Ben Pearce (00:01.611)
Hi everyone and welcome to the first Tech World Human Skills episode of 2025. It is brilliant to have you with us. Now, as ever, we'll be talking about the human skills that help you thrive in the tech world. And today we're talking about how to translate the complexity of tech to business stakeholders. And we'll talk about why that's important and how to do it.
Now, to help us with this topic, our guest today has been an engineer, an architect, held senior leadership roles. He's worked in large corporates. He's worked in startups and he's a regular event speaker. So please welcome to the show, Ed Santana. Ed, welcome to the show.
Ed Sant'Anna (00:53.051)
thank you so much. That's a great introduction. So Ben, first thing to say really is how is this? So this is not two blokes wearing glasses, beard, yeah, a zip up jumper and a little bit, a little bit challenging on the, on the hair side. Yeah. Talk, talk to each other. If you listen, if you're just listening to this, you definitely need to go and watch the YouTube because it's uncanny that people will think people will think.
Ben Pearce (01:03.327)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes.
Ben Pearce (01:11.297)
somewhat bold, yes, yes, yeah, yeah.
Ben Pearce (01:19.447)
Yeah.
Ed Sant'Anna (01:22.593)
that you've created the AI version of yourself, Ben.
Ben Pearce (01:25.175)
But the only difference is I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but your background is Brazilian so you're born and raised in Brazilian so I think it's fair to say your hair colouring and complexion is somewhat less pasty white than me.
Ed Sant'Anna (01:31.958)
Yes.
Ed Sant'Anna (01:37.1)
Yeah!
Ed Sant'Anna (01:40.686)
Yeah, I lost some of it because I've been in the UK for almost 20 years. Not enough sun. But yes, there is a bit of a difference.
Ben Pearce (01:45.437)
Right. well, welcome to the show, mate. is lovely to have you with us. And for all our listeners out there, could you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your background?
Ed Sant'Anna (02:01.485)
Absolutely. So as you said earlier, I started as an engineer, I have an engineering degree myself and but been very, very early in my career. I realized I love technology and business. And then when you work for solution providers and consultancies, you realize that there is this little gap between the sales requirements, the business needs from your customer, the technology available. And often these different areas don't really communicate very well.
So I said, this is my place. I want to be in the middle here, being the bridge, being the tech translator between these different areas. So that's what I've been doing. We're working for large companies like Orange and Fujitsu and Vodafone, but also running my own small consultancy, doing some contract work, working with startups, advising large corporates as well, C level, et cetera. And it's fascinating to see how
A lot of us, I'll include everybody here, struggle to have that conversation to convince your stakeholders to go forward with a project, to release budget. And that is why I'm putting together, through my experience and through a lot of research, putting together this framework that we'll talk about today to help people simplify complexity.
Ben Pearce (03:25.911)
That's also, I'm really looking forward to digging into this. And I think it's fair to say that probably your technical area of focus at the moment is around that data and AI space. Is that right?
Ed Sant'Anna (03:35.82)
Yeah, exactly. Certainly for the last 10 years, maybe a bit more. Way before ChatTPT, I was already putting together strategies for AI, how to use conversational AI, so the dreaded chatbots. And really, there's massive power to be unlocked there. But we are now in January 2025, ChatTPT was released in 2022. Everyone was expecting massive change. It hasn't happened.
Why? I think we'll dig into why in a minute, but a lot of it is about just the human psychology for change. And that's really what we need to understand here.
Ben Pearce (04:18.007)
Right, well, there we go. There's a little cliffhanger to suck people in for later in the episode. Well, I'll tell you what, let's start off. So this notion, this idea of being a tech translator, could we start with defining that? So what is a tech translator?
Ed Sant'Anna (04:21.611)
Hahaha
Ed Sant'Anna (04:36.458)
Okay, so professionals everywhere, particularly in our information technology area, they regularly need to convey complex concepts to others, right? It's not always just non-techies, by the way, know, too non-techies. It can be just convey to your peers and maybe let's call them semi-techies. So your manager, your project manager, and it's challenging, right? And I say information technology, but it can be anywhere. It could be a lawyer.
translating legal to their clients a medical profession, right? But let's focus on our technology area. can be, you know, a team is implementing AI for data analytics, for example. Can the AI expert explain the choice of machine learning model? Maybe the trade-offs between precision and recall, which are very technical data scientist terms, can that be translated into what does it mean to my business? Can a data engineer explain
why this data source doesn't really deliver what is needed. Does the project manager actually understand everything end to end? And this is really what I mean by the translation, right? And it's easier said than done. A lot of people struggle to be understood and to get those projects off the ground, that those budgets approved or customers buy into their proposed solution,
Ben Pearce (05:56.535)
And so if this text translation is about this idea of taking the real jargon, the real nuts and bolts and turning it into something that's understandable to other roles, other people that come up, why is that important? Why do you need to invest in this tech translator skill?
