Nerdy Babelfish - The Importance of Communication in Tech

Here on the Red Badger blog, we certainly don’t pull any punches where technical discussion is concerned. In a lot of posts, we assume a high level of knowledge when it comes to our readers, and avoid going overboard with explanation in order to get to the core of our discussion without being boring.

I for one think that this is a great thing. We want to attract the most intelligent, highly skilled people to interact with us, and we can’t do that if we over-simplify things. I feel hugely proud to be a part of a company that has the courage to push forward with new tech, no matter how complex it may seem at first glance.

However, for the less technical people in the team (I include myself in that) it can present a bit of a dilemma. For testers and project managers especially, who bridge the gap between technical and operational, knowing how to explain things is crucial. When you work with a team of such highly skilled developers, you have to be able to not only keep up with them, but make a very complicated thing highly digestible from a business perspective. 

From Code to Conversation

To me, good communication skills are vital if you want to work in tech of any kind. Just because one person understands everything there is to know about a system, doesn’t mean the person fixing the bug you write does. Similarly, your client will likely have a very different, non-technical focus to the project. As a result, you need to be able to distill a sometimes mind-bogglingly complicated technical problem into a form that even the least technical Product Owner can understand.

Let’s take something that, for anyone in web development, will be very familiar. Deploying code from a local environment into a live environment. This will obviously vary depending on how your business functions, but the core steps are the same. You write your code, spinning up a local environment to check your work. You write some automated tests to cover your work, and then submit a Pull Request on your repository for review by another coder. This code will then be tested further and deployed on to your live environment, usually running the tests through a Continuous Integration tool such as Circle or Travis. Simple right?

Or maybe not. Here is a top level breakdown of concepts and terms in the paragraph above that may leave non-technical people scratching their heads:

• Deployment

• Local environment

• Automated tests

• Pull request

• Repository

• Continuous Integration tool

That list is just the tip of the iceberg, as I’m sure if we were to go into more detail about the the build process we would lose people even further. So when I’m explaining how long a build will take to a customer, there is absolutely no point in me explaining it like this. 

From Conversation to Code

This process can most definitely work the other way around as well. If a client adds a bug of their own to the database, or requests a new feature, it can be easy to dismiss it because it seems frivolous or insignificant. This is because, as technical people, our priorities are different. We want to have something that runs smoothly and looks beautiful, and woe betide anyone who asks for something that we feel may compromise that.

A notable example of this for me, is some of the tracking and 3rd parties that I’ve seen requested for integration into various projects. If you look at them in a purely technical way, they are by and large quite undesirable. They may risk slowing down your site, or perhaps cause conflicts with already implemented features that will take more work to fix.

This won’t matter to your client. What matters, invariably, is the continuing success of the business. If the implementation of a 3rd party could hugely improves customer engagement on their site, arguing with them about milliseconds is unproductive and may become needlessly combative.

So What Can You Do?

On both sides, the point at which communication breaks down is the point at which people stop asking “Why?” From the tech side, why am I making this change? Why is doing it this way better than doing it in a way that may seem faster? There’s no need to get technical with those answers.

Going the other way, we should be asking why we are implementing, while still staying empathetic to the overall needs of the client. Yes, to a developer certain 3rd party integrations may seem painful, but if they have sat down prior to starting the work and learned a bit more about the situation surrounding the task, the work will feel more meaningful, and you may even be able to suggest a better alternative.

Through all of this, you should always try to put yourself in the other person’s shoes. I will never sit down and have a conversation with someone without first spending some time thinking about how they might take the news I’m going to give. Often it’s not about the words you say, it’s about the delivery. So I can boil a build deployment right down to “the feature you want will take us 3 hours to take through our internal process” and as long as I’m delivering that with meaningful information such as timescales, the complicated stuff isn’t going to feel so important.

Once you put tech jargon or business jargon aside, it really is just two people having a conversation about something that they both really care about. As long as you remember that the person sitting across the table from you wants the same thing, the rest is easy.

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