Communication and Marketing - second-hand-tigers/badocter-career-learnings GitHub Wiki

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Communication & Marketing

Technical skill gets you in the room. What happens after that — framing your work so it lands, making sure the right people actually know what you and your team accomplished, marketing yourself and your ideas without overselling them — is a separate skill set, and it's the Interpersonal and Leadership territory of the Leadership, Business, Interpersonal, and Technical (LBIT) framework that most engineers develop the least deliberately. Building Your Network covers the relationship side of that; this page covers the rest of what I've learned about it, mostly the hard way, across 27 years.

Get Your Brand Off to the Right Start

Your boss is going to hand you tasks you don't know how to do — that's expected. You're new; everyone around you already knows you don't know everything yet, and you're expected to leverage the team to close the gap. What actually damages your brand early on is leading with "I don't know how" and "I can't," over and over, instead of seeking guidance to extend yourself.

First impressions carry disproportionate weight, and the order you present information in can change how people feel about identical facts. Picture two people described with the exact same six traits, just in a different order:

Nat — intelligent, industrious, impulsive, critical, stubborn, envious
Pat — envious, stubborn, critical, impulsive, industrious, intelligent

Same six words, reversed order. Most people read Nat more favorably than Pat, purely because the positive traits came first — a version of the "halo effect." Structure your own messages so the strong points land first, and stay alert to when your own judgment is being shaped by someone else's halo effect rather than the facts. (Adapted from Solomon Asch's classic experiment, retold in Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow.)

Reference Point Matters

The exact same underlying fact can be framed two ways:

Driving incremental performance improvement, versus
Reducing past lost opportunity

Same mathematical result, different story. Choose your words carefully — good news can easily be made to sound bad through careless framing. The goal isn't spin for its own sake; it's making sure the frame you land on tells an accurate story that makes you and your team look good. Get someone to peer-review your presentations before you give them — a second set of eyes catches framing problems you're too close to see yourself.

Communicating a Vision Is Not Easy

Even when everyone involved is acting in good faith, a single idea can get quietly reinterpreted at every handoff — between the people who want it, the people who approve it, the people who fund it, the people who design it, the people who build it, and the people who inspect, document, and bill it. After a few handoffs, the initiative may have little resemblance to what it started as and may not even meet the functional requirements originally intended. Nobody in that chain is malicious or even incompetent. Each handoff is a legitimate translation of the vision into that function's own language — engineering, procurement, risk, finance — and each translation loses or distorts something if the vision was never communicated clearly and consistently to begin with. The classic "tree swing" cartoon captures this better than any bullet list could (see Wikipedia: Tree Swing Cartoon)

That's the whole argument for treating communication as a first-class skill instead of an afterthought: distortion is the default outcome, not a failure mode you can assume away.

Where Programs of Change Fail

John Kotter's classic Harvard Business Review Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail is worth reading directly rather than summarized secondhand — HBR publishes a lot of genuinely useful research on soft skills that engineers don't usually go looking for. His first and most common failure point: not establishing a great enough sense of urgency before launching the plan. It's the same citation behind a structural choice already visible elsewhere on this wiki: the anecdote on Setting and Accomplishing Development Goals is told before the practical framework, on purpose — establishing the stakes before the plan, the same "urgency before plan" logic Kotter argues for in change management generally.

No Idea Sells Itself

Part of your job — every career stage, not just senior ones — is advertising yourself, your team, and your ideas. A few rules I keep coming back to:

Target your audience. Part of being an expert is translating your area into terms non-experts can act on. Financial impact is understood by almost every stakeholder regardless of their technical background — lead with it when you can.
Skip the jargon meant to sound impressive. Using pretentious language to sound superior, or to intellectually intimidate, mostly just reads as out of touch.
Report your findings — don't assume they'll surface on their own. Managers are just as susceptible as anyone to "what you see is all there is" — Daniel Kahneman's WYSIATI, from Thinking, Fast and Slow, the same blind-spot idea already discussed on Technical Career Stages — and to plain "out of sight, out of mind." If a value isn't explicitly stated, it gets assumed to be zero, including the value your team created.

Credit Other Contributors

Few things damage a working relationship faster than one person taking credit for work other people did. It's basic human nature to overestimate your own contribution and underestimate everyone else's — which is exactly why crediting contributors takes deliberate effort rather than happening automatically. It's also simply good long-term strategy: people want you on their next team if you have a track record of making your team look good, not just yourself. (This is the same team-first framing behind how Who is Dr. Docter? describes my own proudest contributions — every one of them credited as team work, not individual work.)

As the closing slide of the source lecture puts it: communication and networking are key enablers for driving technical progress and innovation — ideas do not sell themselves, regardless of their value potential.

License: © 2026 William Docter. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). You may copy, redistribute, remix, and build upon this material, including for commercial purposes, provided you give appropriate credit to William Docter and indicate if changes were made. The Second-Hand Tigers logo is not covered by this license. All rights in it are reserved.