Communication. Your career success will be largely determined your ability to speak, your ability to write, and the quality of your ideas — in this order.

Writing

• Keep track of what your reader knows and doesn’t know
• Make every sentence mean something
• Put the bottom line up front (BLUF)
• Present, don't persuade
• Be precise
• Replace adjectives with data
• Use short sentences
• Avoid intensifiers, like “very” and "significant"
• Use parallel syntax

Decks

• Aim for under 10 slides
• Put detailed analyses in an appendix
• Use at least size 16 font
• Put the essential point in the title slide
• Connect slide titles in a single, linear train of thought
• Replace adjectives with data
• Communicate ETA with owners and exact dates
• Show milestone progress on a gantt
• Annotate your charts and use BFAs
• In reviews, answer questions directly

Data

• Always report effect size; not stat sig is an opaque way of saying you didn’t learn anything by counting a metric
• Use sensible units; if you can report a number as 2.3 rather than 0.0000023, that’s usually easier to understand.
• Use the correct number of significant digits: 4.56783 with a standard error of 0.6789 should be 4.6 with a standard error of 0.7