At INDUSTRY 2025, Sahil Jain, Co-founder of Samepage.ai, tackled a challenge that every product professional faces daily: communication breakdown. The skill we rank as most important is also the one we're measurably terrible at, he opened with.
Watch the video in full, or read on for some of his key takeaways.
"It doesn't matter what role you are, whether you're an engineer, a product leader, or just a general leader in a business," Sahil explains. "The communication and the quality of your communication is the single biggest multiplier or bottleneck for your work."
Why communication breaks down
Like many product teams, you've probably experienced this: Teams duplicate work without knowing it. Meetings consume 30-40 hours a week, yet everyone still feels out of sync. "68% of marriages end due to communication issues," Sahil notes. "But of course, this isn't just a problem at home."
He cites NASA's history as an example of what bad communication can evolve into. In 1999, NASA lost a $125 million climate orbiter due to a simple miscommunication. One team used metric units, the other Imperial. The orbiter entered the atmosphere at the wrong trajectory and disintegrated.
Sahil references Gagan Biyani, CEO of Maven and founder of Udemy, who articulates what true communication actually means. "True communication isn't about what you said," Sahil explains. "True good communication is about if the other person actually understood it. How many times have we sent an email to somebody and they said they read it? Everyone, of course. But did they understand it?"
The product communication paradox
As product people, communication sits at the core of the role. In a recent survey, product professionals listed communication as their most important skill. However he explains how 40% of product people were actually satisfied with the quality of their communication.
"The skill that we think is most important is also something we're not really good at," Sahil says.
Why communication is so hard
Sahil outlines three factors that make communication challenging.
- Information degradation: The message fading off with each handoff overtime.
- The mutation of interpretation: As we pass information, everything we say will be reinterpreted.
- The efficiency obsession: A need to streamline and improve things.
He references Claude Shannon's foundational work at Bell Labs, which treated communication like radio engineering: sender, message, receiver, with noise in between. "While the schematic is fine and it works, there are a couple issues with it," Sahil notes. Sociologist Stuart Hall later challenged this model with a critical insight: "Meaning is not received. Meaning is interpreted."
"This is why your communication can be as efficient as possible. It can be the perfect AI summary that you think everyone will read, but it still won't land. It'll still fail." Sahil says.
Four techniques to transform your communication
Sahil walks through four practical techniques to reduce miscommunication, and improve collaboration.
1. Lower your expectations
"Which sounds a little counterintuitive and almost a bit defeatist," Sahil says. But the obsession with perfect alignment creates its own problems. "How many times do we hear we need to have perfect alignment? We need to be in lock step. We need to agree on every single word."
Hill Ferguson, former CPO at PayPal used to tell his teams that 70% alignment is a win. "This was smart because taking off a little bit of that pressure for perfection allowed his teams to focus more so on just moving together," Sahil explains.
2. Lead with empathy
"All these people that you're communicating with are coming from different places," Sahil notes. "Some of them have different goals. Some care about money. Some care about having a work life balance that matters to them. Some of them really want to be motivated by the mission or vision."
Sahil took release notes as a practical example. "Your salespeople don't care about the bugs you fixed or the technically impressive feature that took eight months to build but doesn't drive revenue." he exaplains. "Learning, crafting, and changing our message to actually fit the end recipient's goals and worldview is going to increase the chance of it actually landing," Sahil says. "And that onus is on us as the communicator."
Aayush Jindal, Head of Product at Equals and formerly a Lead PM at Gusto, provides insight on communicating with engineering teams: "Engineers actually want to feel empowered and included. If you only tell them what to do, they disengage. If you treat them transactionally, which a lot of times unfortunately as product people, we do make that mistake. But if you ask thoughtful questions and you actually guide them through the conversation, they'll move forward with you."
3. Repeat with intention
Psychologists call it the illusion of transparency: we overestimate how much others know about what's going on in our heads. John Donahoe, former CEO of Nike, used to tell product leaders: "By the time you're sick of hearing something, you're only halfway there with everyone else."
"A lot of times repetition has this negative connotation, but it's actually part of your job," Sahil explains. "No one's talking about just copying and pasting over and over and over again."
Good communicators know messages must travel across various mediums and channels. A PRD is a communication tool. Release notes are communication tools. Roadmap updates are communication tools. "Those can be shared in live meetings. They can be shared in Slack. They can be shared via email. And as we should, different people will consume this information with different levels of success."
4. Frame with story
"Facts alone, information alone just informs, but stories really stick," Sahil notes, "Researchers have actually found that stories are 22 times more memorable than facts or loose leaf information."
When you hear facts, only the language processing region of your brain lights up. But when you hear a good story, multiple regions activate: memory, sensory data, emotion. "This is why messages actually stay intact with stories."
Stories follow simple arcs: here's the problem, here's how we're thinking about solving it, here's the solution, and most importantly, here's why this matters to you. "As product people, we're often told, you need to write the user story. In the PRD, you need to give us a little bit more context," Sahil says. "Those are great practices, but we're also busy. So we skip a lot of these."
Making the shift
When you combine these four techniques: appropriate expectations, empathy-led communication, intentional repetition, and storytelling, teams align. Duplicate work disappears. Meetings become productive rather than punishing.
"The last thing I want to leave you guys with," Sahil closes, "is that communication communication is a craft. And what that means is like any other craft, any other hobby, any sport, you have to train, you have to hone it, you have to improve it."
He draws the parallel to product development itself. "What every product has, right? It has features. It has a road map. So you don't need to figure it all out on day one, but you need to iteratively improve it over time."
Taking us back to Biyani's insight: true communication isn't about what you said, it's about whether the other person actually understood it. "And when we get this right, something super powerful happens," Sahil concludes. "We build stronger teams. We build way better products and far more resilient companies. And that's what it's like to be on the same page."
Want more practical product insights? Access the full INDUSTRY 2025 recap to discover more talks.
