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How to Communicate Effectively with Stakeholders
A simple 6-step process developed by my team at Uber Amsterdam
Every software engineer will at some point in their career have to deal with people outside their own team. Those other people could be engineers that use your APIs, your manager’s manager, designers, technical writers, product managers, quality assurance engineers, production engineers, internal customers, and whatnot. Collectively, let’s call those people “stakeholders” of your work.
Good communication with stakeholders is important. How you communicate with others controls how they perceive your efficiency, impact, and productivity. Most of the time, good communication is actually more important than the actual work you do. As an engineer, communication may not come easy.
In my team at Uber Amsterdam, we deal with stakeholders all the time because we manage an internal platform used by multiple teams, from different product divisions, and across various time zones. We developed 6 rules for effective communication for our team. Our aim was to keep the process as lightweight as possible for the engineers, while still informing everyone with the right information so we can move forward, faster, together.
