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How to communicate with non-technical stakeholders – Towards AI
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HOW TO COMMUNICATE WITH NON-TECHNICAL STAKEHOLDERS
ETHICS
How to communicate with nontechnical stakeholders
 March 11, 2022
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Last Updated on March 24, 2022 by Editorial Team
Author(s): Shanmukh Dara
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How to communicate with non-technical stakeholders – Towards AI
Communicating your ideas to a non-technical audience can be
really tricky. Whether it’s presenting to your non-tech team lead or
communicating via email. This skill of translating technical insights
into less jargon-filled, easily digestible nuggets is crucial for
everyone, but data scientists should practice this skill more
rigorously. Why? As data scientists, we frequently collaborate with a
wide range of non-technical audiences from diverse teams such as
finance, marketing, logistics, social media, and others, who are
responsible for deploying your insights into action. As a result, this
ability is extremely important to be a successful data scientist.
Over the course of nearly ten months working on a practicum
project as part of my MSBA program, I’ve learned a lot. I discovered
what differentiates a successful data science project from a failure.
Our project’s goal was to help a non-profit fin-tech company
achieve targeted marketing by utilizing machine learning and
advanced
data
science.
Our
day-to-day
work
involved
collaborating with non-technical marketing, sales, and customer
success management stakeholders. In this blog, I’ll share some of
the lessons I’ve learned from my project on how to communicate
technical concepts in a way that anyone can understand.
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How to communicate with non-technical stakeholders – Towards AI
“If you cannot explain something in simple
terms,
you
don’t
understand
it.” —
Richard Feynman
Simple things make up the world, and simple ideas make up
knowledge. As a result, any insights or ideas can be explained in a
clear and simple manner that everyone can understand. however,
this skill does not come naturally; it takes a lot of practice.
But why is mastering this skill so difficult? It’s mainly because it’s all
too easy for a speaker to lose his or her audience. This is usually due
to the presenter’s lack of skills, such as not making it easy for the
audience to understand. As a presenter, it’s your job to make your
talk interesting, to wow the audience, and to help you say what you
want to say in a clear and easy-to-understand manner.
Image Source 
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arecookies.
a few takeaways from my practicum experience:
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How to communicate with non-technical stakeholders – Towards AI
In Every presentation, I try to keep technical content to a bare
minimum and avoid assuming that my audience is familiar with the
topic I’m discussing. I try to get to know my audience before the
meeting so that I can direct my presentation in a direction that I
believe the audience will enjoy. The most important goal is to make
your presentation as relatable as possible. Let me use my
practicum project as an example. When I meet with the marketing
team, I’ll focus on the impact of these insights on the bottom line
and the time required. A meeting with the software team, on the
other hand, will focus on the efforts required from their end to
deploy these insights, as well as explain why this project is so
essential.
Photo by Lukas Blazek  on Unsplash 
People have short attention spans, so every aspect of my
presentation should be engaging and visually appealing to my
audience while remaining focused on the main topic.
Converting your insights into easily understandable visualizations is
one way to make the presentation more visually appealing.
However, not all visualizations are effective; they must be welldesigned. When presenting to my practicum partner, I use the
following key ideas:
It’s best to keep the visualization as simple as possible (you don’t want
to write an article on how to read it), and it should be self-explanatory.
Draw attention to the areas you want the audience to focus on
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Every
should include a call to action, as well as key
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How to communicate with non-technical stakeholders – Towards AI
Narrate a story
Photo by Nong V  on Unsplash 
A good story keeps people listening. Make an engaging story, and
your audience will be able to follow along with whatever technical
details you include. A good story is the result of a great narrative,
easily digestible visuals, and data insights.
Try to think of a story that everyone can relate to, and make sure
you speak in their language, i.e. turn analytics into actionable
insights. Below are a few guidelines that are necessary for an
engaging story:
Explain: a concise narrative that explains what is going on with the data
and why certain metrics are more important than others in terms of the
overall trend
Enlighten: by highlighting key patterns and trends in the visualizations,
you can draw the audience’s attention to important elements that
might otherwise go unnoticed.
Engage: Finally, by combining visuals and data insights with a
compelling narrative, you can create an engaging story that can be
easily understood by everyone
Is that all?
In addition to these, I enjoy using concrete anecdotes to explain
complex technical topics. For example, neural networks can be
explained using complex brain structures, with each aspect
explained to the best of the anecdote’s ability before returning to
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I try to put myself in the shoes of your target audience by following
the
above-mentioned
guidelines.
These
may
appear
straightforward, but give them a shot to see how effective they are.
Thanks for Reading!
Do
you
agree/disagree
with
me?
Let
me
know
in
the
stakeholders
was
comments below.
How
to
communicate
with
non-technical
originally published in Towards AI on Medium, where people are
continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this
story.
Published via Towards AI
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