 All right. Are these on? Do it. Is that better? No? Yeah? Okay. If anybody has a hedgehog, by the way, please come see me afterwards. I'm trying to convince my husband right here to get me one for Christmas. And I could use the support. So if you have one and you love it, come find me. Anyways, we're going to be talking about communication today. I am attempting to communicate to a group about communication. So I hope you do give me some grace on this topic. This is my Twitter handle, my Instagram handle as well. If you want to mention me in any of your tweets today, or if you just want to check out what I find interesting enough to put on social media, that's where you can do it. I'm glad to be back in Birmingham for the weekend. I lived here six years during and after college. And then I moved with some stops in between to Chattanooga, Tennessee, with my husband. This is us on the Okowie River this summer. It's about an hour north of Chattanooga, and this part of the Okowie runs through the Olympic whitewater course. It's class four rapids, and the banks are absolutely lined with people that have cameras. They're not there to see how awesome you look. They're there to check out how awesome you look when you flip over. This is me up front that looks a little bit scared, but a little bit excited. And that's kind of me in a nutshell. I'm never sure quite which one to be. If you've never been whitewater rafting before, this is what happens. By day, I'm a digital project manager for Range, an agency that designs and develops custom WordPress websites. I get to work alongside a very talented team that serves a lot of cool clients. We've partnered with startups in Silicon Valley to global companies, to small nonprofits, to publishers. That kind of client diversity is really exciting, and it keeps us on our toes constantly. On this side, I also do some things like curate newsletters and facilitate community building for a co-working space. Up on the screen is one of the newsletters I help write every week. It's called Start in the South, and it's weekly bite-sized lessons on building tech startups outside of the usual hubs. I work with an app agency in Charleston to produce this one. It's a ton of fun to write and read, and if you're curious about signing up or checking it out, that's where you do it. All of this means that I deal with words and communication constantly, for up to 50 or 60 hours a week sometimes. I see a lot of great communication, but I also see a lot of really terrible, no-good communication. And what's been interesting to me, too, is that most of the project issues that we run into at my agency, they're not traced back to the design and development, not at their core. They're traced back to communication. There's been a development bug, sure, but the clients pissed not because there was a bug, but because we never told them that there could be bugs. And the color scheme has been not on point sometimes, but that's not the real issue. The real issue is that we didn't communicate with them well enough in Discovery to find out how they wanted to stand out and how they wanted to be different from their competitors. And it'd be one thing if bad communication just couldn't be helped. If it were like an unavoidable software bug that just came with the programming language you're using. But bad communication isn't like that. It's something you can help and you can improve with a little bit of knowledge no matter what your roller position is. And that's what I want to chat with you guys about today. I want to talk about how you can make some communication updates at the beginning, the middle, and the end of your projects to have happier clients, more referrals, and greater personal satisfaction with your projects. First, it's only fair that you know that I make a few assumptions about you. I'm assuming that if you're a jerk it's only by accident and that on the whole you're a relatively decent human being who cares about other human beings. I assume you care about any work or project that has your name on it and that you aim to do that thing well even if it requires a lot of work because working with words is work. And I assume that most of your communication about projects and with clients happens online just like mine does. I'm not going to talk to you a lot about in-personal communication or non-verbal cues. You can find a lot about that online. Most of what I address is going to be related to online. So let's start at the beginning of your projects. I'm going to skip over the proposal and the sales process. If you want some information on that, look up Melanie Adcockstock from this morning on Crafting the Perfect Proposal. She has a lot of great ideas in there. But we're going to start this week in glorious beginning after that. People have signed on. Everything is exciting. People are hopeful, stoked, and ready to chip in because we are doing things and it is awesome. And that momentum is a really good thing and I don't want you to kill it. Instead I want you to leverage that energy and that excitement to push for answers to questions you really need to know. Because what I've found is that what's obvious to them isn't obvious to you and vice versa. The client has really specific purposes for bringing their project to you and signing on with you and it's really important that you know what these are. You can dig through this in a formal discovery which is what we typically do at our agency or you can do it in an informal phone conversation but you're probably going to have to dig because the client is obvious to them and they're going to assume that a large part of it is obvious to you as well. So even if you think you know why start with why. Ask why you're doing it all of this because a big part of communication breakdown starts with assumptions and so test those right off the bat with the most important question of the project. You don't have to ask every version of why but you could. Asking the most important question multiple ways is a good way to dig for answers you need because what's obvious to them isn't obvious to you and this question is so important that the client knows in their head what success looks like even if they can't clearly articulate it in one or two questions they know at the end of the project what success is going to look like and you're going to have to get them to try and lay that out on the table for you. You need to know what success looks like to them so that you can have a good outcome have a happy client and get some good referrals. In