How Wendy Yang Writes to Success at SAP
Welcome to Write Like a Pro — where experts from diverse fields and industries discuss how writing supports their professional success.
Professional: Wendy Yang
Company: SAP (7+ years)
Role: Global Program Management and Development – Customer Success COO Group
Sector: SaaS
Location: Ireland
How important are writing skills to your professional success?
Critical. All through my career arc, it’s always about explaining or describing complex information to non-technical people in the simplest language.
What’s your current job role?
I’m a go-to-market business partner.
What are your duties?
The core function of the GTM is figuring out what to sell and what services to [offer to] support the product. My role is to talk to each [SAP] department that has something to sell and make a plan for the coming year.
What is the scope of your role?
I deal with 10 managers or experts heading large departments, so if you count their departments, 20,000 to 30,000 people! I work globally: Europe, the Americas, Asia-Pacific, Japan, Greater China.
How long is the lifespan of work with a particular department?
About a year. The most intense period is Q4 when you have to create a business plan that’s ready to go in January. There may be some tweaks in the following Q1, but by Q2 you’re ready for the next year’s cycle.
What is your professional background?
Mine is not a linear path! Prior to joining SAP, I was in the games industry, working in operations, which is very different.
What’s your educational background?
Once again, not a linear path! I did a Bachelors in genetics, then a PhD in genetics – molecular evolution.
What underlying skills/strengths apply across your work?
During my PhD, I spent a lot of time gathering, absorbing and analyzing information, then summarizing my learnings in my own language. That has been vital to everything I’ve done. If I hadn’t done that PhD, I’d be freaked out all the time. If I were waiting for someone to tell me what to do, I’d never get anything done.
What role does writing play in your job?
Writing is very important. The output of these [GTM] discussions and decisions is a guidance document. It’s a mandate, and potentially anyone in the company could read it. It must be simple, precise, prescriptive. No buzzwords, no flowery language. It is a demanding style of writing.
What’s the writing process?
It’s written in collaboration with the 10 managers. Once everyone agrees it’s accurate, it goes through an editing process, then it’s published as a series of documents via SharePoint, each containing sections which may be relevant to different people.
How did you learn to write this way?
I’ve never been in a job that anybody sat me down and trained me. We have a template that tells you what sections to include. Beyond that, the rules of thumb are simple sentences, keep it to bullets, avoid acronyms. Clarity is key.
How have previous roles prepared you for this type of writing?
In my project manager role, you write a charter and regular status updates. That’s a different form of writing. In GTM, we’re producing instructions, there is no ambiguity, open topics or call to action. You still need to be clear and accurate, these are non-negotiable, but the content is very different.
What other areas of your work require writing-related skills?
Competitor research. Every large company is saying, ‘we need to invest in AI’. In my field, we do a lot of investigation to figure out what people are really doing versus what they say they’re doing.
How did you learn to write?
Nobody teaches you how to write, ever. At least that was my experience. My first [academic] paper, I literally wrote whatever came to my mind an a disorganized way. A post-doc student finally told me how to structure a paper and what to write, in a really prescriptive way. Nobody had done that before, and nobody has done it since. I’m so grateful to him.
People take for granted that because you went through school you can write. I was studying bio-science, so every single module was science. None of it had anything to do with English. And none of those lecturers were there to teach you English. Yet at the end you’re expected to write something coherent.
How would you like to develop or improve your writing?
My goal is to write with the fewest words to convey the clearest message. Concise storytelling. How can I distill a 20-page story down to one sentence? Each word is precious. People’s attention spans are shot.
What communication tools do you routinely use?
We’re quite old school: Microsoft suite. And we write emails all the time.
What role does AI have in your job/field?
AI isn’t one thing. For example, we might use machine learning to predict how consumer needs will evolve, which is one type.
Another is ChatGPT. Everyone says, use ChatGPT to write your stuff! But we can’t give business-sensitive data to ChatGPT. If you were silly enough to go and say, write me a GTM plan, and tell it a bunch of information, that goes straight to ChatGPT.
Personally, I prefer to do the work myself. I don’t want the tool to go down and not know what to do. I used to be able to hand write Chinese. Once I could type in Chinese, I lost that ability. I lost a skill. I don’t want to lose another one.
Just for fun questions
A professional development book you recommend?
Difficult Conversations by Bruce Patton, Douglas Stone, and Sheila Heen.
A personal favorite book?
The Art of War by Sun Tzu. The man does what I’m trying to do – most amount of information, least amount of BS.
A publication you go to for industry news?
Financial Times; sometimes Bloomberg, but it’s not always accurate; I stay away from blogs – those are just opinion.
A favorite digital channel?
I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn seeing what my connections are doing – it’s a bit of a social network for me.
An area you’d like to learn more about?
Astrophysics and quantum mechanics. Something Hidden Deeply by Sean Carroll is my second-favorite book of the millennium. It forces you to rethink the world.