Raising Visibility To Other Teams And Getting Their Support

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Hey folks, I'm just driving to work here. It's uh Friday morning. Getting there a little bit early. I have to do a presentation in in about an hour. And so I wanted to talk a little bit about this kind of thing because I think it's uh obviously very relevant for me right now considering it's about to happen in an hour. And um I can maybe speak to this a little bit more like firsthand I guess versus just uh more hypothetical I suppose. So I wanted to talk about doing presentations for uh and not specifically the presentation part but communication to to like other stakeholder groups um especially people that you have dependencies on uh sort of like a working partnership and that kind of thing.

And so the context is really around you know in in organizations where you have or across organizations right in companies that are big enough where you have dependencies between teams right so it could be technology that you're leveraging from another team um support service whatever it happens to be um even you know like uh people that are contributing right it could could look any any way um different organizations or different teams even are going to have their own priorities of course right their own road maps and I think that obviously in a company you want to make sure that as much as possible everyone's aligned for like the common mission that the company stands for and I think the bigger the company is and the bigger the organizations and teams and number of teams all this kind of stuff just I think by definition the

easier it is for teams to be misaligned and I don't mean in like a adversarial way like we're team A and because you're team B like we hate you because of that and like we don't care about you it's mostly just that given scale of things you know if everyone is focused on their part of you know the overall mission of the company that the the likelihood of these things not being perfectly overlapped is uh is much higher. So, um with that said, you know, if you're working with other teams and you're leveraging technology, uh getting help from them, from their their engineers, whatever it looks like, right? Um there's going to be situations where things are working really well. There's going to be situations where things seem to work okay.

And there's going to be other things where you're like, "Hey, look, like our team based on our priorities, like we we seem to notice that, you know, our priorities have a different uh alignment or weight compared to maybe your team." And so what I'm about to talk through is sort of this combination of like all of the above, right? And so one of the goals of having whether it's like a presentation or doc write up or whatever it happens to be and like some type of communication to um another stakeholder group. In this case, we're I'm talking about like a presentation to their leadership. Um the goal is not like, hey, we're we're not talking to this team, so we're going to go up the chain like as high as we can to like get people in trouble so that we'll get listened to. Like 100% not the case.

And I just tried to clarify that that um I think there are situations where like you know unfortunately something like that might be required where a team you know you're not getting any type of communication something is critical on fire and like you you kind of just need to to escalate to get attention to something. Um that's not what I'm focused on for this. So, you know, how I'm framing the rest of this conversation is not like immediate urgency, everything's on fire, no one's listening, escalate. This is more like uh longer time horizon, right? Like as we continue to move in this direction, how do we make sure that we have alignment? Um, and so I think that like one of the most critical things that I want to stress in in a scenario like this is that um there there are like I already

said, there are going to be parts that are going very smooth and there's going to be parts that are like, hey, like this would be great if we could have more attention in this area. And the goal of that is not to to say like, hey, look, this team is doing a bad job or like you guys are wrong or whatever else. It's really just to say this is why for us this is a priority. Like I want we want to be able to make sure that there's visibility into like why there's either urgency or a lot of weight for something and um and just bring awareness to it, right? Because at the end of the day like we we understand like every other team is going to have priorities that in in some way are going to overlap and in other ways won't and that's that that's normal, right?

So the goal is to be able to say, "Hey, look, like for us, this is why this is important." And um is there a way that when we talk through this, we see more clear alignment on like on what your priorities are, right? Um right. If we can bring clarity into why this is a priority for us um maybe different perspective as to why does that shift things for you um in terms of your overall priorities like can you see things in a different light to maybe help realign this? So that's part of it. Um maybe maybe I'll come back I'm going to maybe go a little bit higher level and then come back to this. Um the other part is like at a super high level is that we want to make sure that we can communicate like the things that we're building like hey look like uh not only why it's a priority for us to have uh you know support in different ways.

Um but like here's the cool stuff we're building and like this is from our team you know leveraging stuff that another team is doing and like do any of you have like you know a need for such technology um are there similar challenges or problem areas that that you could see this being a benefit um because this is an opportunity for for further collaboration. Did I stutter that for further collab collaboration? My goodness. Um and so like raising awareness to like hey we have these types of problems we solve them this particular way like this is why we we build this technology this solution. It's almost like advertising right where you're trying to say like in our area we have this type of challenge we solve it this way. there's all of this tech product service that do it and like given that you're also a big organization is there is there something about this that seems appealing that you might be interested in.

