what kinds of outputs your work produces — documents decisions artifacts communications.

Example: You are a product manager who has been in the role for three years, and if someone asked you what your job produces, you would probably say something vague like "I make sure the product gets built." But when you sit down and actually catalog the tangible outputs you created last quarter, the list is startlingly specific: fourteen product requirement documents, sixty-three Slack messages that constituted decisions (buried in threads, never recorded elsewhere), nine slide decks for stakeholder presentations, four competitive analyses, one quarterly roadmap, twenty-two Jira tickets with acceptance criteria, and roughly two hundred email replies. You produced seven distinct output types, each with different quality requirements, different audiences, and different shelf lives — but you had never named them, never distinguished between them, and never asked whether the distribution of effort across them was correct. You spent more hours on slide decks than on the requirement documents that actually drove engineering work. You made sixty-three decisions via Slack messages that were effectively invisible to anyone who was not in the thread at the time. Naming your output types does not change the work. It changes your awareness of the work — and awareness is the prerequisite for optimization.

Try this: Conduct a personal output audit over the past two weeks. Step 1: Open your calendar, your email sent folder, your messaging app, your document editor, and any project management tools you use. Scan the past fourteen days and list every tangible thing you produced — every document, every message that contained a decision, every artifact, every analysis, every presentation, every piece of feedback. Do not filter for importance; list everything. Step 2: Group the items into categories. You will likely find five to eight natural clusters: documents (memos, reports, specs), decisions (choices communicated to others), communications (emails, messages, updates), artifacts (code, designs, spreadsheets, templates), analyses (research, comparisons, evaluations), presentations (decks, demos, pitches), and feedback (reviews, critiques, approvals). Use whatever categories emerge from your actual output — do not force it into someone else s taxonomy. Step 3: For each category, count the items and estimate the total hours spent. Step 4: Rank the categories by the value they created — not the time they consumed, but the actual impact on your goals, your team, or your stakeholders. Step 5: Compare the time ranking to the value ranking. Where are you over-investing in low-value output types? Where are you under-investing in high-value ones? Write a one-paragraph summary of what this audit revealed about the shape of your output portfolio.