Talking to the Audience ......

Afternoon ... and just after a stressful conference call with a customer who has issues with the certain networking devices we build. Nothing unusual !

Vikram and Betaal finished the call and went to grab a cup of coffee !

Betaal: Boy that was a disaster !!! One of those rare times I see you, "Vikram", failing to make your point.

Vikram: Don't know what went wrong. And I still don't know why they did not understand me.

Betaal: Repeat the metaphor (typical software guys - reproduce everything to understand better:), using which you wanted to explain the customer and what you were trying to explain. Then we will find, together, what went wrong.

Vikram: Ok ! This customer is Italian. One of the national carriers. They are upset because, network is not stable and the box (the one we develop and sell) keeps misbehaving and as a result customer loses revenue and sleep.

When I looked in to the box, it was plain, simple mis-use of the box. People buy networking devices to push packets of information. This customer is monitoring the device so much and so often that it is busy answering all the external bodies monitoring it and hardly gets time to do its own job.

Its like having a good engineer to do engineering, and then micro manage so much and interrupt so frequently that he/she hardly gets the work done.

This is what I was trying to explain the customer. Monitor it less and let it do its job !

But the customer said, I ve outsourced all my monitoring to different smaller companies, and they all have their scripts runnings. Our box should prevent being over-monitored intelligently without the customer going to all its out sourcing partner and asking them to co-ordinate so that they do not load up the box just doing that.

Betaal: So far so good... what exactly did you say though !!! How did you articulate it ?

Vikram: I always like using real life metaphors / stories to explain a situation.

So, I said, "You have a critical patient. You called an ambulance. The job of the ambulance is to ship the patient as soon as possible, as safely as possible to the hospital. Ambulance is here. Patient is in. And then the Ambulance driver monitors the tyre pressure, accelerator, water, coolant, 19 point inspection that takes 1 hr. The patient would die"

My intention was to tell a story, that helps them understand, one shot.

Betaal: What ended up happening after that story ?

Vikram: They did not understand why I was telling that story. They thought there is someone really serious who needs an ambulance. They thought the ambulance driver is not keeping the vehicle ready. They thought some one is dead. All in literal sense. Some people mused, why are we talking about patients and ambulance in this meeting. Some people said, we should probably call off the meeting, arrange funeral for whoever is dead and reconvene. Rest thought I was nuts.

Betaal: You told a metaphorical ENGLISH story to bunch of Italians, who have a translator in the meeting to help, and the translator barely manages English. :) And you do not know Italian. See the point ???


"Always talk to the audience. Talk what they can apprehend, appreciate and understand. Being a wise-a&& costs a lot."