addition to why we try and ask a lot of other questions. The one question I never skip is this first question. Because if they've never done a project like this before it means I need to take extra special care to explain things to them. They may not know that it's normal to have those bugs after launch or for us to seem a little quiet when we start developing because we're heads down doing what we've already agreed to do. They've never taken this kind of journey before so they need a really detailed map on how we're going to get to point A to point B because they're going to get more anxious often than someone who's done this before. And if they have done a website redesign project they probably had some kind of memorable experience and it probably wasn't a good one. If a client tells me that the last group totally botched designs or the sign up page I know they're going to be really skittish about those pieces this time around and I need to be extra compassionate when we hit those parts. Without that kind of context a client can seem unreasonably neurotic or fixated on certain pages or certain pieces. Knowing their context helps us guide a project with compassion, kindness and efficiency. The last question is similarly helpful. I found it extremely important to ask this question early on. For some people it's the home page for some publishers we work with is the article page. But knowing what page impacts their bottom line or is most important to them that helps you plan ahead because that's the page that they're going to spend talking about, they're going to ask for the most revisions for and it's going to cause them the most anxiety. Now if these questions give you no other information they're going to give you what I call and what some copywriters refer to as the voice of customer data. This is in this context insight into the client's tone their level of formality the vocabulary they use to describe certain things and other qualitative aspects. It means you can speak their language and that's really important. When you communicate the other party has to understand you and not just hear you and to order to help them understand you you have to know how they speak and you have to be able to speak that language. For example depending on your client both of these could be right or wrong ways to talk to them and I've sent similar emails of each tone to our clients. Some clients view the first option as really friendly and personable and they get excited to get that kind of email from you. This is professional and intrusive. Likewise clients can see the second option as professionally to the point and respectful of their time. Other clients can see it as standoffish and robotic. If you spend time interacting with and talking with your client gathering that voice of customer data you're going to know which tone is appropriate. Once you're getting a feel for who the client is you also want to give them some directions on how you work matters because if you don't define the route that you're going to take from point A to point B they're going to define it for you and they're probably going to take some detours and shortcuts that you don't want to take. You've heard the phrase nature appores a vacuum clients appore them too and when it comes to thinking about expectations, setting expectations I like to think about eating in a restaurant so if you show up at the host ask and they say it's going to be a 30 minute wait and then once you're seated it'll be about another 45 minute wait for your food and you'll be ready to kitchen a short staffed. If you really want to eat there you'll be okay with that and you'll be content with the wait times and you'll be fine that your food is taking a while but if they hadn't told you any of that and you unexpectedly waited for nearly half an hour and then you waited another nearly full hour for your food you'd barely be able to taste it you were so bitterly angry that's a really small but relatable example of how expectations can help you or hurt you depending on what you set them so I recommend you set expectations in these following areas or things could get really off track for the first one I usually say something about what time zone I'm in what times I'm most available and what method of communication will get them to me and my team the fastest for me that's 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. eastern time in our project management app teamwork I also clarify that our projects aren't a choose your own adventure kind of thing we have a beginning we have some milestones in between there's some creative flexibility but it has some very well defined steps and deliverables and if you clarify nothing else clarify what you aren't building it is much better to do this at the beginning than the middle or the end of your project some of the things we try and clarify at the agency are what's totally custom first what's an existing software or plugin if it's completely custom we're going to have a lot more control over it if it's an existing software we're going to have a wide range of things to people for some people it means colors to others it means fonts to some people it means full on graphic illustrations what we're doing in each project is usually not all three in fact it's usually just the first two and we have experienced issues before where we get we deliver a design that is in fact beautiful and it's exactly what we agreed on but it's disappointing the client because they thought design means something it doesn't so if nothing else clarify it doesn't mean in your proposal and keep in mind that according to normal isn't normal according to plan it's normal normal is changes, out of scope requests developers getting migraines designers having vacations and you having an off day that's why it's important to remember what you'll do when those things happen when things go astray because normal is things going off the rails for us this means explaining a change order so a change order for us is when we get halfway through the project and the client decides they want another design revision they want to add a whole another functionality or they want to do something else you can't tell them no you can't tell them to bump it to face to you a lot of times we end up doing a change order this is a snapshot of the heart of our change order the only thing you're not seeing from our template is the header, the legal byline and the signature area I try and make it painfully clear what is happening they put their name and signature