Uh do you already have people working on this type of thing? Like should we collaborate further on that? Do you have teams that would benefit from this and you know it's like on their horizon but they're like we're not we're not yet building that um or we're not yet solving that problem but we know where we're going to run into it. Like we should start talking, right? So it's kind of this awareness advertising type of thing. Um and it's a funny thing to say like advertising. It's not like we're selling it to them. It's more like we spend time on this and if there's a way that what we're doing could benefit you, like we would we would love to be able to help because that's like part of our mission, right? So, these types of conversations are are super interesting because it's it's a bit of give and take, right?

Like we want to of course if we're building things try to help other parts of our organization and beyond. So, especially when we're talking with these partners in other parts of uh or other organizations that are that are also very big, we we anticipate parallels, right? Like if we're solving this type of thing, we suspect that this is on the radar of of people in this other organization. Whether or not they're actively solving it or not is a different story, but we anticipate some some similarity. So we want to be able to to give if we can and then at the same time um like I was kind of leading with this conversation some air quotes like take which is like we need support. Um so these are sort of two things that get combined into in in my in my case like this type of presentation that's going to be going on.

So, to kind of come back to the first point a little bit, um, when it comes to like asking for support, I think one thing that's really critical here is like I want to make sure that I can highlight all of the really positive ways that we have been getting support. Um, because I think that's critical. I don't I don't want any of this framing personally to be like, uh, hey, look, like, um, we've been treated poorly or like this team is bad and and we need more from them. It's it's quite the opposite. It's like this has been awesome. We couldn't do this without this team. Um all of this is so good and because this has been so great, it's enabled us to be in this position where we're like we actually need um these other things because we know that this team is like is the go-to for it, right?

like we fully believe that this team is, you know, sort of the authority in this space and um instead of us like going off and building our own or trying to shift to something else, we really want to be like, hey, look, like you guys are awesome. You've proven to be awesome and like, you know, for us to to really benefit from this partnership beyond this, like this is this is the areas that we need support in. So, it's a lot less about like what I really don't want to do is come across like I'm complaining about what's been happening, which is a tricky thing to balance, right? If you're like, we we need more support or we need more features or we need more fixes or whatever it is, um it's hard to like I find it difficult to to ask for those types of things without sounding like I'm complaining about the state that we're in.

Right? So for me it's I'm going to be spending more time um when I'm talking to be able to highlight that to be able to say like hey look we couldn't have done what we're doing without this team this product the service uh or multiple teams right I'm trying not I'm not giving any details on specifically what I'm doing uh for this video I mean but um I'll be highlighting like why that's been so beneficial and Then the way that I'm going to try to to draw uh more clarity, I guess, is to is to then highlight why all of this is so critical for us. So that really what it's doing is uh illustrating that we have something critical for our needs. It's really powered by what some other teams are able to do.

And because of that um like this is why we have these asks because um if I can show how critical it is for us and uh why we've you know have such a a dependency then I'm I'm hoping it will help to articulate like the overall priority right they can see um what's a good way to say this it's almost like they can see why what is uh what they're creating I'm sure they already know this, but like why what they're creating is is even so much bigger than just the direct thing that they're creating, right? I'm trying to think of like a an interesting example of this um like as a total parallel, but it would be like if you this is might sound like an exaggeration or something, I guess, but if you built something open source, right?

And so like you're like I have this cool thing and I make it and then someone starts using it and you're like holy crap like I didn't realize someone uses this thing in this way and and like that's pretty exciting to see. Like you know you might have made this thing for yourself or maybe you do know how how valuable it is, right? And you're proud of that. That's great. And I I mean like you should be just like these teams should realize how great their stuff is and and the significance of it. But if you were to to see like in practice it being used and used in a way that is maybe uh on par or beyond sort of your expectations for significance, I think that could be a pretty empowering thing to be like, wow, like this thing really like has some evidence that it's kicking ass.

