Are your storytelling skills limiting your engineering career?
Are you a no-name engineer? your work feels repetitive and boring? No promotion yet? and you feel that no one cares about your project? these are good indicators that your story telling skills need an uplift.
Every project has two steps - doing the work, selling the work, the order does not matter. Explaining the impact of one’s work takes effort, sometimes less challenging and mundane, but ‘selling’ is as critical as ‘doing’.
Jane is a high performer, she is always on the most important projects, everyone loves her projects. She gets speaking opportunities to illustrate her work. The cycle seems to continue and she is lucky. In reality, Jane figured out the process of story telling for all the work that she does or intends to do. She spends the time to explain the importance of her work. Keeps everyone informed of the progress and people are rooting for her projects to achieve the desired benefits.
Jack is an equally hard working and smart engineer but none of his projects get the same level of fan following. Why?
To nail this point home, let me take a project and tell you the Jane and Jack’s way of story telling. Since story telling on a customer facing product is easier, let me take an engineering focused project to explain the difference.
The project involves migrating a database from one instance to another largely to reduce the cost of running the system. It involves carefully dual writing to the database, building cut over mechanisms, organizing launch windows and careful monitoring.
Jane’s story goes like this - We are going to take up a project to save the company $3M yearly by switching our storage system. Our goal is ensure that this is done reliably requiring without losing customer data or downtime to customers during the moment of transition requiring three weeks of engineering work. Since losing a single record is not an option, the team will handle this with enough observability and diligence.
Jack’s version of the story goes like this - We are migrating a database from one instance to another to reduce cost. We will be building tools to migrate live database and ensure that we are monitoring all the metrics.
Both the above versions are factual and accurate. However, who do you think the peer engineers and the management will be rooting for to succeed? Good stories communicate purpose and progress. Picking up this simple formula will do wonders to your career.
You probably love talking about the technical challenges and complexity of the system you are building but that is not the story that everyone cares to hear.
Your manager, peer, junior engineer, product manager, executive leaders, may care about different talking points for the same work done.