How I rapidly improved my communications skills at a startup, and you can too

I'm an introvert through and through. I don't actively avoid confrontation or anything like that, I'm actually pretty confrontational where it counts, but I just never developed the right skills to really communicate at a high level. Working at a startup has made me painfully aware of that fact, not to mention working with people who are veterans and have improved their skills to a point where you think wow, maybe someday I'll get there.

And I can, I mean these aren't mythical skills that are reserved for the chosen few, they can be taught, they can be learned, and they can be perfected over time. How I approached this at the beginning was pretty straightforward, I dived in and made myself uncomfortable by taking on projects and tasks where I needed to interact with different team inside of the company. The best example I can think of that I'm currently working on is taking the lead of a user-facing web page where its sole purpose is to introduce the company to prospective candidates that we want to hire, hopefully capture their email, and even better get them to apply right then and there if they so choose.

Now I know what you're thinking, "Just build a landing page you dummy, what's so hard about that?", well you're right, but also wrong, let me explain. In order to get this page in the shape that it needs to be, it needs to look good, read well, work correctly, and give us back as much info as possible by way of event data to really get the most out of this page. The hard work that is going on behind this page make it imperative that I interact with our designers, product manager, marketing team, as well as fellow software engineers that help work on it.

When working on a project like this, stakeholders (parties with an interest in the project) need to be kept updated on status, current obstacles, and any relevant timelines for milestones. This has been one opportunity of hopefully many to really develop myself into at a solid communicator. Of course this one project wasn't going to turn me into a communications expert by any means, but it is a start. I've opened up communication channels with all stakeholders, created a central location so they could view the status along with any obstacles holding up progress, and I'm making sure sure to set a reminder semi weekly to update everyone on progress.

Projects evolve over time, everyone knows that, but keeping things manageable doesn't have to be hard, and proper communication is the catalyst that keeps everything moving. No communication, no progress.

Thanks for reading

P.S. I wrote a book! It's not just any book either, It’s the book I wish I would’ve had when I started my first software engineering job, seriously. Check it out!

(Cover Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com)