How to Communicate Technical Decisions to Non-Technical Stakeholders
I spent the first years of my career working in e-commerce consulting, and during that time I accidentally developed a penchant for explaining things in analogies. I'd love to say this was a skill that came naturally, but it was actually developed slowly and painfully.
As software developers, we often get communication wrong. Instead of focusing on clear messaging, we tend to take it as an opportunity to show off our technical knowledge. The reality is that my stakeholders and clients didn't care about the technical details of caching Magento or the nitty-gritty details about scaling servers for Black Friday—they really cared about the impact to their business and the outcomes.
Every technical leader faces this challenge at some point: How do you translate complex technical realities into business language that helps drive good decisions? And this is where lots of people make a critical mistake—it's not about dumbing things down. It's about connecting the dots between technology and business outcomes.
The Core Problem
Good and effective communication matters more than most people think. It can affect your career progression, lead the business to prioritize the wrong things and misallocate resources, make teams suffer, and trust me—nothing, and I mean nothing, kills your influence and credibility faster than confusing explanations.
There are a few common mistakes that most technical leaders fall prey to (I certainly have):
The Technical Deep Dive: Explaining in detail the how instead of the why. This turns meetings into lectures, causing non-technical stakeholders to disengage because they're lost in implementation details that don't directly impact their decision-making.
The Assumption Trap: Assuming a business requirement or context that doesn't really exist. When we make unvalidated assumptions about business priorities, we risk solving imaginary problems or missing critical business constraints, leading to wasted time and resources.
The Binary Choice: Presenting technical decisions as all-or-nothing. Framing choices this way often forces stakeholders into unnecessary conflict, limiting creative solutions and collaborative decision-making that could uncover better compromises.
The Urgency Without Context: "We need to do this NOW" without explaining business consequences and impact. Constantly sounding alarms without clearly connecting urgency to specific business risks erodes trust, making stakeholders skeptical when genuine emergencies arise.
I made all of these mistakes, often more than once, and they cost me deeply—delayed promotions, projects getting canceled, and business decisions that eventually turned into painful layoffs.
The Framework That Actually Works
After years of making these mistakes, I've organically created a framework that I use for communicating and, more importantly, framing the problem so the business and relevant stakeholders can understand it. This is not some revolutionary framework or a big secret—rather, it's a very simple way to structure a technical conversation into three key elements:
Step 1: Start with Business Risk
What happens if we don't address this?
What's the cost of inaction?
What business outcomes are at stake?
Step 2: Connect to Business Outcomes
How does this technical decision drive revenue, reduce costs, or mitigate risk?
What metrics will change?
What business capabilities does this enable or protect?
Step 3: Present Options, Not Solutions
The outcomes we are trying to achieve
The realistic options available to get us there
The "Risk-Outcome-Options" model is simple to put into practice and, if done correctly, should save you many painful meetings and arguments. Let's take a look at an example:
Scenario: The team is dealing with years of technical debt and underinvestment in part of the system. At the time, there was a lot of pressure on this part of the product to deliver more features.
Wrong way: "Our code is a mess and we need to refactor"
Right way:
Business Risk: Maintaining and making changes to this system is becoming increasingly slow and unreliable. We can't commit to the existing product roadmap, and more concerning, customers are losing confidence and churning.
Business Outcomes: The increasing instability of the system, the slowness, and the uptick in churn will affect our growth and revenue targets at the end of the year.
Options: We have three options for handling this:
Option 1: Do nothing, but we will continue to see system instability, churn, and slow development lifecycles.
Option 2: Quick fixes while we continue prioritizing customer requests and product features—we're shifting technical debt around and not really addressing the core issues.
Option 3: Aggressive prioritization of tech debt for all of Q1. We will not work on any features for the entire quarter. While short-term this might slow the roadmap, it positions us for faster and more reliable development for the remainder of the year.
What Not to Do
This section alone could probably be its own article about what not to do when communicating to stakeholders, but for the sake of brevity, I'll include four pitfalls that I've seen people make time and time again.
Don't Oversimplify to the Point of Inaccuracy: Oversimplifying a problem can lead to setting the wrong expectations and burning your credibility when things eventually take longer or are more difficult than anticipated.
Don't Use Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD): Saying "the system will explode" doesn't help anyone make good decisions. Specific, quantified risks do.
Don't Present Technical Decisions as Foregone Conclusions: We are software developers—solving is a big part of what we do, and there's a natural inclination to go in that direction. But it's harder for people to buy into a solution if they haven't really bought into the problem first.
Don't Assume They Don't Want to Understand: Some of the best technical conversations I've had were with non-technical executives who asked really smart questions once they understood the business context.
Analogies Are Powerful (Use Them Carefully)
As I mentioned at the beginning, I learned that analogies can be powerful, but they can also backfire. Comparing our architecture to building construction works great with some people and completely confuses others. The key is to know your audience and try to find a domain that they have a lot of context in to draw analogies from.
That said, there are a few common analogies that map almost universally to tech topics:
Technical debt = financial debt (interest payments, credit card debt, compound effects)
System architecture = city planning (house/building foundations, infrastructure needs to support growth)
Security measures = insurance (cost of protection vs. cost of incident)
Conclusion
The best technical leaders I know aren't necessarily the smartest engineers—they're the ones who can connect technical reality to business outcomes. They help their organizations make better decisions, not just implement better solutions.
This skill isn't optional if you want to grow as a leader. It's the difference between being seen as a cost center and being seen as a strategic partner.
If you want to put this into practice, start with your next technical recommendation: Before you explain how it works, explain why it matters to the business. You'll be surprised how much more engaged your stakeholders become when they understand what's really at stake.