on this so that they agree to this as well they know exactly the impact on the timeline, the cost and other project elements and what could go wrong now some of this can sound stiff controlling or micromanaging but the goal is really to self healthy boundaries and to find helpful context you're helping the client understand what can and should happen first what doesn't and shouldn't happen so that you both can keep moving in the right direction together you're helping both parties so that your communication is smoothly as possible and that helps your business if you want any even more information on discovery and kickoffs this is truly my favorite part of every project so come find me afterwards so we can chat more about it so the middle of the project compared to the excitement at the beginning and the frantic pace of launch at the end the middle can kind of feel like a slog I mean you have this dip of energy you have your highs and lows but it feels more like a steady jog than anything else for most of us but I don't want you to let a dip in excitement I mean to drop off in your communication what you do in the middle is just as important as the beginning and the end too so something I'm a huge advocate of is sending a weekly update every week and this relates back to what's obvious to them is an obvious to you and what's obvious to you is an obvious to them even if things are barely moving send the client a weekly update let them know what's happened what's going to happen anything even remotely important depending on your week these could be really short or really long but keep sending them you're busy so a template can really help you this is my standard weekly template to send to our clients I've sent this template from everything to small nonprofits to corporate enterprise projects if your customer is more formal you might need to tweak the language if there's a specific bugger issue you're tracking you need to add a section on that but clarity is the key here and that's what's driven my language choice for this template you're not trying to impress them with a layout you're not trying to impress them with your intelligence or your vocabulary if they notice any of those things you're probably a little off track you're trying to clearly respectfully tell them exactly what's going on and make it as easy to digest as possible especially if you need to answer a question I normally send these every single Friday but I recommend you check with your client and see if they prefer another day maybe Monday is really when they get organized and this would be helpful then or maybe Wednesday they meet with their team ask them, ask them what day a weekly update would be most helpful the important thing truly is that you keep sending me so my favorite way to think about it is this have you ever tried to turn a car while it's parked the cans on the steering wheel try to turn the wheels while it's parked it's extremely hard for you to do some action turning the wheel on the tires is when you're already moving with a fifth of the effort you can change lanes and a similar concept applies to projects if a project halts it's going to take a lot of energy to redirect it or kickstart it back to life but if it stays in motion even just a little bit it's going to be so much easier to make adjustments in progress so keep it moving now most of your communication is going to happen in emails so I want to help you un-suck any sucky emails you've sent recently you don't have to be a people person an empath or a wordsmith to write good emails my boss and designer writes good emails our developer writes good emails you can be in any role to do this you mostly just have to slow down and care about the other person to write a good email with all of your emails you want to go through these five pieces of communication and a lot of times our emails get stuck at one or another point a wifi issue can prevent the message from being received or the words you use can prevent the receiver from understanding it or maybe the idea you've sent you've sent is preposterous or the receiver has a different opinion than you and you fail to reach an agreement and often times we bury the necessary action we're not bold enough to ask directly for it or the action requires too many steps or any number of things when any of those failure points happen you don't have effective communication to un-suck your emails you've got to figure out how to move through all of these pieces so for the next week or month I want you to keep the following rules which are really more like guidelines in mind for your emails when you go to craft an email make sure you have a reason that sounds obvious but sometimes we feel the need to be productive and so we just send an email for the heck of it I've done it make sure you have a reason to send an email keep it really simple ask yourself what am I trying to say and then importantly go back and see if you've said it that's the number one thing I do when I'm writing and when I'm editing what are you trying to say and have you said it keep it focused on one specific action or question as best you can we know this works from our experience with CTAs drip campaigns and purchase pages but we don't always apply to emails I think too often we'll address an email to 20 people or 5 people and we'll put about 20 different questions as often as you can and whenever you can get away with it send one focused email with one specific question to one person emphasize important information you can highlight it, bold it, use emojis whatever works with your client but find some way to make important points in your email stand out don't do this for every email but if the email needs attention make sure it gets a detention if Jimmy needs to respond to a question put that in bold for him so that he doesn't miss it in the email and then enable undo send if you've never done this in gmail it's such a lifesaver the only button you should be quick to hit in your email inbox is delete enable gmail's undo send for those moments you realize I shouldn't have said that I was angry when I wrote that or someone just answered that question and if you need help keeping your emails my husband is a brilliant math guy a wonderful people person and a really terrible emailer he used to be anyways until I introduced him to this one evening he came home very frustrated with the corporate atmosphere he works in and the nonsensical emails he would received and they were truly nonsensical so I introduced him to him this to him to help