Songkick's Ability: Communication

• Written and oral communication
• Explaining work to peers and non-technical stakeholders
• Proactive communication
• Developing and improving communication channels

Communicates with peers effectively and in a timely manner. Able to ask for help when needed.

Communicates effectively with technical audiences.

Able to explain technical concepts to peers.

Able to present their work to the wider company.

Practises active listening.

Example behaviours:

• Consistently writes good commit messages and release log emails
• Consistently writes good bug reports in Jira
• Created and shared testing notes with the team
• Asked for help during standup
• Asked a question in Slack to help unblock themselves
• Delivered a Show and Tell presentation
• Delivered a lightning talk on CSS preprocessors or zero bugs policy
• Listened to all points of view during a discussion without interrupting anyone

Communicates effectively with non-technical audiences.

Able to explain their work to the wider company, including to a non-technical audience.

Able to explain complex technical concepts (such as software testing or software developing concepts) to peers.

Example behaviours:

• Developed a communication plan to inform non-technical stakeholders about the impact of a complex technical change
• Acted as communicator during a fire and updated appropriate stakeholders in a timely manner
• Delivered a detailed dev talk on logging infrastructure
• Wrote a blog post on the Songkick dev blog
• Wrote about a testing tool or process on the testing wiki and shared with the company

Can explain the impact of their product team’s work to non-technical stakeholders

Can explain the team’s goals to their team in an engaging way.

Example behaviours:

• Delivered a presentation...
  • ... about a technical migration at a company meeting
  • ... a detailed dev talk on test techniques
• Wrote a detailed and concise email to the company
  • a fireout email
  • an email regarding a process change

Proactively communicates future plans and direction to technical and nontechnical people across product teams for a single domain (e.g. platform work).

Works with product teams to help them understand how our software architecture supports the team’s business goals.

Can explain the impact of their product team’s work to non-technical stakeholders; can explain the team’s goals to their team in an engaging way.

Develops and improves communication channels between product teams.

Acts as a conduit between technology and other departments in the business, shielding and fielding questions where necessary.

Example behaviours:

• Created a detailed document outlining a change that we needed to make to our architecture, and delivered presentations to the tech team and wider team to explain the business need
• Delivered a presentation about a technical migration at a company meeting
• Organised and ran a weekly TL meeting
• Gave an update about a process change to the business at team update
• Delivered a presentation about testing a technical migration at a company meeting

Proactively communicates future plans and direction of the Technology team to technical and nontechnical people across the business (working with the CTO).

Represents the Technology team externally.

Develops and improves communication channels for the whole tech team. Promotes Songkick externally.

Example behaviours:

• Introduced the release-log email and explained to the team why it’s valuable
• Gave a presentation about Songkick at Makers Academy jobs fair