Talking to managers - 2nd Edition

Studio, Thursday, 13:00

• Marco Betti

Participants

Summary of Discussions

Wednesday discussion was interesting so we decide to talk again about challenges and difficulties related to talking to managers.

Strategies to talk to managers successfully

The first thing to keep in your mind is to converge toward Managers' vocabulary and understand what the business care about.

You must present your proposal as a solution to one or more business problems.

For example you could talk about how your proposal can:

• have business impact
• help with deadlines
• help with quality (lowering tickets fir example)

It is important to identify the metrics to evaluate the proposal:

• define what the value metrics are
• work for a POC to validate your proposal

Manager buy-in is also important and starts from the closest to you, the try to engage one after the other.

It is also important how you work with your team, there are 3 area to foucus on:

• system thinking (you must have a system view of what you are doing)
• emotional intelligence (know who you are and how to interact)
• new product development (infrastructure as code development)

Since working with engineers on one side and try to convince managers on the other can be frustrating:

• learn the way you react in negative situation
• be careful to your amigdala taking control
• pay attention to different culture in communication

IOTA: a framework to setup excellent dicussions with managers

              |Inside
 Priorities   |
 Trade-ofss   |    Principles (how we gonna proceed)
              |    (get agreement on them)
              |
Thinking------|---------Action
              |
              |
Assumption    |    Improvement
(SHARE THEM)  |    (how to measure it)
              |
              |Out

References:

• Stafford Beer, Diagnosing the System for Organizations
• http://www.manager-tools.com/