Communicating with The Tech Team


1.Bridging the gap: When communicating with the tech team, be prepared to have painful miscommunications.

In order to minimise miscoummunications, we must be very clear, down to the last letter. I've discovered that in working together, there are many states of mind that we can be in. To make it easy, I think of them in quadrants:

i.Quadrant 1: Things they see and we don't - what is achievable through code or development.

ii.Quadrant 2: Things we see and they don't- what we anticipate the milestone should achieve, how it applies to the use case, and its importance. Because we are the subject matter expert, this is much clearer to us as we can see where the pain points are what are our solutions.

Example: When producing the transcription and linking it to the LLM produced documents, it was imporant to highlight or link the sentences in the documents to the parts in the transcript from which it was derived from to verify whether the generated senteced was not a hallucination. Importantly, it was important to highlight (in our case, with a slightly lighter shade) the lines above and below the main highlighted line in the referenced transcript, as reading a single line in the transcript can be meaningless without the context of the few lines above and below it. This had to be explained clearly to the technical team as they had to understand the purpose of creating the reference and how a user would read it.

iii.Quadrant 3: Things we both don't see. This is where we both learn.These are the things that will be discovered as the product is being used and with increasing time.

Example: Feedback from customers or information gathered generally during development including updates and IT advances.

iv.Quadrant 4:Things we both can see. This is where we aim to stay. It should NOT be the place we should be in all the time. Rather, this is the place where we cruise. But a ride needs to have turns and bumps in order to learn how to drive the car porperly. We must learn.

Dealing with Investors

2.Investors are fickle: Never take their word at face value. They are not sure about it themselves.

Most investors have the fear of missing out. Their motivations are varied. In a VC, if they are general partners, then they have a responsibility to their LP's. They can't miss a good opportunity but at the same time they can't miss a good investment.

    1. We must anticipate the edge cases to the best of our knowledge. For example, when developing the visualisation of recordings, we had to add the times. Without the timer, when the recording stops, there was no indicator whether there has been any recording or not. Adding the timer allows us to do this.
    2. We must anticipiate future developements and setup misletones so they are in the right position to be developed further.
    3. We must always link features to the use case.
      Example: During consulations, some parts can be recorded ambiently from the conversations