Moving beyond Buzzword Bingo
A guest contribution by Jeffrey A. McGuire
This article is reproduced with the kind permission of Open Strategy Partners GmbH and was originally published on 30th August 2021 on openstrategypartners.com.
The "Tech/Business Gap" happens because developers and business roles sometimes need help understanding each other. The resulting lack of empathy can lead to poor communication, creating a culture of mistrust, blame, and lack of respect. Signs that your company is experiencing this gap, people saying:
- "Developers and marketers don't speak the same language."
- "Marketing is always BS."
- "Our developers are out of touch with what our clients want."
- "Our marketers are out of touch with our technical reality."
Teams or individuals within an organization end up pulling in different directions—even when everyone believes they're working towards a common goal. Putting ourselves in our colleagues' shoes and practicing good communication builds trust and great teams and products, resulting in more vital and productive organizations.
We all have pressures, deadlines, needs, and priorities. Remembering to use empathy can be hard. It's even harder when we're in roles that have little to do with each other daily. Developer teams and marketing teams are classic examples of where poor communication and misunderstanding can lead to mistrust, blame, and mutual lack of respect. Despite everyone's best intentions, this prevents individuals, teams, and organizations from realizing a vision and delivering value to customers and stakeholders … no matter how brilliant the strategy or technology might be.
We founded OSP to help technology organizations communicate the value of what you do and connect you with the people who need to know about it.
May we help you?
There's a guide for that!
- The OSP Writing and Editing Guide is a comprehensive look at our approach to writing, including our processes, philosophy, and writing rules. We've collected and distilled all the information in it while producing, editing, and consuming writing over the years. At OSP, we refer to it daily and add to it frequently.
- Our better writing quick start guide helps you get up and running, improving your writing straight away.
- The OSP Writing and Editing Codes are our working system, distilling our writing principles into clear, actionable codes. Since we agree on how we want to write and work, these codes give us documented, non-emotional reference points to smooth our collaboration and improve our consistency.
- The OSP Content Writing Guide for Tech Products and Services: Last but not least, we have shared this guide to help you create compelling content based on the technical truth of your offerings. It is a detailed set of answers to the question, "How do we write better content for technology products?"
There's a workshop for that!
OSP can happily coach you and your teams, giving you the materials and tools to create authentic, authoritative content internally. We facilitate various practical workshops and content sprints and provide writer training. We can also offer ongoing editorial and other support to keep you on track :-)
Learn how to create trust-building content, telling the stories of your clients' successes thanks to your work, team, and technology.
- Case studies are vital content marketing assets for your technical B2B offering as a digital agency or B2B product company.
- Good case studies combine the facts and experiences of your offerings to tell the stories of your customer's success.
- For founders, agency leads, product leads, senior technical roles, and product marketers at digital agencies, SaaS software companies, open source projects, or startups.
- The silence of the blank page is daunting. Learn to trust process over creativity.
- For teams and individuals who have trouble finding time to produce the content they need. In a content sprint, we bring a group of people together to get work done in focused, facilitated sessions.
- You'll leave with ready-to-publish materials and a repeatable workflow.
- Writing and editing do not have to be black boxes. This workshop introduces you to the OSP writing toolset and teaches you how to create authentic, compelling content consistently. Learn how to improve your writing and help others with theirs.
- For teams who need to produce content that connects the value of what you do to your audience, new and experienced writers, and non-native English speakers will all learn something.
- You'll leave with ready-to-use templates tailored to your business.
Listen and learn
The OSP podcast, Communicate, Connect, Grow, can help you be a more effective writer and editor, develop clearer strategic thinking, and hear some of our smart friends and peers … being smart!
We have episodes in three broad categories:
- Communicate: All things communication. We share how we tackle writing, editing, word choices, formats, processes, and more.
- Connect: These episodes are in-depth conversations with interesting, smart people about who they are, what they do, and how they approach their life and work as communicators, technologists, and leaders.
- Grow: We cover strategic approaches to understanding and expressing the value of what you do, including tools, templates, and practical applications.
Subscribe now on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or the podcast channel of your choice!
Image Credits: Bull and cows photo by Jonas Koel on Unsplash, coy cow photo by Alberto Rudolphi on Unsplash