Finding my outside voice

For most of my career, I've found that I tend to quickly develop a reputation in whatever company I'm working at. I've never been the best programmer, but I've got some breadth, creativity, and critical thinking skills, and I'm good at synthesis and communication. This has helped me see the big picture in moments where a novel idea was needed, and I was able to connect some talented people to come up with some cool stuff together.

The small pond

Because of this, people have mostly taken me seriously within my companies. In my work as both a platform engineer as well as in engineering leadership, this has come in pretty handy. I do a lot of internal communications, mostly with developers, but also across organizations, including occasionally the C-suite, where the objective is often to influence behavior in some way. For example:

• I have to convince team managers to commit some of their team's time to test out a new observability vendor and get me feedback before a purchasing deadline
• I need to convince a product owner that if their team spends some time migrating their app to our new platform, it will pay off by making their team faster and their product more reliable
• I need to convince developers they need to adopt some new front-end standards, because mobile web is actually a thing now, and we need to make sure our site works on phones (lol, this one is a bit dated now)
• I need to convince the CTO that an assumption they made isn't correct, and we need to pivot ASAP

In all these kinds of communications, I usually start with writing. Not only does it help me clarify my own thoughts, but I feel like its a conscientious way to engage with someone when you're obviously trying to influence them. It gives them a chance to read, absorb, and process, without being put on the spot. Then it can be a lot easier to have subsequent conversations.

Writing is an even more essential tool for communicating to a larger audience, and interestingly, the same dynamic applies. Sending an email to a whole division of a company has a slightly different flavor than to an individual, but I've found that the more you treat it like an invitation for further conversation, the more effective it is at actually influencing behavior.

My inside voice

So I ended up writing a lot of internal documentation, emails (and increasingly more multi-paragraph slacks), Confluence articles, and occasionally some slides for a presentation. In all of these, I've found a particular voice that feels appropriately authoritative, but also approachable and informal, with a bit of self-deprecating humor, and the occasional pop culture reference thrown in.

These communications have always been relatively well received, and usually effective. I've also found that developers tend to read my emails at a much higher rate than those from others (sometimes more than those from senior executives).

But at some level, I've always known that a big part of this is my reputation and pre-existing standing in the company, and I'm honestly not sure how big. It's easy to be confident about my communication when I know a big chunk of the people in my audience personally, and understand their context, concerns, and environment.

Finding my outside voice is a little scary

I've been procrastinating on starting this blog for over 15 years. I wrote my first entry a few months before my youngest child was born... and she's now in high school. I have to admit it's partially because I'm a bit nervous about leaving my comfortable little corporate bubble where everyone knows me.

Part of me thinks all these "great insights" I've been wanting to share for years are going to get absolutely shredded in the daylight, given the tech world is filled with brilliant people, and on any single topic I think I know anything about, there's someone who knows a whole lot more. Perhaps I'm absolutely full of crap, or perhaps my insights are just boring and obvious.

Something changed in the past few months, and the urge to start sharing some ideas has finally overcome my fear of getting pilloried. I'm finally getting to the point where, however masochistic it may be, I'm really starting to crave external feedback. I want a way test out some of these crazy ideas in the open, where I can see how a more diverse and knowledgeable population reacts to them.

Mustering the energy

The other obstacle was finding the time and energy to do the technical work to get this thing up and running. My site used to be on Vistaprint's website platform (which I helped build back in the day, so it was free for me), and had since been (forcibly) migrated to Wix. Frankly, working with Wix... did not make me happy.

At my current job, I finally found a static site generator that I like a lot for documentation, so that gave me the push I needed to export my stuff out of a languishing Wordpress, and get it published to Github Pages.

At some point soon I have to figure out SEO, and probably get over my disdain for social media and start putting myself out there.

Conclusion

I remember as a kid, I was sometimes loud, and my teachers and parents would occasionally admonish me to use my inside voice. Perhaps it was good advice at the time. For me, though, I think it's finally time to find a voice for speaking outside.

Hopefully those mean kids across the street won't throw rocks at me again.