Learn To Talk to Non-Tech People in Your Team

15 Nov 2024 #career

That’s a crucial skill to master for every coder, even if you’re not in the path to be a team leader.

We take pride in dropping any technical jargon during our conversations. It makes us look smart. But true mastery is explaining things to people outside our fields.

At a past team, while working on a hotel management software, we found an issue when syncing restaurant bills to room charges. It took us long to fix it. It was a serious issue.

The next day, we have “that” conversation in our daily meeting.

The team lead started to explain: “API, background processor, eventual consistency, optimistic concurrency…” He used any jargon he knew to justify our 1- or 2-day delay.

To our PM and other non-tech people in the meeting, it sounded like the alien language from The Arrival. You could tell it by their confused and “what are you talking about” faces.

A simpler “somebody could walk away without paying his restaurant bills. And nobody here wants to pay for that” would have finished the conversation with some laughs and a point made.

Always make it about the person listening. Often our job is being interpreters: from business language to technical language and vice-versa.

Learn to talk to non-tech people in your team—using their own words.