Cross-Department Study Session - Explaining Technical Concepts to Non-Developers

Last week, I held a study session—what would probably be translated into Chinese as a 學習會—for non-developer departments such as planning, QA, and legal. The main topic was web development-related content.

When I first started thinking it through, I even considered covering DNS, IP addresses, packets, and all those mechanisms in detail. But on second thought, I realized that for people across departments, that would be quite a nitpicky subject. Other than satisfying tech geeks, it wouldn’t really produce a very good result.

My goal was to give them the most basic understanding, so I ended up choosing an approach that avoided technical details as much as possible and instead used analogies to help the audience understand the concepts.

The topics included HTML, the basics of networking, servers, as well as API and JSON.

I spent quite a bit of time creating interactive elements, such as multiple-choice questions directly in the slides, and even a built-in editor where people could write code. This wasn’t my first time giving a talk in Japanese, but it was my first time presenting in Japanese to a non-developer audience, especially since most of the audience was Japanese and there was no translation.

Still, the results were better than I expected. In the feedback survey, many people answered things like “わかりやすかった” and “聞きやすかった.” Maybe there was a bit of politeness or flattery in those responses, but since filling out the survey wasn’t required, I was still really happy to receive nearly 10 responses that were all along the same lines.

There were also comments I hadn’t expected before, such as:

“穏やかな話し方”

“口調が丁寧で優しかった”

My previous presentations were mostly for developers, and a large portion of the audience was foreign. Getting this kind of feedback from a study session aimed mainly at Japanese attendees made me very happy. It also made me wonder: maybe this is a strength I hadn’t noticed before?

Of course, compared with a genius like 3Blue1Brown, who can perfectly transform concepts into animation and explain them so clearly in words, I often feel like I’m still far too weak. But this experience showed me that even though I still have a long way to go, I’m doing pretty well too.

“Easy to understand,” “easy to listen to,” “calm way of speaking,” and “gentle way of speaking” are the kinds of feedback I don’t receive very often. Since these came especially from Japanese attendees, I’m writing them down here as a small record.