Ed Sant'Anna (06:16.489)
really to evolve, right? To move forward with those projects and just move forward with your career as well, right? And you may not realize that, but we are all in this together. We all need to convince people, even at the very first hurdle, which is a job interview. You are already trying to translate how your skills
will deliver value to an organization, to the line manager. And often you need to interview with across the board. So to the line manager might be one thing. Maybe they will put you in front of the salesperson as well, and so on and so forth. And you need to understand and empathize with them to understand what is important for them. So these skills, again, very human skills in our tech world, which is the title of our podcast here.
Ben Pearce (07:07.755)
Yeah.
Ben Pearce (07:12.681)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so really, it's about saying, right, you know, I've got this tremendous subject matter expertise.
Ed Sant'Anna (07:22.698)
Mm-hmm.
Ben Pearce (07:23.687)
And actually what I now need to be able to do is to be able to talk about this thing that I'm really passionate about, I really care about, I spend my day doing, but I now need to put this in language that is relevant to you in whatever role that you're in, because you will make decisions that affect me, perhaps budgetary decisions, purchase decisions, promotion decisions, job hire decisions. And if I've been able to speak to you in a language that you understand and are persuaded by, then...
then me as a techie, I can be successful. So it's about making people successful.
Ed Sant'Anna (07:56.37)
Exactly, exactly. And there's no single language either because each person, each stakeholder will have a slightly different perspective. Right. And I know if you can see, but there's a musical instrument just behind me. This happens to be a bass. Yeah, exactly. So it's the same. So what I'm trying to provide here is some tools, an instrument that you can use, but instruments can make several types of music.
Ben Pearce (08:09.604)
I can see a guitar hanging on the wall, yes? Yeah.
Ben Pearce (08:25.559)
Okay, okay.
Ed Sant'Anna (08:25.787)
So you need to be able to translate what you have in your mind into something that will resonate with the other person and it will be specific to a particular type of character or particular role that that person is in as part of your organization.
Ben Pearce (08:33.079)
Okay.
Ben Pearce (08:45.383)
Love it. So, so to some people I need to play heavy metal. To some people I need to pay acoustic folk, you know, it, you know, the instruments capable of both, but I need, you know, to get people right. Love it. Love it. Love it. Love it. What? Shall we start? Shall we start to start to dig into that then? So, so how do you do it? How do you become a tech translator?
Ed Sant'Anna (08:49.064)
Yep.
Exactly.
Ed Sant'Anna (08:58.461)
That's it.
Ed Sant'Anna (09:03.689)
Yes.
Ed Sant'Anna (09:12.083)
Yes, great. So this is interesting, right? So I called this whole thing the Chief Tech Translator and tech here is actually an acronym, T-E-C-H, right? So that makes it easier for us to remember. So train, explain, convince, highlight. Train, and we'll go through this in detail. So basically training, for train.
Ben Pearce (09:22.391)
Okay. Okay.
Ben Pearce (09:35.583)
So T for train, E for explain, C for convince, H for highlight, tech. Right. Okay. Got you. Got you.
Ed Sant'Anna (09:40.681)
highlight. That's it. Exactly. So train by that. mean, train your brain and what you need to know as an expert, but also how others think and react. We'll deep dive in a minute about that. Explain, obviously explain to other people. I'm really empathizing with them to understand how exactly you need to explain it. Convince, obviously convince stakeholders. And this is where I have very bad news for the tech people. You're also in sales.
and marketing, right? Because you have to convince people. I will actually throughout the whole thing, I'll bring in a few methodologies and frameworks and some of them from sales for us to use in our day to day life. And then H for highlights, which is highlighting the numbers. Another bad news here, you're also in finance. So, you know, shall we deep dive into those, right? So maybe starting from, from train. Yeah.
Ben Pearce (10:32.119)
Okay.
