Girls In Tech

Susan Su blogs about everyday entrepreneurship and life in the Valley at Ask The Entrepreneurs.

I love engineers. But, I’m not one.

I’m a Murakami-devouring, French-speaking, fuzzy techie. That is, I took a total of two non-humanities courses at Stanford: Intro to Statistics, whose only textbook was “Cartoon Statistics,” and Search For Life in the Solar System, a freshman course about alien life between the Sun and Neptune.

How then, did I end up as a web product manager at an engineering-driven tech start-up?

I learned, after a few early failures, how to talk to engineers.

Here are the THREE things to remember when talking to engineers:

1.    Bring value to the table. The simplest way to gain anybody’s respect, especially members of the ‘ruling’ class of your company or organization, whether they’re engineers in a tech start-up or male analysts at Goldman, is to know something that they don’t know but might like to know.

The HR Director at my old company was a smart young woman who could easily have been pigeonholed into being another one of those “HR girls.”

She never let this happen because she had lots of valuable workplace and HR information that EVERYONE – even engineers – needed to know. And, she wasn’t afraid to make it clear in her (highly articulate) conversations with developers.

2.    Do ALL Your Homework. There’s nothing more annoying than when you’re busy fixing bugs for an afternoon release, and some product manager comes up to you with a bunch of easily answerable questions. You’re an engineer, and you’re in a time-crunch, so you respond gruffly.

The PM may or may not find the answers she needs through this frustrating, waste-of-time conversation, but either way the relationship between the ‘fuzzie’ PM and the ‘techie’ developer is strained.

When you have something important to say or ask an engineer, or anybody with major time constraints, make sure you do ALL your homework and bring in to the conversation the most critical things that can’t be answered any other way.

Is there any way your question could be answered by a Webopedia search? If so, then answer it that way.

3.    Talk less, act more. When I see an email thread that’s 17 messages long, where each message is heavy with multiple, 10-line paragraphs, my eyes glaze. I’ve been on email threads attempting to coordinate a picnic in Dolores Park that ends up being 19 messages long.

This type of communication will even drive friends away from your picnic, not to mention grouchy, overworked engineers from your project.

Always punctuate your request by placing it at the end of your email, rather than burying it at the beginning or, worse yet, somewhere in the middle of your message.

Always create a separate email for each request so that your recipient can respond to your email right away when that request is fulfilled, rather than having to wait for a bunch of them to show progress before sending an update.

Why should you go to so much trouble to talk to engineers? Isn’t communication a two-way street?

The lessons I’ve learned from communicating, and mis-communicating, with my engineer colleagues apply to all kinds of audiences that you really care about.

Want to reach out to a famous blogger to get publishing tips, or a potential mentor for career advice?

Bring value to the table, do ALL your homework, and talk less, act more.

You’ll save precious time for people whose respect you want and need, and your preparation and togetherness will raise eyebrows in the best possible way.