Professional communication skills - identify your audience

Xinran Wang — Sun, 01 Mar 2020 21:56:45 +0000

Welcome back to my series on professional communication skills. In part 1, we established the importance of growing your communication skills, especially within a tech-focused career. In this article, I'm going to discuss the first skill that can help improve your communication abilities.

Identify your audience

The first step is to consciously identify who you're communicating with.

The way different groups of people communicate between themselves can be vastly different. Think about the common discussions between engineers vs managers vs directors; the problems they discuss, the terminology they use, even the tools they rely on for communicating, are all quite distinct.

By default, after a few weeks on a job, you get used to talking with other engineers on your team. But what does "getting used to" mean? Why are you able to communicate relatively easily? Why might talking to a non-engineer or non-team member seem harder?

With people you work with on a regular basis, sure you get used to their personalities and ways of talking, but you also inherently share underlying context: goals, tools, languages, acronyms etc. All of these factors affect effectiveness of your communication style. By identifying who you're talking to, you can start adjusting for those differences and vary the information, terminology, and style of your communication.

For example, if you're a frontend engineer, talking about your problems with javascript, react, html, css, webpack, npm etc. might cause a lot of confusion with the backend engineers on the team, bu they can still probably provide input on technical design issues or help talk through a bug.

Moving a bit farther away from the tech stack, designers and product managers won't really care about the technical problems you're having but would be happy to talk through product and design level questions and feedback.

Moving another level away, directors, marketing, legal etc. might all be so far removed from the projects you work on that there won't be many commonalities in your day to day work, especially at a larger company. So even when talking about the same projects, you'll have to find ways to communicate in a way that's relevant to them. This might sound more like user research, metrics, or alignment with company goals.

So in the future, try being more conscious of your audience, especially when you're working with people outside of your immediate team. Think about the words you use and adjust for your audience. These small changes can have a big impact in how you are able to communicate outside of engineering.

This is part 2 of my series on professional communication skills. Stick around for future articles in this series!

Professional Communication Skills series:

Professional communication skills intro
Identify your audience
Figure out what your audience actually cares about
Adjust the information and terminology you use for your audience

Professional communication skills - Intro

Xinran Wang — Tue, 11 Feb 2020 08:40:58 +0000

For most of us, talking to people within our realms is relatively easy. We all care about similar things, use the same tools, solve similar problems. But when we need to break out of our bubble to collaborate with other functions (design, product, marketing, business, etc.), communication gets harder and harder.

Part of what makes this difficult is that these communication skills are often not emphasized early in our careers. It's usually after we've caught up on the technical skills that these ~~soft~~ professional skills become more important.

As junior engineers, our day-to-day work often requires hours of continuous individual focus, solving new technical problems, and communicating via Slack with our peers. Occasionally we'll have a 1-on-1 with a manager or participate in team meetings. Most of these interactions involve largely similar communication styles.

After a few years, as you try to level up and start leading projects, you'll immediately start running into problems if you use the same communication styles as before. At first, you'll work with engineers outside of your team, who won't have the same technical background and goals as you. Then more closely with the engineering and product managers, who care about entirely non-technical problems. Eventually you'll scale out of the product org to working with business and legal, who basically speak a different language. How you're used to communicating with fellow engineers on your team is probably not going to work very well when you're working with these other groups of people.

Yet being able to communicate effectively is incredibly important. You have to be able to work across teams and organizations to solve the really big problems. You have to talk to all kinds of different people and convince them to believe in you and trust in you. All of that requires effective communication skills.

In these upcoming articles, I'll do some deep dives into some of the skills that have helped me improve. Stick around!

Professional communication skills intro
Identify your audience
Figure out what your audience actually cares about
Adjust the information and terminology you use for your audience
Change your communication medium for your audience

DEV Community: Xinran Wang

Professional communication skills - identify your audience

Identify your audience

Professional communication skills - Intro