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Hey Reader, When there’s a cake in the break room fridge, you know it’s time for the office birthday party! It’s time to decorate the conference room. Put up a sign on the wall, and bring in the balloons and streamers. But what about The Office birthday party? The U.S. television series had one of the worst onscreen parties. Planned by Dwight Shrute, the salesman lacking the simplest of social skills, nothing said celebration: the neutral color balloons were half-filled, masking tape was haphazardly attached to miserable streamers, and the sign had big black lettering on simple white paper:
According to legend, this was the most difficult scene to film in the nine seasons of the show. The ridiculousness of the situation (“it is a statement of fact,” Shrute said defending the sign) caused fits of laughter. “IT IS YOUR BIRTHDAY” is the visual equivalent of most technical products I see. I wrote about this problem in Technical Content Strategy Decoded, published in 2023 — before AI arrived to declare war on that em-dash and generate generic technical content at scale. I’m still seeing the same mistakes, and AI tools like Claude are making them worse:
You CAN avoid them, of course. You can spot them before you (or your team or Claude) write a single sentence—as long as you’re clear on how you want developers to know your product. What opinions does your product embody? How do these ideas attract the right developers and repel the wrong ones? That’s positioning. Yours has gaps that AI can identify. You’ve probably seen the way I’ve been digging into this publicly with LLM Rank. Privately, I’ve built reports for clients to help them identify and fill those positioning gaps. I’m running a few of these custom reports for non-clients in mid-August. Want to see exactly where your positioning sits? Reports start at $499 and include a call with me. Tap a quick reply to let me know you’re interested.
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EveryDeveloper
IT IS YOUR BIRTHDAY
Adam DuVander
1mo·4 min read
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