Ben Pearce (10:35.987)
Yeah, well, I guess we ought to do them in order, right? So T for train, could you unpack train to us?
Ed Sant'Anna (10:43.792)
Absolutely. again, train is about training yourself to know your stuff, but that's a given. I'm not going to teach you to suck eggs, right? You know what you need to know. But it's very important to understand the effects of what you know of your domain on other people. Right. So if you go through that example of maybe an implementation of a data analytics project, could be any project. So it tends to have a team of
comprised of a project manager, a data engineer or consultant, a data analyst, a product owner, and most likely a business person who's a user, and who's always an account manager, right? Always an account manager somewhere. The first question I have to you is, does everyone understand the end-to-end process, at least at high level, right? So if there's a problem,
As a data engineer, if I find that there is a problem in my data pipeline, can it be understood by everybody? Those people don't even know what a data pipeline is. And this is interesting because sometimes we will describe things in a way that it feels very obvious to everybody, but it might not be. So in data analytics, have this term, Microsoft in particular used the term modern data analytics platform. What does that actually mean? It might be just a given or.
Let's move from legacy to the cloud. Does the business user understand what legacy and cloud really means? So it might be very obvious to us techies, but it doesn't mean everyone understands. So if we elevate it a little bit, think of a C level strategy. It's not uncommon for you to see things like our strategy as a company is to unlock further stakeholder value.
Ed Sant'Anna (12:41.831)
So if it's a 20,000 people company, in retail, for example, does me stacking up shelves in the stock, do I understand what unlocking shareholder value is? The business world understands it, but it's not clear for everybody. So you have to break it down. There's a really interesting study and well-known cognitive bias now called the curse of knowledge or the expert curse.
Ben Pearce (13:10.295)
Okay.
Ed Sant'Anna (13:11.751)
It was coined in 1989 by economists, really, but it was popularized by a woman of the name Elizabeth Newton from Stanford University in 1990. And she had a really interesting... She was a study of psychology at Stanford University. And she did an interesting experiment. She got over 100 people and divided them into those who are listeners and
tappers and by tapping she means tapping on a table for example and she just asked these tappers to tap out a well-known song let's say happy birthday to you but only tapping it so and I'm not sure if our noise cancellation will close this but I'll try it in my my here in my phone here microphone here so you know something like
Ed Sant'Anna (14:12.807)
Something like that, right? So I'm not gonna ask you what you think that is, but that is happy birthday to you, right? So the question was, how many people do you think are gonna guess it? And they say, oh, everybody knows happy birthday to you. Over 50 % will guess it. You know what the actual number was? Not even 3%, not even 3%. Why? Because you can hear it in your head. You have that knowledge.
but to the other person is just some random Morse code. Right? And that is the problem sometimes, right? So you may actually feel like this is obvious to everybody, but it's not. You have the curse of knowledge. You are an expert and you are assuming everybody else understands it. Don't do that. Yeah.
Ben Pearce (14:45.825)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ben Pearce (15:02.551)
OK, OK. So so this this train bit, this train bit from the tech, the tech acronym you've got is about not only understanding the detail, the knowledge, but but then to actually be able to empathise with other people and understand other people. So train yourself on their roles, on their perspective, understand where they're coming from so that you're able to to to to translate the stuff you need into the language they need to hear.
Ed Sant'Anna (15:32.974)
Exactly. And train yourself to A, understand the cognitive bias, but also the bias of others. And we'll touch on these in some of the other elements here. What I really like doing is structuring the approach that we're taking. And this tends to be strategy. Now, ideally, you want your organization to have a very strong corporate strategy.
that then translates into your department, et cetera. It's, let's face it, this is rarely the case. But what you can do, you can take the framework and at least have a clear strategy for the projects that you're running. And I'm talking here particularly to leaders, your solution architects, your principal consultants, your project and product managers. I really like the book written by Richard Ruhmelt. And I did say that I was gonna read
Ben Pearce (16:08.437)
Hahaha.
Ed Sant'Anna (16:31.024)
refer to frameworks and a few books here. This book is called Good Strategy, Bad Strategy. Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Ruhmelt. And it's fascinating because he talks about how most organizations out there unfortunately have a bad strategy. He doesn't even mean having no strategy. Having no strategy is better than having a bad strategy, which is not a strategy at all.
Ben Pearce (16:37.687)
Okay.
