One of the biggest things I struggled with before my promotion was the fact that people didn’t listen to what I had to say!

I always blamed it on them.

If they just listened, we wouldn’t have as many incidents!

Why can’t they see this would make their life easier if they just adopted this new pattern?!

Why wont anyone review my proposal? It has all the details you could possibly ask for!

Boy, was I wrong.

Audience, Audience, Audience

Who are you sharing your idea to? This matters

For example, if you’re presenting to all backend engineers at your company, you probably don’t want to get into the weeds of how you fixed some problem. Instead think about what would apply directly to them.

Some examples of what they might care about:

• A safe rollout method that worked for you that they can try for their next rollout
• A bug you caused due to a common misunderstanding of a system that other engineers might also come across
• A new monitoring runbook you created that can apply to any webapp engineers creating new features

Data, Data, Data

What if you have a new idea you want to share with your direct team? Prove to them that it’s worth their time.

For example, if you have a proposal for reducing noisy logs, show them why noisy logs suck!

Some examples:

• Show the % of incidents caused due to missing an important alert
• Show the cost of noisy logs in AWS
• Show the times that an escalation was extended due to not being able to find an important log
• etc.

If you can show that your noisy logs are costing your team $10,000/mo — they might start to listen! Data is your friend and make sure to use it before sharing a proposal.

Conclusion

So if you’re like my previous self, you might be taking it a little to personally when people don’t listen to your idea 😬

Next time, find data to back up your ideas and cater it to the right audience. Soon you’ll notice people will start coming to you for proposals instead of the other way around!

Thanks for reading :)

Eden xx