Can you describe how you convey complex engineering ideas to non-technical team members in a clear and concise way?

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Anonymous · Accepted Answer

The most important tenet is to understand the needs of the audience. For
example, I recently partnered with the Product team to improve the elastic
cluster experience to support bursts in traffic of up to 10x past peaks as
opposed to 4x that it was. The Elastic team had broken down the ask into
engineering requirements and came to the backend with the need to improve the
rate of resizing by 30% in the short term and 4x in the long term along side
asks to increase our baseline capacity footprint by ~2.5x worldwide. They'd also
taken on significant scaling projects on their Elastic Workflow Engine and had
finally given Product a 9-month roadmap before feature launch. When I looked at
the problem statement I saw a path to providing this feature trivially to the
customer as long as we're able to charge them differently for 10x support
instead of 4x: instead of having Elastic resources to be twice as big as their
peak load, make them 5 times as big from the get go and pass along the extra
cost to the customer. We can do this with fairly straightforward tweaks to the
Elastic engine and doesn't involve any work on the backend. The Elastic team EM
and Staff engineers had suggested the "right", "most efficient" solution to
Product. This allowed incremental delivery, tune-ability (3x, 4x, 5x support)
etc. But, Product was interested in ensuring key customers don't walk away from
Elastic clusters today. These customers didn't expect to pay the same amount for
the increasing performance. Explaining the constraints of the system and the
factors that played into cost modeling in simple terms allowed us to favor my
proposal. The project was delivered within 30 days of the pivot in private beta
and in 2 months it was available worldwide behind an allowlist.

Can you describe how you convey complex engineering ideas to non-technical team members in a clear and concise way?

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