Ed Sant'Anna (16:58.947)
It confuses things like goals, mission, vision, KPIs, ambition, right? So you may hear companies talk about, my strategy is to reach a billion dollar revenue. Well, that's an ambition, that's a KPI, it's not a strategy. A good strategy is simple and obvious. It understands and identifies challenges and then has coherent action to fix those challenges.
Really, really important. And focusing means saying no to some other things. So saying no to some goals that don't address the challenge, some initiatives, and to some people. Really, really interesting to think of. So let's go back to that example of the data analytics project. What is the challenge? Maybe the challenge is there's not enough visibility.
Ben Pearce (17:50.615)
Okay.
Ed Sant'Anna (17:57.093)
in real time of customer behavior. Now, how do you even get to that challenge? Maybe another framework, you can use the five whys. You've heard of that probably. that's actually, yeah, it was built by Toyota, really. Five whys, ask at least five times, in my opinion. And it's not uncommon. So if you go to a data analytics project, the question might be, why are we doing this? Oh, to create a report.
Ben Pearce (18:08.276)
Yeah, yeah.
Ed Sant'Anna (18:25.377)
We already have reports. Why? To make it more modern. What do mean? Dashboards, AI powered, fine. But why? Okay, to make it more efficient so it's not done manually, right? It takes two weeks to build it. Okay, that's interesting. But so what? Why? To gain more insights about my customers' behavior, about profitability for each product set. okay. What would that do? It will drive more revenue for my company. I'll be more profitable.
Excellent. Now we're talking. So that's what I mean. So think of a strategy on a page. Again, it can be very simple. Have your top objectives, drive revenue, improve profitability. But what's the challenge that we've identified? We don't have enough visibility of the customer behavior because the report production is inefficient. It's manual. It takes five to 10 working days. It's error prone because it's, you know, people doing it manually.
getting it wrong. What's the action? Aha, we'll modernize it. We'll bring it to the cloud. We'll automate it. And we'll take only the three most relevant data sources, the CRM, the inventory, bidding, say no to everything else. They're not very important at the moment. And we'll change the process. So it's not just manual spreadsheets. It's actually automated.
Ben Pearce (19:50.027)
Yeah. OK. So you've flipped it around, haven't you really? And whereas we from a tech world might come at it with a modern data platform, that means we want to implement this service from this provider in the cloud or whatever it is. It's completely flipping it around to be you start with the end of those five whys and go, right, in order to improve our red revenue, we need to understand our customers better. And in order to understand our customers behavior better.
we need a report that's up to date, real time, blah, blah, blah, and efficient. And therefore, so it's walking it back the other way. So when you're talking to those stakeholders, you're starting at the end really, and getting back to the detail, not starting with the detail, and getting to the why it's important.
Ed Sant'Anna (20:35.263)
Exactly right. Exactly right. So that leads us to, so that was T, train. So E, explain, right? Okay, so now you have an idea and you've organized your own mind, right? Now are you able to explain it to other people in many different ways, upside down if you have to. So can you elevate, of abstract what you have to general level? We've just done this, isn't it? We said,
Ben Pearce (20:41.193)
Okay, right.
Ed Sant'Anna (21:04.556)
data platform actually will deliver more revenue and profits for you, but can also deep dive and go in the weeds to talk to your peer at the customer side or your colleagues and you effortly go up and down. That is very interesting. And when I talk about going up to explain to a lay person, yes, it's customers, business users, but you know what? Can you explain it to your other half, to your kids, your mom, your dad?
It's an interesting exercise for us in tech. How many here think that their parents understand what they do? It's very difficult to explain it, isn't it? But I really like that challenge. Right. Really important.
Ben Pearce (21:33.419)
Yeah. Yeah.
Ben Pearce (21:46.881)
Yeah, it's an interesting challenge. And I think a lot of people in the tech world, because we're knowledge workers, right? We know something and we're paid to take that thing that we know and implement it or whatever. I think people get a little bit insecure that they've got to know so much. They've got to know everything. And so then people are so focused on...
Yeah, or what if I get grilled and I don't know these really detailed parts that whenever they get asked about this question, they want to get all of this detail out so that they're sharing with people. I know what I'm talking about. know what I'm talking about. But actually, what you're talking about there is sometimes sometimes you need to talk to other techies about really technical things and you need to know your stuff. But to be able to talk to your wife or your husband or your whoever it might be and somebody that's not in the industry or your children.
and explain it in a way that makes sense, that's a real skill as well. And to think about it and practice it is important.
