Communicating well with your technical team is essential to creating high-performing teams in your organisation. Here are my top 5 tips for improving communication between technical and non-technical teams:
Business Goals
Communicate business goals to the technical team, and don’t try to shield them from challenges. Technical teams work best when they understand the "why" behind what they’re asked to do. Teams must make decisions daily, and if they're not clear on the why, they may unwittingly make choices that contradict the business goals.
It can be tricky to share when times are tough, but I encourage you to be as open as possible. For example, if cash flow is a challenge, you can explain that, e.g., customer subscriptions are down, so saving money is important this quarter.
Align Tech Team Metrics
Try to align tech team metrics with business metrics. There isn’t always an apparent translation between the two. However, it’s essential that the tech team works towards the same goals, so it's worth spending the time to make this happen.
Getting alignment often needs a bit of sleuthing and some critical thinking. However, most of the time, the tech team will be happy to get involved with this work and help you find the right metrics.
Some examples from my own experiences:
Business goal: Reduce customer support requests
Here, we looked at what was causing the most support requests and figured out that most of the tickets fell into two categories:
Bugs in features (mainly newly released ones)
How-do-I type requests
For the first point, tracking bugs in new features made total sense, and we knew we were often rushing the testing, so this gave us a clear metric to work towards: "no. of bugs in newly released features". We also decided to add "time to resolve new bugs" because if we fixed the bugs faster, fewer customers would encounter them, reducing tickets.
The second point was a little trickier. We had many ideas for improving the situation, but it wasn't clear if there was a direct link between, for example, the lack of tooltips and support tickets. We did a little more investigation and found multiple causes (unsurprisingly). This likely required new development work to add tooltips, help dialogs, and onboarding guides. Ultimately, our team decided to adopt the metric of the number of requests for help navigating new features, which led to us working much more closely with the support team to understand their pain points.
Business Goal: Increase Customer Retention
For this case, we started by asking what factors impacted customer retention. Thankfully, we had a data team who could help, as this is often quite a complex analysis task. Some of their suggestions were missing functionality, e.g., not covering all use cases for a workflow, not using key parts of the functionality, and bugs in the system.
Not all of these were necessarily things that the engineering team could fix. Some of the "missing" functionality was deliberately missing - often because it was an edge-case situation we weren't planning to cater towards.
Bugs in the system were within our control, so we tracked bugs and other technical measurements such as up-time and latency that would also contribute to customer frustrations in the same way.
Another issue that wasn't directly in our control was not using key parts of the app's functionality. However, we had many ideas on how to address this, e.g., by improving onboarding, rearranging the menus, and adding a help wizard. So, we worked with the product and data teams to identify the key areas we wanted people to experience. Our metric became how many of these key areas new users actively tried out in the first two weeks.
Cross-functional Collaboration
Encouraging cross-functional collaboration gives all teams an understanding of what other parts of the business do. This fosters respect for people’s time and skills on both sides.
Something I often hear when working in technical teams is "I've no idea what <team x> do all day" or "Marketing are just trying to make our lives more difficult". This isn't just an engineering team thing; I often hear it the other way around, with non-technical teams not understanding what tech teams do.
Encouraging collaboration and discussions across different functional areas leads to mutual respect for each other's skills and challenges and often leads to innovative solutions for problems and workflow issues.
Some ways I've seen that worked:
Lunch and Learns from each department in turn - but only when it gets real and people aren't afraid to respectfully share their pain points.
Spending a day with another team now and again. This works incredibly well with support teams. Everyone should spend a few days in support to understand the customers.
Hearing from other teams in planning meetings or occasionally attending their planning meetings.
Recognise Technical Achievements
Recognising technical achievements beyond product or feature launches is essential so that the effort behind the scenes is noticed and rewarded. For example, upgrading a framework before it goes out of support, catching and fixing security issues before they’re exploited, and infrastructure work to enable scaling are all key activities that often go unnoticed.
This recognition doesn't need to be major; a shout-out on an all-hands call is often a good choice.
To find out what needs recognition, ask several technical team members for suggestions, preferably live (call or in person) rather than anonymous surveys, so you can ask follow-up questions to understand why the work was important and share as part of the recognition.
Open Communication
Encourage open communication about ideas and innovations. Technical team members are often natural problem solvers and typically have suggestions for features, product improvements, and process automation that are worth listening to.
Not every idea suggested needs to be implemented, but there should be a way for these ideas to get to the right people. Make sure the team have a way to share ideas that doesn’t just go into a comms black hole!
If you're a startup or scaleup and need technical leadership and strategy support or are looking to improve your team alignment, I offer a technical advisory service, fractional CTO, and mentoring. If interested, you can book a free initial chat to discuss your situation and needs.
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