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I have been sitting in on some tech meetings in the last three weeks and it is striking that the “usual” tech professional doesn’t communicate very well with lay-people and the non-tech professional doesn’t communicate to tech people very well.

This is all the more striking when you have, in the same session, a mix of tech and non-tech persons in the audience with tech and non-tech speakers talking about technology.

In fact, in the rare cases where a person is able to do both well irrespective of background, the audience is so pleased that we go ga-ga over that person and (s)he becomes a sort of celebrity.

In very generalised terms, the main drawback that tech persons seem to have while communicating is that they talk about ‘functionality’ while the non-tech audience wants to hear about features and benefits. The non-tech person wants to know about “Can we do <this>?” and in response, hears some mumbo-jumbo about databases and redundancies and user groups and access privileges.

The non-tech person, unfortunately, is able to relate to things only as user scenarios (“If I am so-and-so and I want to do <this> and not have so-and-so know about it but the so-and-so should be able to track what I am doing”) and not in the strict abstract terms that a typical tech person prefers.

The tech person then easily gets frustrated as (s)he is not able to identify with particular user scenarios.

This goes on: tech person talks of functionality and non-tech person asks about a feature/benefit; non-tech person describes a user case and tech person abstracts it and non-tech person does not understand the abstraction… into an almost interminable loop, till the session is brought to a grinding halt by the link to the demo server going down!

N. Nagaraj

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