him focus and simplify his email writing now if you put a bad set of words into here it's going to light up like a Christmas tree that's not really what you're looking for it's going to call attention to your adverbs your passive voice and your complicated sentences none of those things are evil or necessarily bad in their own right but they're going to work against you when you're trying to get a response to your email what you're looking for is something closer to this you want easy to read easy to digest low as possible grade level research has shown somewhere around the second or third grade level is what people respond to you so again your goal is not to impress them with your vocabulary your goal is to make sure they understand it so there's some really great examples from the VP of design at Facebook she has some brilliant thoughts on management and work and she wrote an amazing article called escaping email help so here's one example that she's given in this example she takes a 52 word very squishy response and condenses it to a 9 word straightforward answer so at this point you may be noticing a trend to unsuck your emails is to shorten them this is a similar example where she takes 68 words to 18 words and there's a lot less suck in here it's also, and this is what I love about it it's more respectful of the other party's time and interest quite frankly most of the time our clients don't care a whole bunch about our logistics and our rabbit holes they care about what you need from them and what you expect them to do and what they need to do is they're willing, has their own time constraints and interests and that's one way you can be kind to them by the way something else you can do to unsuck your emails overall is to make a template stash you can do this in Gmail by going to settings, lab canned responses and so if that's something that would save you a lot of time take one day this month type up frequent responses that you have thank yous, follow ups, apologies other common emails that you need to make a good email and this is really in here because it's a pet peeve of mine for the love of all that is good if you were sending an email to your client take an extra 30 seconds to remind yourself where they are then communicate any times, especially meeting times in their time zones not some weird standard you think should be a standard not your time zone communicate the time in their time zone because most of the time they're skimming they're busy, they're going to read their context into your email and save the client some embarrassment by putting the meeting time in their time zone time zones are hard we have people from California to the Netherlands I get this so use everytimezone.com if you've never used it before it's damn near magic and it will help you with time zones so at some point in the middle of the project you're going to have to give feedback on something it may be design it might be the overall direction of the project it might be an idea or development and when that happens you want to keep a couple things in mind have you ever given a received feedback that follows the formula here's something you did great here's something you kind of sucked at here's something you did great Claire Lou at Know Your Company calls these shit sandwiches and I used to really love this format of giving feedback but she kind of opened my eyes to why they're not ideal people really pick and choose what they want to hear from that so depending on who you're talking to they say I suck at life or I'm the most awesome person you've ever worked with and it's also because people know about this technique so if you frequently give it in this manner it's going to feel really disingenuous and it's not going to accomplish your point and I thought this was particularly enlightening shit sandwiches are usually a whole lot about making you comfortable than it is about making the other person comfortable receiving your feedback so next time you think about using this method ask yourself if it's really the best framework she has some tips on what to do instead based on her years of talking with CEOs and employees and she recommends that instead of delivering a shit sandwich you come from a place of care from a place of observation that you would make your fallibility in giving the feedback and that you come from a place of curiosity some ways this can look in your project is making your intentions crystal clear frame up your feedback around a shared goal or another person's success ideally this is actually the reason you're giving the feedback to begin with not everyone is jumping at the gun to hear criticism most people don't want to hear it at all so framing up your feedback around a shared goal or this success is one way you can make your criticism much easier to take and more effective it becomes obvious that you're not coming from a place of malice or taking a bad day out on them you really want to help either the project or them be the best possible something else you want to do especially with clients is keep it a conversation deliver your feedback but then ask questions like what do you think what's your perspective or my personal favorite do you think this moves us closer to the goals you've already told me you have that's a humble and caring way you can solicit the other party's feedback and work together towards a better result something else you're going to have to do at some point in a project is apologize despite how good you are at your job you're probably going to mess something up or your team's going to mess something up you'll get sleep deprived or you'll move too fast and break something or you'll just have an off day when you do screw something up it's important that you know how to effectively apologize so that both parties can move forward without the weight of shame frustration or bitterness dragging the project down so these five elements of an effective apology are taken from HelpScout one of the best customer support platforms out there from the sheer number of volume of tickets they deal with one thing or two about messing up and owning their mistakes they say genuinely be sorry make sure you validate that your customer's frustration is legitimate explain what happened admit that you did actually make a mistake believe it or not you can very you can apologize your heart out and not actually say you were wrong and explain what you'll do differently help them understand that you're going to try and be better some things you don't want to do is up here none of