How to communicate effectively to a non-technical stakeholder

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3 min read
Leadership, Pitch, Communication

In this article, I’ll focus on the situation where you are the go-to person for a specific technology and the organization’s leadership wants a brief on this topic.

Scenario:

Top management just got pitched by a vendor about a game-changing approach in machine learning (ML) that’d redefine the business. They send you a calendar invite the next day to get in-house expertise on the subject to complete their understanding.

You’ve got a solid technical background and great communication skills, so here’s how you can approach the situation. By the end of this article, you’ll have a playbook for preparing your next pitch!

Before the event

Preparation is key in delivering a convincing presentation to leadership on technical matters.

A few tips that I use;

  • Keep track of the relevant sources you consume to learn about your craft and index them. Keep blog posts, YouTube videos, books, and podcasts you read and listen to. Sites like Goodreads, apps like Pocket, or reference managers like Zotero can help with that. Find the ones that work for you.
  • Highlights segments of interests and add notes to ease information recovery. This is long-term. Think compounding interest, this trove of references you take a careful effort to keep with relevant material will help you share the right reference when the time is right.
  • Contextualize this knowledge to your business. Maintain a list of examples related to your industry when you read about a new approach

Context of the meeting

  • Research your audience, who they are and their level of proficiency on the matter — use LinkedIn, Google, or the internal company directory;
  • Think about biases the audience might have about the topic you’ll pitch. It will help you prepare for likely questions and ensure you don’t get derailed during the presentation.

About maintaining a list of references

Most topics in software engineering have been written about, and you’ll find plenty of illustrated articles on your topic. Use them wisely.

Think about key influencers in your field like Jay Alamar and The Illustrated Transfomer or Andrej Karpathy and its unreasonable effectiveness of neural nets post. Articles like those are references you can curate and transpose to your domain as required, using business-specific examples to make your point.

Leverage your network

If you have peers in the field, share insights with them about the last great article you read or this mind-blowing video on graph neural networks you just saw, and share why it’s relevant.

During the presentation

You own the situation.

  • Be true to the proposed agenda;
  • Deliver as expected, on time;
  • Derisk any risk of failures; arrive early, check hardware, and have backups if doing a live demo;
  • Avoid acronyms and define new concepts;

After your presentation

Follow up. Send the presentation support, and remind the key action items and the suggested direction to take based on the insight you shared. You can also add key infographics you relied on.

Some people won’t dare to ask questions during the meeting for fear of looking dumb. Make sure to diffuse such a situation if you identify a complex topic that needs to be defined.

To wrap up,

  • Make a habit of maintaining relevant references and contextualize it to your industry;
  • Own the situation when running the pitch, leave no details unchecked, and research the attendees’ level of fluency with the topic.