Communication Solution

[00:00:00]
>> So, okay, you believe that you will get better performance on your Frontend, it's easier to recruit for solid engineers. Developers get an opportunity to rewrite buggy parts of the code, and you'll believe that you're able to move faster. This doesn't really say much of that, right? And you're getting into, who cares about declarative primitives?

[00:00:21]
Your VP of Engineering might a bit, but the answer's no. Actually, probably not, right? And your CEO and VP of Product really doesn't care, right? So this is a good litmus test for you, is like, look at how much jargon is in what you're saying. In other words, is this makes sense to someone outside of your particular discipline?

[00:00:40]
And if the answer is no, probably either needs to be rephrased or left out. And this feels like it belongs on the marketing for SolidJS, right? This actually doesn't feel at all like it belongs going to a CEO. The way you should communicate this to your CEO is, basically these, I think you'd be better off literally just copying and pasting these directly to your CEO, then you wouldn't be with anything down here.

[00:01:05]
You wanna let them know what is happening, just the minimum of context is Backbone, old, Solid, new. And by the way, if anyone's on the chat telling me, well, Backbone is better than Solid, I don't care, I'm making an example. So please just follow with me. It is true, though.

[00:01:21]
I would rather write in Solid than Backbone. You're trying to get them the minimum of context of what Backbone is, why you're trying to move to SolidJS, and a basic amount of Solid is a new framework that's supported and well used in the industry. And here is the bullet points of reasons why we're trying to get from here to there.

[00:01:40]
That's it, say less, right? Remove all the stuff about reactive primitives, blah, blah, blah. This one down here is a very emotional appeal. Engineers love to talk about like, we wanna be on the new hot stuff, right? And as a product owner, as a product manager, as a CEO, your job is kinda say, I don't really care, right?

[00:02:00]
I need you to offer me real business value not just cuz it's pretty and shiny, right? Anyone have other thoughts on this one and why what I wrote sucks? Yeah, please.
>> I would call this burying the lead, like you said.
>> Yeah.
>> You want to communicate that the industry is moving on from us with better technology and saving time and money in the process.

[00:02:24]
And so now we have this bullet list of, we know it's better performance, we know more people use it. And that takes five minutes to say, but if you focus on industry adoption and the practical savings, you've got a 45 second, 60 second pitch.
>> Yep, it's something I never say in this course, but don't bury the lead, right?

[00:02:48]
You're trying to get them from zero to your point as fast as possible. We'll actually talk a little bit when we get into executive summaries, it's basically how to unbury leads. But that's a really good way of saying that, so thank you. Okay, so A/B testing tool. You go and you basically say, hey, I wanna be able to experiment.

[00:03:11]
That's essentially your pitch here, is like, I wanna be able to try A and B, and I wanna be able to prove that either A is better or B is better, and I wanna have that capability. So going into here, we're gonna be implementing whatever as an A/B testing tool.

[00:03:30]
And you kind of get into here is like, this is more like how you would communicate a competitive analysis to a product suite. This doesn't really match up at all with a project kickoff, right? So my point here is I wanted you to identify there was an audience mismatch here of, these people wanna hear, what are the challenges?

[00:03:49]
What are we doing? How are we gonna do it? How are we aligned on this? What sort of technical constraints are we gonna have? You're trying to get the engineers on board and pumped up to work on something that's gonna be working on the product, and instead you're giving them a bunch of nonsense context, right?

[00:04:06]
You are doing the opposite of saying less, you are definitely saying more here. So I would focus way more on like, we're building an experimentation platform and we're going to be able to A/B test all the cool stuff that you all build. Here's some technical information that's gonna be helpful as we kick off this project.

[00:04:21]
It's more or less where I would go with that bit of technical communication. So adding a social share button. You're trying to convince a group of mixed engineers, product managers, and trying to basically act in persuasion. I actually literally just had an MBA class on the art of persuasion, which was very interesting.

[00:04:46]
What is wrong with this? And why do you hate me right now?
>> Flowery language is just annoying.
>> It's absurd. And I got through that and I took a shower, right? [LAUGH] It's using so much language, and it's massively distracting from the points that you're actually making.

[00:05:11]
I think I would read this, if I was the recipient of this email, I'd be like, I don't care what you do, I'm choosing the other person, because I don't trust you [LAUGH] in particular. Yeah.
>> Yeah, I kinda read that, if my goal is those bullet points, I don't know if I trust myself if I'm the one writing this.

[00:05:28]
The things that I probably want my idea to succeed on is consistency, it's easier to implement, right? I've hit some of the targets that the organization likes. Maybe I should just be okay of saying that isn't enough, instead of really going over the hill to try to make a pitch.

[00:05:45]
>> Yeah.
>> This one gives off the vibe that you're better than everyone reading this.
>> I mean, I am better than, [LAUGH] just kidding. No, it definitely does come off that way. I do like the ideas of things resting on their merits, but also I also wanna get my way, and so I'm willing to push harder for that.

[00:06:05]
And so I'm totally fine saying, this is better, and it might be visually apparent to you, and if it's not, I'm going to tell you why it's better. Because sometimes people just kind of need that direction. We're all squishy, dumb animals, right? And so sometimes we just need the obvious pointed out to us, that I'm better, right?

[00:06:23]
So that's why I wrote it [LAUGH] like this. If that's not clear, I honestly [LAUGH] don't think I'm better than anyone else here. I'm chief idiot in the room.