these actions will benefit you they'll not only crush your apology they'll make it even harder to communicate for a while perhaps even for the rest of the project most of the time your client just wants to hear that you messed up that they're valid and being frustrated and that you have a prevention strategy moving forward if you give an effective apology it's amazing what you can recover from when you make a mistake so here's an example that I typed up you can find a ton of examples online but this is one example of how you can be clear and straightforward without over apologizing telling them what happened why it happened what you're going to do about it be as genuine as you can don't totally break from all the other emails you've sent them and then move on now if you work with a team there are some things you're going to want to do internally as well I recommend that you send weekly updates to your team just like you send weekly updates to your client it sets clear expectations for the week it gives your team a chance to raise red flags it provides an opportunity to course correct I do this on Monday in our Slack every week depending on the season or part of project you might want to consider a daily stand up or a more frequent update whatever you do facilitate some form of regular check in and keep lines wide open for feedback and conversation here's an example of the kind of update you can give if you're heading up a project or a piece of a project you can say it a lot of different ways but the ingredients basically are what specific items you need when the specific items are due and who you need those items from and then give your team an opportunity to respond to that let you know if you're right if you're working on a piece instead you'll want to send an update more along those lines even if your team or project leader doesn't ask for one do it anyways they'll probably love you for it and they'll be relentless for this one too specify what items you're working on when you'll be working on them when you'll be done working on them and how your team can help you and then I think this is most important every week with every teammate try and make time to talk to them this is harder than it sounds I'm a type A person I get caught up into due list in what I have to get done this week and I can forget to talk to the people in front of me but make time to talk to them you don't have to be in leadership or managing the project to do this you can actually learn quite a bit about your boss and how they're going to respond to things this week by asking them these same questions it's tough but try and remember to do it set yourself a recurring task if you have to note the highlighted words specific in the second question it's not bad to ask general questions but general questions get general answers and so if you can suggest a specific way you can help that'll usually jump start the other person thinking that you actually can do whether or not your suggestion was right and the last question it's extremely important if someone's buying a house starting a new travel season with the kids getting married going through a divorce in a period of grieving these are all factors that whether you like it or not are going to bleed into your project people are not as neatly segmented as we want them to be and so remember that your teammate's life provides context for their work as well if someone's not intrusive ask them how they are and ask it often so now we've reached the end of the project for us that's normally the one to three weeks before launch and then one to two weeks after launch depending on the size of your project there's a lot of exciting energy here but a lot of anxiety to you there's a big opportunity for your communication to facilitate good energy and alleviate bad anxiety there's this thing in psychology called the peak end rule it theorizes that the peak in the end of things is something people remember more clearly than any other part for us with our mortgage that means I really remember the end and how stressful and uncertain it was I didn't know if we would close in time I didn't know if the loan would be ready or if there's anything else we could or should do the idea of making another mortgage loan application makes me want to break out in hives the silence and lack of direction sucked don't have that kind of end of project for your client because that's what they're going to remember when they think of your project we've covered so far the weekly updates, the clear emails the voice of customer data that matters here too don't drop that off but there's some other things you're going to want to do as well you're going to want to make more frequent updates the closer you get to launch and the wrap up of your project you're going to want to send them more information they're going to get a little bit more restless a little bit more anxious help alleviate that if your agency or business emphasizes transparency there's a lackluster to do with the clients for some clients that could be an incredibly reassuring way for them to follow alongside of you for others it could turn them into micromanaging monsters so definitely take that with a grain of salt in particular I found that a few days before launch is a really good time to give a granular roadmap of what's going to happen the day before the day of and afterwards that way they can go ahead and ask questions about it they can set their team schedules around it and they can know what's going to happen for example many non-technical clients of ours have never heard of a propagation period that can be anywhere from a few hours to a 72 hour delay when you make a name server change if the client isn't tech oriented and hasn't heard of this that can be really jarring to figure out that when you launch they may not see it live for a while that's especially frustrating if they're ramping up social media or making announcements to correspond with the site launch so tell them this ahead of time again your goal is to be kind and knowledgeable in your communications know what's happening in your clients world and help them achieve their success because that helps you find more business and gain more referrals in the long term something else to advocate or end up project surveys both for you and with your clients your goal here is to break out of what Claire Lou calls the good news cocoon where you're wrapped up in all the warm fuzzies of what went great without any knowledge of how you can improve so this is some screenshots of our