Ed Sant'Anna (22:48.758)
Yeah, exactly. And my view is it doesn't have, you don't have to have all answers off the cuff. You can refer to notes. You know, you're having that conversation with the directors of a company. You can prepare, right? And yes, you are allowed to use General TVI to help you with some ideas, right? And that is one of the most common use cases, isn't it? Explain to me as if I was five year old. Excellent. I mean, you don't, you're not going to repeat
Ben Pearce (23:07.423)
Yeah.
Ed Sant'Anna (23:17.826)
you know, word for word, what Jenny I gave you, double check by the way to make sure it hasn't hallucinated. But it gives you some ideas on how to structure it, right? Very important. And again, storytelling, you're very, very good at this, storytelling with analogies with metaphors, really give some examples. So I'll give you one, right? And I don't take full credit for this. I'll say hi to my my friend Sam Boot, who is a fantastic principal consultant in data analytics.
And one day in the office, we were talking about how can we explain this to non-techies, to the project managers, et cetera? How does a data pipeline work? And he said, well, it's like Lego. What do mean it's like Lego? So we started evolving that and then ended up creating a full training course with that in mind. If you want to know, and I know you do, what we mean is, let's say you have a bucket full of Lego bricks, all different shapes and colors.
Ben Pearce (24:09.043)
Hahaha
Ed Sant'Anna (24:17.076)
you don't actually have the final result or instructions and you need to create something for your customer. Your customer asks you to build a castle, right? So all you have is this random things. First thing you do is you need some sort of platform, which can be a table with trays and you dump all of that into that first tray that you see. Now you have them in a way that you can see them. And maybe what you do is you have a second tray where you move and start organizing them.
by color and shapes. Ah, okay, good. And then in the third one, you may say, well, I only need these types. And by the way, I can connect them, pre-connect them in some sort of model where I can reuse them later. And it makes it much easier to build the castle. By the way, this guy needs several different castles of different types, but they're all castles, right? Now, you can probably, if you understand data analytics, you can probably see what I mean here. That first bucket,
is a data lake, is your raw data. You just dumped it there. Then the middle one, you started working on your data warehouse. You organize it, you clean your data, you structure it. And then towards the end, you have something that looks like a model where things are already connected and you can quite easily visualize in your Power BI Tableau. So once you explain that, people went, ha, OK, that makes sense. It's really interesting to have that sort of storytelling.
And I know you have a few examples of that as well.
Ben Pearce (25:49.347)
Yeah, yeah, do you know what? As I sort of start to think about this, there's an example that's coming into my mind. Back when I used to work at Microsoft, we used to do this service called the Active Directory Risk Assessment Program. So, we would go in and look at people's Active Directory. If you're not familiar with Active Directory, it is how in an on-premise world, you authenticate users.
And therefore it was like one of the most important things, because if you walk into a computer in the morning and you can't log on, it's a denial of service of everything. Everything falls to pieces. And I remember we used to do these risk assessments and we'd done one at a customer. And there was at least one single point of failure. So we've done this risk assessment, we've identified that there's some issues. And it's the typical where there was an IT department, there was a partner.
involved, you know, they've been paid to do certain functions and certain support, but not do other things. And we were saying, you need to fix this because it's a single point of failure and it's high risk. And we couldn't get them to fix it and come up with a budget to do whatever they did. And so I remember thinking, you know, with the team, what can we do? And actually, we managed to get in front of one of the business units. Now, as it turns out, these were a manufacturer. And actually, the AD, the production line,
dependent on AD. So if Active Directory went down, the entire production line went down. And if that went down, that would cost a gazillion pounds a second for every minute that production line was there. And we managed to speak to this person that owned the production line and said, do you know that there's a high risk element you've got here? And if this went down and if this thing happened, you would use your production line. And he was like, what? What? And how much does it cost me to fix it?
And it was peanuts, literally peanuts compared to the cost of the production line going down. And he was like, well, let's do it. So we'd been and spoke to this person. And then all of a sudden the IT department that we had been speaking to and the partner that didn't want to do it and were saying there was blockers, suddenly the money was available from the business and it all got fixed ASAP. And so it was instead of having a technical conversation to technical people about the technical problem.