Um so anyway, I'm hoping to kind of frame it that way to be like, you know, what we what we're doing and the path that we need to move forward on like yeah we do have a a big dependency here and um we're really you know thankful essentially for the the work that's been done so far but here's I shouldn't say but I don't like that word it's not good and here are like the and here are the things that you know would help us even further to uh to reach our goals so again for a conversation like I'm about to have it's two primary things. One is like advertising what we've been building in case they can benefit from it and then the inverse which is like for us to continue we need this type of support. Um I would say in conversations like this it's really important to like uh to make sure that you're bringing along the other team.

Right? It's one thing for me as I'm as I'm talking to you in this video to say like here's how I plan to like frame some of this stuff so that um you know people are aware that we're thankful uh for what's going on aware that like you know taking on such dependencies has has proven to be very beneficial. Um it's one thing to to say that and I think it's another thing that um the the dependencies sort of the people the teams that you're talking about are aware um you know they're not blindsided. I think that's really important um because in this type of conversation it's like we are talking to sort of like leadership groups that are above them right for their organizations. And so you could like if you put yourself in their shoes and imagine imagine someone came and talked to like uh your boss's boss's boss and they had things to say about the work you're doing.

Like you would hope you would hope it's all great things, right? And you would hope that if there was more that they were asking for that that didn't catch you off guard that you were like, "Well, man, why didn't you just talk to me about that?" or like you know if there were challenges are these things that we've been working on or like with you or are these things where like you've just never consulted us like you you wouldn't want to be caught off guard right and so I think that's really important uh in this type of communication is making sure that people have awareness because like I said the goal is not like throwing people under the bus so to speak to say like you know screw this team they haven't been helpful It's really just to to help their leadership understand uh in

our organization here's here's why these things are priority and that means that in their organization if they can find ways to align with that then there's less friction overall right um something to consider like again depending on companies you've worked at the size scale how many teams that kind of thing um there's for many of you u you've probably exper experienced this and maybe for some of you, you have not yet, but it's like a pretty normal thing, right? You're a team working on stuff. You have your own road map, your own priorities as you're executing on that. And then um you have a person or another team that comes to you and they're like, "Hey, like we like we're doing this and it would be really great if you guys could go like build feature ABC or like make a fix for XYZ and

like please go do that." And you're like, "Okay, like we get it, but like makes sense what you're asking for, but also like that's just not not a priority for us right now." Not because we don't think that it's valuable or we don't think it's important, but everything can't be a priority zero because there has to be some ordering to how we get things done and based on the goals in our organization for our leadership. Like these are things that we've already sort of agreed to and like and we are at capacity and like if we weren't then we would do that but that's going to take more time. Like inevitably there's going to be this this thing that creates some friction. And it's again not because you think it's a dumb idea or like you just want to be, you know, a pain in the ass to other teams.

It's because it's a reality. There's only so much that can physically get done in a given time. And genuinely, if something came up like that and you were like, "Oh, wow." Like we do see that that is a higher priority than maybe something we're working on. that might be something you have to go clarify with other stakeholders and you're like, "Hey, look, like this other thing that is a higher priority did come up. We have to kind of shift our our timelines, right? And if if you're not in a position to do that, if you're like, hey, look to our stakeholders, we promise this um it might be something you have to go have a conversation with like people in your leadership group to be able to say, are we all on the same page here?" Right? If we talk about these, take a step back and look at our priorities again, are we are we aligned on this?

Because, you know, we all agreed on ABC before, but now thing XYZ has shown up and like there's pretty significant evidence that we think that this could be a higher priority than either A, B, or C. So, like given that, do we think that we should pivot to go address this? Right? I think that's a that's a normal thing that can come up and happen, right? I feel like in my career, this happens non-stop. Um, and so as a result, it's not a it's not just how do you stand firm on all of the asks and never budge and like, you know, you plan for long time horizons and make the perfect plan and then you never have to adjust. It's almost the inverse which is like at least in my opinion uh the inverse being like have a direction you're moving in. Make sure that if with your stakeholders you're communicating regularly on timelines but be ready to pivot.

Um for me this comes from startup life right like so this is just a way of working that's very ingrained in how I think because that's how we survived right if uh if every time when I was so prior to Microsoft when I was at magnet forensics if every time we had a plan and we stuck to it blindly and just said like this is what we agreed on like just do it um and doesn't matter if like something else on fire comes up or there's an opportunity. If every time we just blindly stuck to a plan that we made up front, I would I feel very confident in saying I don't think that we would have survived as a company. We made lots of wrong decisions early and had to pivot like plenty of times. And I think that that's that's normal. Like you can't you don't have a crystal ball unless you do in which case let me know about the crystal ball.

