What methods do you use to alter your communication style effectively?

Question

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

During the post-RTL freeze stage, I had to present to the bug fix approval
committee about a critical bug found late in the process. The committee’s
decision would determine whether we proceed with an Engineering Change Order
(ECO), implement a software (SW) workaround, or explore other strategies—each
impacting the project schedule differently. Since the committee members had
varying levels of technical expertise, I needed to present the bug's impact,
root cause, and possible fixes in a way that both technical and non-technical
stakeholders could interpret to make an informed decision.
🔹 Engaged with Architects to understand the expected vs. actual behavior of the
system due to this bug.
🔹 Collaborated with SW teams to evaluate how their applications would interact
with the silicon and whether this bug could be avoided at the system level.
🔹 Explored a SW workaround—leveraging an existing register configuration to
bypass the issue—reducing the need for an ECO fix.
🔹 Presented a comparative analysis to the committee:
 * ECO fix: Required additional design effort and verification cycles, delaying
   the project.
 * SW workaround: A faster, low-risk solution with minimal validation overhead.

My SW workaround proposal was approved, preventing costly design changes.
🔹 This saved significant time for both Design and DV teams, allowing
verification to be completed quickly.
🔹 We added functional coverage to our regressions to ensure the bug scenario
remained tested.
🔹 Most importantly, effective communication across stakeholders enabled a
timely, well-informed decision, keeping the project on track.

Anonymous · Answer

Every situation demands a communication that fits the scenario. In my case, I
ran into a tricky situation of working with couple of users from Japan & Korea.
One of our epics in that quarter was to ingest their data into our database. A
constraint was that their team was brand new and we initially had some
communication problems with them. After my initial engagement with them, I
understood that they:
1. Lack a clarity on the data egress patterns from their sources. 
2. Unaware of how to provide a customised or static dataset.
3. Unclear on how quick they want this data to be available to all the users.
This made our leaders nervous about delivering this data ingestion. So I took
the below initiatives:
1. Approached data architects and proposed my solution to make sure I don't
deviate from org's data ingestion standards and practices.
2. Approached our principal engineers to determine if this is a sustainable
design and if it could be applied for similar requests in the future. After I
got their approval, I created a generic framework so that I can apply this
automation for other teams as well.
3. Conducted thorough testing in our QA environments, took the sing-offs from
our users and data analysts.

This helped me communicate with different teams, leaders, users, my own teams,
approach stake holders and all of these areas require a distinct communication
style and patterns. So it was a good learning opportunity for me to sharpen my
communication skills.

Anonymous · Answer

In my presales' role, I was often communicating to stakeholders presenting
automation solution concepts. One challenge involved unknown level of
stakeholder's technical understanding when there are new people brought to the
table in the specification process, for example for the first specification
meeting round. In this situation, I start my presentation with leading questions
specifically addressed to new members, such as: "what is your experience with
laboratory automation to date?", "are you familiar with the liquid level
detection techniques?" or "should I first introduce the recapping solutions
currently available in the market, or shall we jump to your system concept
directly?". I judge how much background do member of the team have and provide
detailed explanations where needed to understand the implications on the
automation system. This lead to engagement of the other parties and lies
foundation to successful work in an interdisciplinary team.

What methods do you use to alter your communication style effectively?

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