Communicating project context

                          +--------+                        
                          |Org goal|                        
                          +----+---+                        
                               |                            
                               |                            
                               |                            
  (External)                   |                 (Internal)
+-----------+         xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx         +--------+
|Competitive|         x+--------------+x         | Similar|
| analysis  |---------x| Your project |x---------|projects|
+-----------+         x+--------------+x         +--------+
                      xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx                    
                               |                            
                               |                            
                               |                            
                               |                            
                      +--------+-------+                    
                      |Data, User study|                    
                      +----------------+  

After years of presenting my projects to the organization’s leadership, I learned a few lessons about the importance of communicating project context — providing them with a 30,000-foot view of the project without getting too much into details.

The diagram above highlights the key constituents of the context setup. Any given project can be placed in these X-Y axes. The X-axis shows Why the project matters and the Y-axis shows What are the opportunities the project can capitalize and leverage.

• Org goals: How does the project ladder up to higher org goals?
• Data & User study: What are the evidences that this project should exist and be prioritized (especially against all other potential projects)?
• Competitive analysis: What’s the industry landscape and how are the competitors doing? Are we leading or lagging?
• Similar projects: Are there any past projects or similar project being worked on by other teams in other orgs? This is where the leadership can be directly of help since they can connect me and my team with any teams in any orgs.

When it comes to the presentation’s narrative. here are a couple of principles that I always adhere to:

• Avoid getting too much into details: The leadership doesn’t have bandwidth to get familar with all the nitty gritty details. It’s definitely very tempting to share all the work you’ve done. For that, the Appendix section’s the perfect place to place all the details as footnotes.
• ELI5 (Explain Like I’m 5): This popular Q&A format from Reddit is very useful in leadership presentations. It surely takes a lot of work to break the complicated concepts down to simpler structure and elements, but it is necessary for effective storytelling. I think of myself as a YouTuber trying to explain complicated concepts to their viewers in their explainer videos (The “explainer journalism” guys like Vox Media does this very well).

In future posts, I’d like to share more about what comes next after sharing the project context.