A rubber duck in an office environment can only mean one of three things: a colleague brought their kid to work, marketing is thinking about what the company mascot should be, or someone is using the duck to solve problems.

Rubberducking (or rubber duck debugging) is an engineering technique where developers explain code line by line to a rubber duck, often revealing the solution through the process.

The technique has spread to other professions because the process of explaining step by step consistently results in people seeing the solution. Rubberducking is a helpful tool for me, and so is writing things down or describing problems I’m trying to solve to others.

AI Policy: All content on this website is written by me. I do not use AI such as ChatGPT or other LLMs to generate articles from prompts or similar. All content reflects my own thinking, ideas, style, and craft. Occasionally, I ask AI (such as Frase or Formalizer) to summarize or re-state my own ideas on the basis of a complete skeleton I’ve written. Based on the response, I may reorder, restructure, or alter my original thinking. I personally write each draft and final copy.

Revisiting the fundamentals

I’m getting some help with marketing materials for Little Language Models. As part of this work, I was sent a list of questions to help ensure we’re aligned on the strategy and desired direction.

Answering these questions reinforced the understanding of how integral this area—facilitating conversations that help clients articulate their needs and goals—is to the value of our work as consultants. It also underscores the value of going back to the basics, such as explaining your audience, key messages, and value proposition.

For me, revisiting the fundamentals means clearly identifying potential clients’ challenges and how I can help solve them. So, for example, people discovering my brand for the first time will have identified one and likely more of the problems below on their site.

Potential clients will recognize the following problems

• Things (billing plan comparisons, information about their services, sample AI models that are ready to deploy, login) are hard to find.
• Their website is difficult to navigate.
• The homepage entry point presents a missed opportunity to inform and generate interest in what they do.
• The homepage and navigation features various products and call to actions, but the content hierarchy doesn’t accurately reflect key user tasks.
• They’re not confident in their understanding of key user tasks and site usage, and the influence of both these factors on business objectives.
• Content and page groupings aren’t intuitive and confuse rather than clarify.
• Their colleagues have to answer the same questions over and over.
• The team publishes and updates content frequently, yet they keep getting complaints that people can’t find what they need.
• Their team deals with large amounts of information, but they can’t agree on how to structure it so it’s easier to discover.
• Multiple teams and platforms have resulted in inconsistent navigation styles and terminology, creating a sense of disconnection and negatively affecting visitors’ perception of the company.

Prospects may be considering IA as a way to solve these problems, or something entirely different:

• an AI chatbot
• a website interface redesign
• tasking engineers or product designers with content architecture decisions
• asking ChatGPT to organize website content
• increasing their marketing spend
• team restructuring
• doing nothing.

Their budget and current priorities may not allow them to take action. They may have identified the problems, but aren’t sure what the solution is or how to look for it. I need to speak about problems, solutions, and what sets me apart from other choices.

What does going back to basics look like for your business?

• Are people aware of the problem your product or service can solve?
• Are people aware of the solution?
• If they’re considering a few options, are you making it easy for them to know if you’re the right option for them or not?
• How do you want them to think of and describe your product?

Going back to basics helps. When facing a challenging problem, explaining the issue to others—whether a colleague, a rubber duck, or an actual duck (good luck getting them to listen) —can facilitate new insights and help you solve problems. Writing things down helps get you unstuck. Revisiting the basics of your team dynamics, business model, and user needs can facilitate new insights and help you find innovative solutions.