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by tristor 1336 days ago
As someone who went from engineering to product management, partly due to having developed a skill of communicating effectively in writing and in speech, I would suggest perhaps the most important part of communicating effectively is storytelling. If what you are sharing does not have a clear and obvious narrative arc, people are going to disengage quickly. This is not necessary for short bursts of information in a high-context environment, but any time you need to level set and share context before communicating the critical information, you should do so in story fashion.

If you want to level up your technical communication, I'd highly recommend taking classes in creative writing, participating in things like NaNoWriMo, or taking a class in improv comedy/theater. All of these things emphasize construction of narrative arcs and how to draw people through a story, which are essential communication skills. This gets more important the farther up the chain of command in a company you are communicating with.
2 comments
wcedmisten 1336 days ago
I recently watched Kelsey Hightower's Strange Loop talk on "The Secure Software Supply Chain", which incorporates a humorous narrative about deploying code found on a flash drive in a coffee shop. I think the talk was especially captivating because of that.

I'm trying to incorporate that narrative aspect into my own demos and presentations now.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JC-xCXcyNXI

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zwkrt 1336 days ago
Completely agree, although I don't think that people need to be better creative writers to be better at creating narrative arcs. For work, your narrative arc is normally solved if you are understanding (1) the relationship between you and your audience, (2) what you want, and (3) why your audience should care. If you communicate those things, the narrative should be crystal clear. That depends heavily on the context.

    "Hi, I'm from a team from far away in company land (1). I've been having an issue with your service for the last few weeks because it seemingly drops connections sometimes. I looked at your metrics and I see that this is happening to other clients as well. This issue is stopping us from deploying a change to the UI that we promised customers would go out next week (2). Can you help me debug from your side? (3)"

    "Hey boss (1). I think that I need more support on this project (2a). We originally thought it would be easy to refactor a widget into a widgetFactory, but after I investigated it widgetFactories will require a schema migration (3). I think Sarah is really good with those, can I ask her to work on this with me (2b)?

    "Apache upgrade production outage thread (123)"
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