Hey, Luca here! Today we are hosting a fantastic new article by Anna Shipman, CTO at Kooth.
I have always enjoyed Anna’s writing on her blog (which she’s been writing for 15 years!) and she was a guest on our podcast last year, so I am proud to be hosting one of her pieces on Refactoring.
Today’s topic is an evergreen one: how do you translate engineering to executives? Anna brilliantly unpacks it from first principles, and then by providing a ton of practical advice and examples.
On to Anna!
(p.s. if you want to stay updated with her articles, you can subscribe to her mailing list!)
Have you ever had the experience where you make a great proposal to your Engineering leader and it languishes for weeks and then comes back with a no for reasons you don’t seem to make sense?
Or your Engineering leader is keen, but they too report that it has gone into the higher levels of decision-making and not returned, or has come back with a no for unclear reasons?
As a CTO, I know that engineers on my team have had that experience; and as a member of the executive team I also know that there can be multiple challenges that get in the way of requests, suggestions or ideas from engineering.
Today I’d like to demystify this and give you some practical steps you can take to get your ideas across. I’ll cover three areas:
💭 How executives think — and how you should think about communicating with them. 🔀 The translation layer — from engineering to executives. 🔧 How to translate — for success and profit!
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