“Soft skills are always going to be those ladders for you to climb in your career, whereas your tech skills can turn into snakes, meaning you’ve got to start again with another skill."

Jacqui Read, author of “Communication Patterns,” joins in this episode to discuss why strong communication skills are crucial for developers and technical leaders, often surpassing the importance of merely technical expertise. We delve into four key communication areas: visual communication, multimodal communication, communicating knowledge, and communicating remotely. During the discussion, Jacqui suggests several practical patterns you can immediately implement to level up your communication skills, such as knowing your audience, the big picture comes first, and perspective-driven documentation.

Listen out for:

Career Journey - [00:01:40]
Architecture Kata - [00:03:17]
Writing Communication Patterns - [00:05:03]
Importance of Soft Skills - [00:07:33]
Visual Communication - [00:09:24]
Visual Communication Essentials - [00:12:12]
Visual Narrative - [00:17:46]
Multimodal Communication - [00:21:09]
Verbal & Non-Verbal Communication - [00:26:29]
Encoding & Decoding - [00:29:58]
Communicating Knowledge - [00:32:22]
Tips for Capturing Knowledge - [00:40:14]
Get Feedback Early & Just-in-Time - [00:43:05]
Communicating Remotely - [00:48:59]
3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:54:23]

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Jacqui Read’s Bio
Jacqui Read is an internationally-recognised solution and enterprise architect, and author of Communication Patterns: A Guide for Developers and Architects. She teaches public and private workshops and speaks at international conferences on topics such as architecture practices, technical communication, and systems design. Jacqui specialises in untangling and extracting value from data and knowledge, helping businesses to determine direction in complex environments.

Her professional interests include collaborative modelling, knowledge management, Domain-Driven Design, sociotechnical architecture, and modernising enterprise architecture practices. Outside of work she enjoys gardening and strumming her ukulele while singing at the same time.

Follow Jacqui:

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#170 - Essential Communication Patterns for Developers and Technical Leaders - Jacqui Read

Tech Lead Journal