Make It Memorable
On the power of making things people can actually hold in their head
I’ve watched leadership teams spend days creating six strategic pillars, fourteen objectives, and beautifully designed documents. Three months later, almost nobody can tell you what they were.
If people can’t remember something, they can’t use it.
It sounds almost insultingly simple: make things memorable. But I’ve watched smart leaders at good companies invest enormous energy into goals and values that don’t actually have any effect on behavior — not because they got the strategy wrong, but because they made things too complex for it to stick.
If your goals aren’t memorable, they’re not useful. If you have fourteen company values, people will remember three. And they won’t all remember the same three.
When people can’t hold something in their head, they can’t use it to make decisions. They fall back on something else — their own instincts, their manager’s preferences, whatever feels urgent in the moment.
Ultimately, your job as a leader is to create structure that shapes the decisions people make day-to-day.
A goal only matters if someone remembers it in a product review. A value only matters if someone remembers it when deciding whether to hire someone or escalate an issue.
The test isn’t whether people saw it. It’s whether they can use it at the moment they need it.
I’ll give you two common examples: goals and values.
Goals
Goals are a communication tool. That’s it. They exist to help people decide what to work on, prioritize their time, and know what winning looks like. If your goals can’t do that, they’re decorative.
Before you set goals, ask yourself: what do you want someone to remember when they sit down at their desk and decide what to work on? What do you want them to remember when they’re debating competing priorities and you’re not in the room?
The most effective version of company-level goals is a simple, prioritized list that is easy to repeat out loud. My favorite number is three — not because there’s magic in three, but because three things fit in a human head. At Facebook for the five years I was there, we had three top-line goals: Growth, Engagement, and Revenue. Entire organizations existed to move those numbers. But the goals themselves were simple enough that anyone in the company could tell you what they were and why they mattered. I wrote a much longer piece on the mechanics of this — how to find your three, how to decide which one wins when they conflict, and why non-goals matter as much as goals.
Values
I’ll be honest: I sort of hate values exercises, because no one ever stops to talk about what values are actually for. Most company values I’ve seen are too many, too vague, or both. They live on a wall and have no relationship to how decisions actually get made.
Culture is shaped by behavior. If you choose to write your values down, they should reflect the way you already operate — and they should help people make decisions when no one senior is in the room. If an engineer is choosing between two approaches and can’t point to a value that helps break the tie, the values aren’t working.
Fewer is better — three is a magic number. So many companies have 10 principles or 14 values, but if you ask every employee what the values are they will remember… three. A small set of values that people actually internalize beat twelve nobody can recite. And specificity beats aspiration every time. “Disagree and commit” is more useful than “we value healthy debate.”
Simplicity is a forcing function
One of the enemies of memorability is nuance. We’re often scared that if you reduce your strategy to three goals or your values to two, you’re leaving out something important.
I’ll tell you about one of my favorite experiences with memorability:
When Mark Zuckerberg needed to shift the entire company from web-first to mobile-first in 2012 — a fundamental change in how thousands of people thought about building product — he didn’t write a memo. He stood up at an all-hands and put up a single slide: a desktop computer icon with a big red slash through it. And he said, “We are mobile-first now.”
That was it.
It was overly simple. It absolutely left people with questions. But watching what happened next was like watching someone drop a rock in a pond — the ripples ran through the whole company. Every team had to go figure out what it meant for their roadmap. Every leader had to have the conversation with their people. Yes, it created stress, but if you think about it, that’s what Mark wanted: urgency and rapid change. The debates that followed were exactly the right debates. The simplicity didn’t kill the nuance — it created the conditions for it.
So the next time you’re staring at a list of eight goals or twelve values, ask yourself: what’s the version of this that someone could repeat to a new hire in thirty seconds, without notes? Find that.
Constraint is what makes things usable.
It can feel like dumbing things down, but when you make things memorable, you make them operable.
What else?
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Sitting with this today! 👍 “Culture is shaped by behavior. If you choose to write your values down, they should reflect the way you already operate — and they should help people make decisions when no one senior is in the room. If an engineer is choosing between two approaches and can’t point to a value that helps break the tie, the values aren’t working.”