How To Talk To Non-Technical People And Get Their Agreement.

Speak their language to reach a win-win situation.

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Hi this is John with this week’s Developing Skills - Skills for Developers looking to develop their careers.

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Tip of The Week: How To Talk To Non-Technical People In A Way They Understand So They Will Agree With You

“Why won’t management give us the time to fix the technical debt?” asked Steve.

My usual response was out of my mouth before I even thought about it: “what did you say to them?”

“I explained that we had 103 tickets open and 47 of them related to technical debt. The key issues we need to tackle are related to the cloud platform and some legacy APIs we built way back. Plus we need to tackle some issues in the data pipeline so we can improve our training data for Borg.” replied Steve.

I began to see the problem. Steve had been talking to the CEO and CFO about tickets, technical debt, cloud platforms, APIs and data pipelines. It meant nothing to them. The CEO had a sales background and the CFO had never worked in the tech sector before. They had absolutely no idea what he was on about.

If you find yourself in this position, talk to people in their language. Don’t use domain specific jargon - things like API, tickets, cloud. It will confuse, not clarify the message. Instead try to understand their concerns and translate the message into terms they understand and can relate to their concerns.

Put another way, if you aren’t transferring information or it’s not being understood, you’re not communicating.

So how can you talk to non-technical people and get them to understand and agree with your ideas? Here’s how:

1. Get to know them and their concerns - spend some time in their world getting to know what they are concerned about, what their goals and priorities are and how they speak about them.

2. Tailor your content for your audience - speak to them using their language, address their priorities and concerns. Translate what you care about into what they care about.

3. Check your message has been understood - too often we assume that just because we’ve said our piece or sent our email that it’s been received and understood. Often it hasn’t. So when you’re communicating be sure to get feedback from your audience to ensure they have understood your message. To do this ask them open ended questions like:

• What are your thoughts?

• Can you give me some feedback on the ideas I’ve presented?

• How would you like to proceed?

• Which option would you like more details on and what would you like to know?

• What are the next steps that we a can agree on?

I worked with Steve to apply this approach and over the coming weeks and months we got support to address the key issue. For example:

• We grouped the tickets into themes that affected upcoming customer sales presentations or renewals then explained how they would potentially impact our future revenue - both the CEO and CFO understood and cared about that.

• We addressed the cost of the cloud platform and gave the CFO some simple reports that gave him some insight into the monthly costs and the trend.

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