Ben Pearce (28:09.557)
we switched the conversation to a business conversation about risk and business impact. And all of a sudden there was budget for the customer to be able to fix this problem that we'd highlighted. So just an example there for me where that translation and that understanding of the business made a real difference.
Ed Sant'Anna (28:25.471)
Absolutely, and that is the key. So first off, you found the right person to talk to, the one with the pain, right? The true pain. And you may have used another framework that I like talking about without realizing, which is the pyramid principle or the mental pyramid, right? So this one was developed by a lady called Barbara Minto in McKinsey over 40 years ago. She was actually the first female MBA hire for the company.
Ben Pearce (28:31.872)
Yeah.
Ben Pearce (28:39.733)
Okay? Okay.
Ed Sant'Anna (28:54.643)
McKinsey, course, the big consultancy company and pyramid here being a top down way of explaining things. When you talk to particularly C level, they are very time poor. Most people are anyway. And when we talk about storytelling, everyone thinks the story needs to be just like a Netflix series. Right. And then there's this cliffhanger. And then towards the end, go, ta-da, I found you two million pounds.
But by then you may have lost them completely. So what the pyramid principle talks about is start from the conclusion, right? If I fix this in your example, it will remove that risk for you, right? What I do a lot, especially when presented to CFOs is first slide, I say in our project, we found $2 million average savings every year.
hard savings plus immediate efficiency and potential revenue growth of 10%. That already captures their attention. Then from conclusion, you go to key arguments, which are straightforward as well. You go, okay, so the ROI is 12 months. We'll do a removal of your old platform. We'll change the process and automate your report generation and you get better insights into customer behavior. That will better target your customers.
And then you go through the actual details, the detailed information, which may not be interesting for that CFO, but it's important for the team developing, right? You go through the timescales and the people involved and the technology, the third parties, maybe even an architectural diagram, but you don't start there, right? Cause you will lose that person. So that's the other thing. When I talk about understanding and empathizing, you need to understand who your audience are really, really well. The CFO is probably looking for savings.
The CEO or the sales director is looking for growth, can you help them sell? Your program director is looking for solving blockers so that the timelines can be hit within budget. So you really need to understand those things. And that's exactly what he did in that example there.
Ben Pearce (31:10.453)
And so we're thinking about this tech model. So we've done train, we've done explain. I guess are we now starting to get into the scene, into convince how you convince different personas to take some action and do something.
Ed Sant'Anna (31:17.222)
Yessss
Ed Sant'Anna (31:21.923)
Exactly. Convince. And again, everyone is in sales, right? You've been having to convince people to get you a job in your job interview, convinced of getting promotions in your performance review. If you have children, have you tried convincing your child it's time to go home from a party or it's bedtime or even convince your dog to go home from a walk or something, right? You've been selling all your life, even if you feel you don't like it.
Ben Pearce (31:40.405)
you
Ha ha ha ha.
Ed Sant'Anna (31:51.164)
And again, your projects are all about convincing stakeholders, et cetera. Now, it's really important to understand human behavior. We are geared up to avoid change. We love the quo and the status quo is the main competitor for every salesperson. And a salesperson knows that sort of thing really, really well. Yeah.
So even doctors are now more likely to give you options as well of illusion There's a bit of an illusion of choice there as well. So that brings a lot of indecision Right a lot of indecision and this is where there are a few frameworks that are quite interesting So there's a book called again other another Recommendation here called the jolt effect by Yeah, Dixon Matthews and 10 McKenna McKenna
Ben Pearce (32:38.091)
Right, okay.
Ed Sant'Anna (32:42.905)
And in there, they talk about something called the omission bias, which is actually a research by Daniel Kahneman. You may know from the book Thinking Fast and Slow. A lot of people know that. So omission bias means the following, right? So last time you maybe, let's say you bought some cryptocurrency and you won a thousand pounds within a week. How excited is that? Right?
Now imagine the opposite, imagine you bought the same cryptocurrency and it went down by a thousand pounds. So which one of these two emotions is stronger? The loss or the winning? And the loss is much worse, much, worse. So effectively we are trying to avoid making that mistake. And they talk about the difference between the error of omission, not doing anything, and an error of commission.
which I quite like using the word execution. So execution versus omission. So it's preferable to not buy the cryptocurrency and miss out on the opportunity to win a thousand than it is for me to do it and then lose. So a lot of people out there talk about the fear of missing out, which is absolutely fine.
