Communicating intent

Any conversation has to connect the dots between reasons and results. When a discussion ends up in an argument, its the failure to connect these dots.

When someone asks you to work on your communication, what does that mean? It typically breaks down to two things: communicating intent and communicating results. Communicating intent means you tell people what you’re going to do before you do it (for example, I’m going to switch our tests from QUnit to Mocha). The purpose of communicating intent is typically to gather feedback and ensure the right number of people are working on the right things (including eliminating duplicate efforts and prioritizing among the team).
Communicating results means you tell people what you just did and why it matters (for example, now that’s we’re on Mocha, it’s easier to write tests the same way for the browser and Node.js). The purpose of communicating results is to signify that you have completed task and validate why the task was done. As another mentor once told me, “if you do great work and no one knows about it, then you’ll never get the credit you deserve.” Your work doesn’t actually speak for itself, you need to speak for it.
Nicholas Zakas