client survey template I am not an expert in surveys I think somebody next door might be so if you want even more tips on this I'd recommend you look up their talk later so this is what I send out to our clients I ask them how satisfied they are with the product and if it's similar to what they envisioned if they're satisfied with our process or if there's anything that we can do to improve that honestly it is intimidating to send this to our clients and sometimes I don't really want to it can be very scary to open up that door to hear what you might have done wrong but few things will help you improve all across the board than hearing back I also specifically asked them about communication how our frequency tone and helpfulness was if there's anything else that they wish we had done different if there's anything we totally admitted and kept them in the dark about and then I like ending by asking what their favorite moment of the project was full disclosure I try and prep them on a high note before I ask if we can have a testimonial about how awesome we were and then I also send a survey to our team to me this is much less intimidating I really trust my team I've worked with them for about three plus years now so it's not as scary to me to receive feedback from them if you've never done this before I really recommend you give it a shot see how it goes we don't always come away with these mind-blowingly brilliant ideas but the conversation is usually rich if you're a boss or a manager this first portion is really important fear is one of the main reasons people don't speak up especially to someone who's employing them so make it crystal clear that there's not a penalty for honest feedback and that's exactly what you're looking for I also like to set the tone of these meetings by clarifying that it's not a blame game this isn't your opportunity to throw your co-worker under the bus by pointing out that his bug was really why things went wrong the goal of this is to talk about what we can do better and how we can all get better at the projects together so typically I'll fill this out beforehand and then schedule a meeting with our team I like to provide them with a little bit of honest feedback that they can play off of before entering their own notes it just helps keep things moving so I'll go back and look at the goals that we discussed in Discovery and that we identified with the clients and then I'll take a hard look about whether we actually achieved them and then this part I found is the hardest part to be honest about with yourself when you go through you want to say you hit your timeline you want to say you didn't way over budget your hours you want to say the client is satisfied but that's not always the case take a hard look at these see what you expected see what actually happened and then make notes about why and then I typically leave them most time for this part of the conversation this is when our team really digs in and I found that if you can make these simple questions very specific to your team it's going to be much richer again vague questions are going to give you vague responses but specific questions are more likely to get you specific feedback and improvements and then another big reason people actually don't speak up is because they feel that giving honest feedback within a team is futile they feel like if they tell you something you did wrong or something the project could have done better on they feel like that won't get them anywhere that there's no point in speaking up at all so again especially if you're a manager in leadership this is where you get to demonstrate that feedback isn't futile on your team you get to show them what you're going to do as an immediate short term and long term take away that could be things you're going to change or it could be things you're going to keep doing that you did really well and one hack that I really like if you have trouble getting some feedback from your team ask for advice instead people tend to feel a little bit more comfortable giving advice than constructive feedback so see if they'll give you some ideas on how you can improve now some of you knew that stuff so I'm going to give you three ways that you can level up if you want to get even better at project communications here's what you can do if you have a choice work on other projects with good communicators you'll notice things they do well that they blow out of the park that you can steal for your own projects for example one of our developers Kyle he has a much longer fuse than I do so with difficult and frustrating projects and clients Kyle is very consistently clear and kind in his emails and his emails have helped me become more that way too if you work primarily on your own you don't have this option but you can fill your inbox with good communicators instead these four are the people I get really excited to see in my inbox they're not only brilliant they're brilliant at communicating very complex ideas in a way that you'll understand the first guy he's an analytics genius I am probably one of the worst people in this room at math I understand almost every email he sends me look these people up see if you can get on their newsletter and learn from the way they communicate and look at other industries project communication and communication isn't a new thing not by a long shot people have been trying to figure out how to communicate important information for a long time in places like the military, rescue operations, aviation and medicine there's some things you can learn from those this is actually my favorite cross-discipline application it's a nursing framework that nurses use to relay critical information up the command chain I see a ton of application ideas for this in web development especially in critical scenarios where you need to immediately relay a bug to another developer or to the lead developer and then help them achieve a solution quickly so that wraps up my talk that takes you through the beginning, the middle, the end and some things you can do to level up here are links to some things I mentioned to to people smarter than me who have done this for decades I'd recommend you take a look at those and specifically at the communicators at the end there I will find a way to put them online and I will tweet them so if you go to my Twitter if you follow me on Twitter, Lara, eBosco I'll put them up online and tweet out a link to it the talk will also be available when we're press TV at some point and you'll be able to look it up there