Case Study: From PIP to Powerful Product Briefs
A senior technical product manager at a global gaming company faced a career-critical challenge: despite strong technical instincts and leadership potential, their writing repeatedly failed to meet executive expectations. After being placed on a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) for the second time in two years, they had eight weeks to demonstrate significant improvement in clarity, structure, and strategic communication… or risk losing their job.
The pressure was real. Their role, reputation, and long-term trajectory depended on a skill they had never been formally taught: writing for executive decision-making.
The challenge:
Their product briefs were thoughtful but difficult for leadership to act on. The core issues showed up in predictable ways: unclear structure, buried insights, over-explaining in some areas and under-explaining in others, and a tone shaped by ESL/second-language interference and ADHD-influenced nonlinear thinking.
Before our work, they had approached AI the way many people do under pressure: drop in a prompt, hope the model spits out a finished brief. Executives disliked the results immediately. The writing came across as generic, indirect, and disconnected from their actual expertise. What leadership interpreted as “not strategic” was often just “AI draft with no author’s brain in it.”
With the PIP clock running, they needed a way to produce crisp, confident, executive-readable briefs — consistently, not by accident.
My approach:
A crucial part of the engagement was retraining how they used AI. Instead of treating it as a ghostwriter, we repositioned the tool as a thinking partner: something that helps clarify ideas, surface gaps, strengthen tone, and organize structure while keeping the actual writing human. This shift eliminated the “AI slop” problem, restored their voice, and allowed their underlying strategic thinking to finally land with leadership.
Across a focused, time-sensitive engagement, I built a custom system that supported their neurodivergent thinking style and organizational expectations. This included:
- Analyzing internal examples of high-performing strategy briefs
- Distilling those patterns into a Successful Brief Benchmarking document
- Creating a Clarity Framework tailored to their cognitive strengths and communication goals
- Designing a Prompt Library for structure, clarity, and editing
- Developing two repeatable workflows (one for editing existing drafts, one for creating new documents from scratch)
- Coaching on tone, confidence, decision-focus, and stakeholder-centric framing
- Role-playing executive readers to simulate leadership’s 3-minute skim
- Reframing their ESL and ADHD tendencies as solvable writing patterns rather than personal deficits
Deliverables included:
Successful Brief Benchmarking document • Clarity Framework • Client-specific prompt library • Clarity workflow cheatsheet • Executive persona prompts • ESL precision review prompts • ADHD pattern interrupter prompts • Document review exercises • Session summaries and implementation guidance
Client Feedback
I didn’t think my writing was something I could easily fix. As a non-native English speaker who struggles with ADHD, I’ve been dealing with this across multiple jobs, and it always held me back.
The framework we built changed everything. It works with my brain instead of against it, and it has helped me soooo much. I can now easily see what my executives need from my briefs, and how to communicate the info strategically.
I went from being terrified of losing my job to feeling confident about the briefs I submit. I understand now how to use AI to help me organize my thoughts so I can write them clearly. Ariel didn’t just help me keep my six-figure job… she helped me build my confidence as a leader in the gaming industry.
The Impact:
- Job retained. Within the review window, the client demonstrated measurable improvement and successfully kept their role.
- Clear, repeatable structure. They now use a seven-section format aligned with how executives skim and make decisions.
- Document quality upgrade. Their briefs are more concise, confident, and strategically framed, with far less cognitive noise.
- Self-management. With the new framework and prompts, they can now produce polished documents independently, without spiraling.
- Long-term growth. The skills built here extend far beyond their current role; they now have a transferable system for communication in any future leadership position.
A crisis engagement became a leadership transformation: not just clearer writing, but clearer thinking.
Want writing and communication to become a strategic advantage for you or your team?
Let’s build the next version of how you work.
