Breaking things down for executives and engineers
Engineering presenters often use the wrong level of abstraction when communicating with executives.
Without guidance, presenters speak about the familiar. Since engineers spend their days working on a series of tasks, they provide a lot of detailed information devoid of business context. In contrast, executives want to see a business outcome — increase the value from X to Y. This usually results in a derailed presentation as executives try to make sense of the details.
You can address this discrepancy by creating a three layer hierarchy:
- Outcomes: Things your VPs care about, usually changing a metric from X to Y. You could justify a party when completing an outcome.
- Milestones: The necessary and sufficient deliverables required to achieve an outcome. You would assign a milestone to a program track.
- Tasks: The necessary and sufficient engineering deliverables required to complete a milestone. You would assign a task to an engineering tech lead.
Your presentations to VPs should focus on outcomes. A roadmap shows how the metric will move every quarter by completing a set of milestones. Progress reports show how the metric has changed based upon completed milestones. The focus is the outcome, whereas the milestones are merely in support of the metrics.
You can often coordinate your programs by grouping milestones into tracks. The track lead can be a product manager or a strong technical lead and paired with a technical program manager to roll up milestone statuses into outcomes. Milestones complete on approximately a monthly cadence.
Engineering teams focus on completing tasks. They can break the tasks down further as needed with whatever granularity is needed to get things done. Just mark the tasks as completed so the milestones can be closed out.
Special thanks to my friend and former colleague Luiz Mendes for reminding me about this topic. Glad it has helped!
