Addressing Poor Software Quality
You can find this storyboard in the following articles and resources:
How to have Difficult Conversations as a Mentor
By Aaron Sherman
A reality of working with people is the periodic need for difficult conversations. Using storyboards allows the author to more easily predict how the other person will respond due to the conversational nature of the storyboard format. Storyboards are also helpful when mentoring someone: walking them through a difficult conversation to help them see both sides of a situation.
Check out some of our other business articles!
Storyboard Description
This conversation is a very common situation in technology companies. Due to the differences in how engineers and marketing thinks, engineers often think of marketing as unintelligent, and marketing thinks of engineers as difficult to work with. This leads to a lot of friction and subpar results on both sides of the fence. There is a great chapter on this phenomenon in the book Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management by Johanna Rothman and Esther Derby.
Storyboard Text
- I want to talk about your code quality. Over 35% of your tickets failed QA.
- What can we do to improve this?
- My problem is stupid marketing keeps changing their mind on their stupid requests.
- How do you think marketing likes being referred to as stupid?
- I never thought of that ... I don't say it to their faces ... but my emails are a bit curt ...
- What do you think would happen if you spent more time trying to understand them?
- I don't know. Let me try.
- Requirements
- Can we spend more time discussing this together? I want to make sure I understand.
- I would love to, I just always thought you were in a hurry to leave.
- I have been hearing great things about you from QA and Marketing.
- One Month Later...
- Our last conversation was an eye opener. I see everyone in a whole new light.
Over 30 Million Storyboards Created