I'd love to to hear more. But if you can't perfectly predict things, stop pretending that you can, right? Like just accept that you can't. Do the best that you can and then be ready to pivot. Like you build in the agility to the work, right? Like you you can't have agility in the work you're doing if the only time you ever talk about changing priorities is like say every 12 months. you'd be screwed if like you know in one month in you're like oh man we weren't right about this guess we have to stick to it for 11 months right it'd be it's ridiculous right so yeah I think building in agility and that kind of stuff's important and then that's another reason why when we're talking with these teams someone's got to let me in thank you sir Um when we're talking with these teams, we're not saying like drop everything you're doing and switch to this.

We're basically saying this is important for us. We want to make sure that you understand why. And then of course we understand you have your priorities too. So like if we have alignment on moving in this direction then our priorities should more naturally converge and then that way you know the things we're asking for and the things that are getting done also naturally converge right it's not a an immediate drop everything you're doing and just do what we ask. So that's some framing for a conversation I'm about to have in I guess like 40 minutes now. um last minute prep for me is that like when I go into this and it's a conversation with a CVP. So for context that's like um across so it's across organizations. It's not my CVP. Um this would be my equivalent of my skip levels manager. So my manager's manager's manager in another org.

And so my sort of final prep going into a conversation like this is like what I don't want to do is just like we have a a document that's put together that was sent out ahead of time. So there's been uh there's been time to pre-eread. We will also have a pre-eread um in like the guess you don't call it a pre-eread, but it's a pre-eread before the actual conversation happens in the meeting. So there's also dedicated time for that. What I don't want to do is after all of that just go cool I'm going to read the part of the document that I wrote because that would be ridiculous like people have already done that maybe twice now. So what I want to do is make sure I guess like two things. one is that uh for the material that I have, I'm just going to like I said before this meeting, make sure that I have a clear like variant of that that I want to be able to to talk about.

Right? If someone said like you have 5 minutes to just like talk about the most important parts of this, what would you focus on? Come on, buddy. Move over. Um, yeah, if I had like a short time limit and someone said summarize this and only talk about sort of like the critical highlights, I would just want to make sure that I have like my version of that um, in my own words. And like I do I do, but in the minutes leading up to this, I just want to like solidify that. Um and then I think the other thing is that if there are any final comments that come in, right? So I think this is one of the ways that we approach some of these conversations.

It's not like I don't think unique to us at Microsoft or our orgs, but um one of the things we do is when we have this much time for pre-ereading content, if if we're all we're doing in the meeting is just saying the same things or talking about the exact same things that are written, it's maybe not adding a ton of value because people have already read it. So instead, we often use some of that pre-eread time to like add comments to like to ask the open questions. And that way when we switch to actually conversing, um, we can just jump to the comments, right? Like you've already called out the things that you want addressed. And when I say you, I mean the other people who did not write the document, right? So um if this is being presented to a CVP of another org um you know they're the primary stakeholder in this case that we're communicating with.

So any open questions they have clarity they need whatever that looks like we want to prioritize that in the conversation. So what comments did they leave? Let's go just go through that first and then if there's additional time then there's additional time but like it makes sense to prioritize what they're curious about or need clarity on. Um so uh yeah if there's any of that before the meeting then I'll make sure that I you know try to have written answers for those things too. Um, and then in the beginning of the meeting when there is pre-eread time, I'll uh, you know, be ready to take notes and make sure that I can talk about that stuff uh, right away. But that's going to be my morning. Um, so hopefully that framing was kind of helpful. I've done this kind of thing a couple of times in different capacities.

like sometimes I've been uh not the one presenting and been part of preparing the material. Um, sometimes I've done things like this with our own CVP and so the format similar like in I think in previous situations it's been maybe less about here's um you know these these teams that we need help from and it's more like hey to our own leadership we're articulating things and saying like and here's where we need support from you please and thank you. So, kind of similar, right? The idea is that you're communicating to uh a stakeholder that's in a leadership position and and the support that you're going to need. So, kind of making your case for uh what's going on. Yeah, hopefully that's helpful. Um I thought I'd do a slightly different topic today. And yeah, if you're new to the channel and you made it this far, just a reminder like if you have uh questions about software engineering career development, leave them below in the comments.

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