Strategic communication of your team’s wins will gain you more trust, higher-impact work, and top talent.
Engineering leaders are often so focused on technical strategy and project execution, that they miss the opportunity to communicate about the team’s work during the process. Communicating the team’s progress and wins becomes something that will happen later once the “real” work is done.
However, if you work to market your team’s work regularly and in real-time, you will gain more trust, higher-impact work, and top talent.
Think like a marketer
Communication is a core competency for engineering managers, so I find it most often a concept discussed during performance reviews – and it’s typically something you’ve either been told you’re good or not so good at. If you belong to the latter group, you may hear things like, “It’d be great if you communicated upward more effectively,” “Communicate progress more transparently,” or “Work on communicating at the right time and in the right way.” These phrases are as common as they are elusive, so how does one broadly become a better communicator?
I recommend a reframing of the problem. Instead of thinking about improving your communication skills, think about practicing your marketing skills. Marketing, in this context, is high quality communication about your work and your team to the wider org. This involves dedicating time to designing and creating content that is distributed with intention, strategy, and coordination. Focusing on key marketing principles like audience needs, clear objectives, content distribution, and content performance will guide your content strategy.
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Audience needs and interests
Marketers focus on understanding their target audience – what problems they need to solve, what interests them, and how to engage them effectively. Tailoring content to address specific pain points or desires ensures relevance and engagement.
The most common mistake I see engineering leaders make is that they write only one version of the information they want to share. Let’s look at a project update as an example.
A leader may share a project update for the wider org highlighting a technical challenge they worked with another team to solve. This sort of information would signal to a technical audience that your team works collaboratively and can build your reputation as problem solvers; however, to a less technical audience who might not have the context to understand why the problem you solved was difficult, it’s less likely to create this positive outcome.
A less technical audience may instead just want to know if the project is on- or off-track and see a brief, recorded demo of the work so far. This broadcasts to that audience that your team is attentive to the overall timeline, that you’re proactively communicative, and that you deliver work incrementally, inviting feedback from stakeholders before the final delivery.
Identify segments within your audience that may have different needs and interests and tailor the message you need to deliver accordingly.
Clear objectives and goals
For marketers, every piece of content is created with a purpose, whether it’s to drive views, increase brand awareness, or encourage someone to do something. Marketers ensure the content aligns with their specific goals and has a clear call to action.
At the very highest level, I think of two buckets of communication that I want to put out into the world: project-based and evergreen content.
Project-based content
A project exists for a specific period and affects a specific group of people. Project-based content aims to build transparency, align stakeholders, and celebrate team contributions.
The content required to effectively market a project varies based on its scale. If the project is short and doesn’t touch too many stakeholders, you may only need to design comms for the project’s kick-off and conclusion. If the project is long and/or touches many different stakeholders, a more robust strategy may be needed, such as weekly project health checks.
Evergreen content
In the marketing world, evergreen content refers to content that remains relevant and valuable to consumers over a long period of time, regardless of trends or current events. In our context, evergreen refers to communication needs that are always relevant regardless of what projects the team is working on.
I think about four distinct evergreen content needs, which involve communicating in four directions:
- Up my reporting chain
- Down my reporting chain
- Laterally to peers and stakeholders, and
- Out to the broader company or outside the company as appropriate.
Check out a template with examples for designing your own evergreen content strategy here.
What I choose to communicate, how I communicate, and how often I communicate to these groups is the foundation of growing my team’s brand – the identity or image that we present to the world. And each communication, in each direction, can meet a distinct objective or goal.
For example, sharing a direct report’s achievements with my superiors highlights their value and helps build support for their future promotion. This differs from writing a blog post about the same achievement, which might be aimed at attracting talent to come work with us.
Content distribution
Marketers consider how the content will be distributed and discovered. This includes choosing the right platforms for distribution (chat tools, email, meetings, etc.) and creating shareable and engaging content for the intended audience.
I think of my work chat (Slack) as my work social media. When I’m sharing marketing there, I try to make it as engaging as possible. Photos, screenshots, and videos are more fun than a wall of text. Because people are consuming Slack while also doing a million other things, it’s a good way to share tidbits of information.
Chats can be a challenging place to get people to take action on a message you’ve shared. When I need people to complete some task I have found email to be the most effective. You may even want to add an emoji and an “ACTION REQUIRED” in the subject line to gain more attention.
Content performance
The content a marketer generates is evaluated for its performance. How many times was that email opened? How many people clicked the link on that Slack message?
When a particular strategy isn’t resonating with the intended audience, a marketer doesn’t give up – they reevaluate the strategy and try again. The second most common mistake I see engineering leaders make in communicating about their projects and their teams is that they communicate something once and don’t check to verify if the communication actually worked. You’re not going to get it right every time, so don’t be afraid to try again to ensure that you’re reaching the goals you outlined in your marketing strategy!
Create the time
Block time on your calendar every week for your marketing work. This point is important enough to deserve its own heading and paragraph. Remember that marketing takes time. No one can create that time on your calendar except you.
You are the marketer
The third most common communication mistake I see is leaders losing hours to try and craft perfect, formal content that sounds nothing like them. Keep it brief, speak in your own voice, and don’t feel that your content needs to be totally polished and serious all the time. By being yourself in your marketing, you make the whole process a lot easier, and you’ll do more of it when it’s easier.
Ultimately, getting more content out into your environment increases recognition of your team and its members and builds trust in your group as people who work transparently – things that help attract bigger, more impactful work and top talent to your team.
