How to Get Buy-in From Your Boss and Their Boss

Persuade them to support your initiative or pet project.

Welcome!

Welcome to Developing Skills - Skills for Developers looking to develop their careers.

My apologies for the gap between issues, life has been rather hectic!

Tip of The Week: To Persuade Someone to Take Action, Talk About Their Problems. Not Yours.

Imagine you want your boss and your boss’s boss to agree to a feature freeze for two weeks to address technical debt. You’ve made the case in your standup that it needs to be addressed and they’ve agreed to give you five minutes to pitch your proposal.

You confidently put together your slides, turn up and deliver them. It looks like this:

Slide 1: We have 57 bits of technical debt!

Slide 2: We’ll take two weeks off from feature work to work on reducing technical debt.

Slide 3: The code will be 97% better when we’ve cleared the technical debt.

Sounds great right? Sadly, whilst they listen and ask a question or two, the say no.

So Where Did It All Go Wrong?

It’s simple, you talked about you and your goals.

To win people over you need to talk to them about their goals.

Let’s imagine that your boss’s boss has three key goals right now. 1. deliver feature X for customer Y. 2. Reduce the number of customer-detected defects for each release. 3. Improve the rate of feature delivery.

If you take that into account here’s what your slides look like:

Slide 1: Recap their three goals and explain that you proposal addresses delivering them.

Slide 2: Present the data that shows how much technical debt you have and the impact it is having on delivery. Show, with data, how technical debt delays feature X, increases customer-detected defects and slows down development of new features.

Slide 3: Go deep into the specifics of how you’ll execute your plan to reduce technical debt. Make a direct ask for the time you want.

Why Does This Work?

You’re not assuming your boss, or your boss’s boss can make the direct link between your goal and their goals. They’re busy so you’re making it clear for them, reducing their cognitive load.

Most effective communication happens when you link your goals to the other person’s goals. If you don’t make the link for them they’ll often be left wondering why it matters and if it’s a distraction from their goals.

If they can see how your goals align, they’ll buy in.

Want to Level Up Your Coding Skills?

I believe the best way to do this is to build real-world applications. For that reason I write a weekly newsletter sharing Coding Challenges.

The coding challenges are all designed to walk you through the process of creating an application and to be less than 8 hours work.

Each challenge has you focus on building real-world software rather than toy applications or algorithms and data structures.

You can tackle the challenges in the programming language of your choice. You can even tackle them in several different languages if you prefer.

You can see the challenges and subscribe on the Coding Challenges SubStack.

Regards, John