Leveraging abstraction
How abstraction can improve communication, efficiency and trust across technical and non-technical stakeholders.
As product managers, engaging stakeholders with a coherent narrative across technical and non-technical detail is our bread and butter. Yet, often communication breaks down because technical and non, or less-technical people are unable to get on the same page.
It can feel like we need to translate, changing the form of the message or idea to equip less technical people to sit at the table. But if I’m not an engineer, I won’t understand it like an engineer. That’s okay.
Rather than change the form of the message or idea, instead we can be more discerning about the detail we include. We can abstract.
The task isn’t to get someone to understand all the detail of your domain, but for you to understand the level of detail they, and the task need, and to meet them there.
What do I mean by this? Here’s an example:
Hearts on a scale
Here are six different representations of a heart on a scale of abstraction, with 0 representing an actual heart, 1 being little abstraction and 5 being a very coarse abstraction. They all communicate different levels of detail, useful in different contexts.
Let’s consider two different people who are working with hearts.
A heart surgeon: They need to know every detail about the real thing, with no gap between their understanding and reality. There is no room for abstraction - a heart symbol is no help in surgery.
A primary school teacher: They may be teaching kids about their bodies. Small children may only need to understand the concept of a heart, where a coarse abstraction is enough. A technical heart diagram is too much detail for a 6 year old.
Surgeon, meet teacher
One day the teacher learns they need heart surgery. Now the teacher and the heart surgeon need to talk, but both the heart shape and the technical diagram are useless.
Enter, abstraction.
The teacher needs enough of a concrete understanding to be informed about their medical decisions, and the surgeon needs enough abstraction to effectively explain the procedure.
On this scale, maybe abstraction no. 3 addresses both needs.
Now they can talk.
Why is this important?
This happens a lot in tech. We have engineers speaking about a technical problem at a level one abstraction, marketing trying to sell the solution at levels 4 and 5 and everyone from legal, design, security, product and docs teams in between.
The surgeon and teacher example demonstrates how abstraction helps build understanding and dialogue between technical and non-technical stakeholders. But, it’s about more than that.
1. Trust
Beyond just understanding each other, this is about building trust. The technical expert needs their stakeholder to understand them, but that stakeholder also needs to trust the expert to endorse their direction.
Providing a non or less-technical stakeholder information at a level that is meaningful to them is an act of empathy. It demonstrates an appreciation for their perspective; that you can anticipate their needs, and will be a safe pair of hands to help them navigate a decision where they are not the expert. This is how we build trust.
2. Relevance and efficiency
Abstraction can also help us with relevance and efficiency. Not everyone needs to know which logo variants can be used on mobile. Especially in cross-disciplinary teams, we don’t all have the time, skill or incentive to understand it all.
To work effectively in such teams, identifying the relevant level of abstraction for communicating and building a shared mental model is about efficiency. A shared mental model across a team with a range of different technical knowledge is enormously effective in speeding up collaboration and decision making. It can act as an artefact around which coalitions are built.
3. Levels of analysis
This final point is critically important: abstraction lets you work at the right level of analysis. Teams with no agility around abstraction literally do not have the shared vocabulary or ways of thinking to collaborate on decision making.
You cannot make a business case for strategic re-platforming if your only language is about JSON payloads, Kafka events or Ruby gems.
Equally, you cannot scope strategic re-platforming if your only language is ‘the tech stack’ or ‘the service’.
Without the ability to work at the right level of analysis, either important context or stakeholders get left behind and poor decisions are made as a result.
A note on accuracy
Inherent in abstraction, is losing detail. This is not to be confused with losing accuracy. A good abstraction retains and is organised around the core tenants of the idea. It removes as much detail as is possible, allowing you to pivot around what is solely necessary for the given task. This forces clear eyed and disciplined thinking.
A famous example is Picasso’s lithograph of a bull:
In every frame, at each level of abstraction, we have a bull. (Apple have famously used this to drive innovation, with their ‘1000 no’s for every yes’ philosophy - you can read more here).
Visual representations are excellent for distilling abstractions. They communicate patterns and relationships such as hierarchy, scale and importance far more efficiently than words. Examples include images, diagrams, graphs, concept maps and decision trees.
It is important to identify the right amount of detail to remove, that enhances communication without degrading accuracy.
Final tips
When using abstraction to bridge the communication gap between technical and non-technical stakeholders, here are a few steps to help with your approach:
Think about the task. What level of analysis - or how much of a detailed understanding, does the task require?
Think about your stakeholders. Who do you need involved? What level of detailed understanding are they bringing to the table?
Think about the middle ground. What is the goldilocks level of abstraction, that meets the needs of both the task and the stakeholders?
Think about the form. Could a visual representation help communicate or represent your abstraction?
That’s it!
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