How to Advocate to Not You: Non-Technical Considerations for our Technical Tools

How to Advocate to Not You Non-Technical Considerations for our Technical Tools Quintessence Anx Developer Advocate

It starts like this QuintessenceAnx

You want / need a tool. QuintessenceAnx

And so: you prepare a case, focused on your needs, and present them. QuintessenceAnx

Source: PhD Comics QuintessenceAnx

After being pulled off stage, you develop a new strategy that looks like this… QuintessenceAnx

Source: XKCD Comics QuintessenceAnx

Why does this happen? QuintessenceAnx

You are trying to make engineering arguments to non-engineers. QuintessenceAnx

What to do instead? 🤔 QuintessenceAnx

411 on Modes of Persuasion QuintessenceAnx

Pillars of Persuasion QuintessenceAnx

Source: Backdrops by Charles H Stewart QuintessenceAnx

Establish your Credibility • “10 years of engineering work has taught me that…” • “When I encountered a problem like this previously, I resolved it by…” QuintessenceAnx

Apply Logic • “Before we streamlined our workflow, we lost Y hours of productivity.” • “The addition of campaign tracking allowed us to see how impactful each of our efforts were.” QuintessenceAnx

Really Feel It: Empathize • “Implementing these new security features will improve customer trust.” • “Being able to more quickly resolve problems will reduce team stress, which will propagate upwards.” QuintessenceAnx

Keeping these in mind QuintessenceAnx

Know what and when to compromise QuintessenceAnx

Keep the discussion points brief and simple QuintessenceAnx

Provide Context QuintessenceAnx

Reciprocate: Give and Ask QuintessenceAnx

Tying this into the main question QuintessenceAnx

Q: How do we (you) convince nontechnical people to value the tools the way you do? QuintessenceAnx

A: You don’t! QuintessenceAnx

You convince non-engineers to value your preferred tools from their vantage point. QuintessenceAnx

Let’s do this. QuintessenceAnx

Learning by Example: Build a Case for a Monitoring Tool QuintessenceAnx

Some Anon. Monitoring System (SAMS) and Some Other Monitoring System (SOMS) QuintessenceAnx

Some context for your situation QuintessenceAnx

Currently you have either 1 ) no monitoring (👻) or 2 ) SOMS (👻 👻) QuintessenceAnx

And you want something that exists and isn’t terrible is good. QuintessenceAnx

Unfortunately, SAMS is … well … 💸💸💸 QuintessenceAnx

No problem! Just get your boss/company to pay for it! QuintessenceAnx

That’ll be easy! (Said no one, ever.) QuintessenceAnx

Start with the familiar: a basic technical case QuintessenceAnx

What do you want? • • • • What infrastructure do you have? What languages are your apps written in? What compliance requirements do you have? What other tools do you have (integration)? QuintessenceAnx

We have only started, but the rabbit hole already looks like … QuintessenceAnx

Well, this. QuintessenceAnx

Pause and breathe QuintessenceAnx

And then be more abstract QuintessenceAnx

What do you want? • The ability to quickly triage and troubleshoot issues • • The ability to integrate with other tools, in the case of monitoring usually at least • A ticketing system • An incident management system As much tool consolidation as possible • As much compatibility as possible QuintessenceAnx

What do you want? • To see latency issues • To see outages To see potential vulnerabilities • • e.g. If there are recognition patterns for various attacks • To see usage patterns Can help determine user experience (UX) • Correlate metrics with any latencies or failures • QuintessenceAnx

What do you want? • See how New Feature X is working out • Be able to work on Oh My Outage without pausing your work (too much) to give status updates • Be able able to link to specific errors / warnings in your tickets for later… QuintessenceAnx

How does this translate to what they want? QuintessenceAnx

Well, who are “they”? 🤔 QuintessenceAnx

Borrowing the “Persona”* concept, define something like… * You may also hear these referred to as “stakeholders”. QuintessenceAnx

Define The Personas (a.k.a. Stakeholders) • Allies Supporters • Antagonists Competitors Other Tech Deciders • e.g. security team(s) • • • Financial Deciders • e.g. executives / management (And so on) QuintessenceAnx

Focusing on management et al QuintessenceAnx

What do they care about? • How does this benefit: • The team • Other teams • The business, e.g. the customer experience • Them QuintessenceAnx

What else do they care about? • To be kept informed / in the loop / transparency • So they can answer questions without needing to call someone • … or worse be called by someone and caught unawares. • To know the total cost • Not just licensing, but time cost to train and roll out To know what they’re paying for is being used • QuintessenceAnx

Keeping these in mind QuintessenceAnx

Find the overlap QuintessenceAnx

The Overlap • If already familiar with tool = decreased cost • • More effective triage + troubleshooting means • • • • (Less or no time needed for training) Better results for KPIs like MTTR, MTBF More features, it’s what businesses crave Integrations = more effective use of existing tools Compatibility = don’t need to add/replace anything to use it QuintessenceAnx

The Overlap • Decreased latency -> increased transactions -> increased revenue • • More automation -> less time lost to manual updates Tool consolidation = lower costs • Links in tickets = more visibility, fewer pings QuintessenceAnx

Beyond the overlap QuintessenceAnx

Ask for help QuintessenceAnx

“What abouts” discussion points? • What about SOMS? • What about budget? What if our needs change? • QuintessenceAnx

Exec / Manager Visibility QuintessenceAnx

Recall amongst their wants • To be kept informed / in the loop / transparency • So they can answer questions without needing to call someone • … or worse be called by someone and caught unawares. QuintessenceAnx

Non-IT use case: Exec Dashboard QuintessenceAnx

QuintessenceAnx

Executive Dashboard • Allows topmost view on health for various apps and systems • Allows the manager or exec to be able to answer “is there a problem?” directly if asked, rather than fencing the question to engineering team(s) • Mobile app, for if/when “on the go” is ever a thing again, would be a huge benefit for upper level execs QuintessenceAnx

Because… QuintessenceAnx

Even Starfleet knows the command staff likes dashboards QuintessenceAnx

Slides & Additional Resources on Notist https://noti.st/quintessence QuintessenceAnx

Thank you! Quintessence Anx Developer Advocate 🥑 @ https://noti.st/quintessence