We’ve all been there. You’re in a cross-departmental meeting, trying to explain why a feature deployment is delayed, and you watch the eyes of the marketing team slowly glaze over. To them, you might as well be chanting in an ancient, forgotten dialect.
As women in tech, we are frequently tasked with acting as the translators between complex technical infrastructure and the rest of the business. Being able to explain “tech stuff” to non-technical stakeholders isn’t just a soft skill, it’s a career superpower that builds trust, secures project budgets, and stops people from asking you to “just fix the internet.”
Here is a practical guide to translating complex code into plain English without losing your mind, or your patience.
The fastest way to lose an audience is to drop a block of text filled with industry shorthand. When you say, “We’re migrating the legacy DB to an AWS cloud bucket via an ETL pipeline to reduce latency,” a non-tech person hears white noise.
Instead, filter your language. If a term isn’t vital to their understanding of the business outcome, strip it out or replace it with a functional translation:
Human brains are wired to understand things they can already see, touch, or experience. When explaining abstract digital concepts, anchor them to physical things.
When a non-technical stakeholder asks a question, they rarely want to know how the clock works; they just want to know the time. Shift your focus from the technical mechanics to the business outcomes.
Ultimately, bridging the gap takes practice, a lot of deep breaths, and the acceptance that some people will never quite understand your world. Just remember that the next time you successfully explain a Git merge conflict to a room full of accountants, you have achieved peak corporate enlightenment. And if all else fails, you can always revert to the time-honoured, universal IT mantra that transcends all language barriers, technical or otherwise: “Have you tried turning it off and on again?“