But sometimes you already made the decision. You already know you want to move away from the legacy platform. But you're now no longer fearing of missing out. You're on a fear of messing up.
Ben Pearce (34:20.375)
Okay.
Ed Sant'Anna (34:20.485)
Very important to distinguish between the two, right? And that tends to be for three main reasons of that sort of indecision. It can be what they call a valuation problem. So how do I know if option one is better than option two and three and four and five? And this is becoming more and more difficult these days, isn't it? Even you go to the supermarket, for everything. So last time you tried, you've thought about going somewhere on holiday. Where do I go? Where do I stay?
Ben Pearce (34:39.305)
Yeah, so many options, such complexity. Yeah.
Ed Sant'Anna (34:50.043)
or just buying some tomatoes in a supermarket. You notice that? There's so many different options. It doesn't even have to be a red tomato anymore. could be yellow. It's very difficult. So it's the same in our case, right? So which cloud platform, with which features do I buy it now or later? It becomes very complicated. That's number one. The second one is just, they call it lack of information challenge, which is have I done enough research? Have I done my homework?
Ben Pearce (34:59.017)
Ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Ed Sant'Anna (35:19.686)
properly to make sure that all these options are there. AI is a particular challenge. So we spoke about that at the beginning. I think the main reason most companies have not implemented is because of indecision. So which one do I go for? OpenAI's GPT or Google's Gemini or Claude or Lama? Do I do open source, not open source? And have I done my research? And by the way, maybe I should wait. It's evolving. The next model is coming.
and then you never make a decision. This is a classic analysis paralysis. that's the thing that I want to tell everybody. It's not your customer's fault. It's not the fault of your manager not approving it. It's human behavior. It's normal. Some are more indecisive than others, but the environment is making it worse. So again, valuation problem, option one, two, three, Which one do I go for? Did I actually make?
my homework and then even if I did all of that and I say yes I'll go for your option Ben, how do I know that I'll get what I'm paying for? It's the outcome uncertainty as well. So that is what is really important to you as a tech person and again I'm talking to your solution architect etc. Your responsibility is to actually reduce that indecision and provide recommendations. Right?
Ben Pearce (36:43.247)
And so how do you do that? How do you overcome that then? You you've highlighted those three issues. What is it that you can practically do to help convince people?
Ed Sant'Anna (36:52.507)
So first off, it's credibility, right? But basically, you were hired to look at all the options. So you did that. You demonstrate you've looked at the options. And then you say, well, in our case, this is what I would do. And don't give them too many options at that point, by the way. You say, I've looked at it. I've analyzed it. I've scored against everything. This is what I would do, right? Because part of the challenge that people may see is that they will start
Ben Pearce (37:13.857)
Yeah. Okay.
Ed Sant'Anna (37:21.822)
using things that salespeople say, upping the FUD, F-U-D, the fear, uncertainty and doubt. If a person has already decided to go forward and change, trying to say things like, but the legacy is much worse, isn't it? All you're gonna miss out on this opportunity is not the best way because it increases the indecision. So you want to reduce indecision. And then you want to, for the outcome uncertainty, you want to, yes,
talk about return on investment, right? And what you get from benefit, but also reduce the risk. So create a really good roadmap with timeframes, thinking about who needs to do what. And sometimes you need to talk people down from buying the Rolls Royce as well, which is potentially opposite to what you've been taught, which is go for the big deal, but actually,
It's easier for people to make a decision on a pilot first or make a decision on the whole thing, but you have a stop here to evaluate and you can pull out if you want to. It helps people make a decision.
Ben Pearce (38:31.135)
Yeah. Yeah, it's better to have a skateboard today that gets you from place A to place B quickly when you need to get to place B rather than a Rolls Royce three years time that may never arrive that gets you there in complete comfort, the right temperature, the comfy seats, but never actually gets developed. And you've had three years of not using a skateboard, which gets you to place A to B really quick. So that that kind of yeah, yeah, yeah, So we've done train.
Ed Sant'Anna (38:58.777)
Exactly. Yes. Yep.
Ben Pearce (38:59.923)
explain, convince, highlight. What is it you mean by highlight?
Ed Sant'Anna (39:04.483)
highlight is all about highlighting the numbers, right? Measure it and show results. Find a baseline. That's the other thing that a lot of people forget about because they talk about improvement, efficiency improvements. But have you been measuring how inefficient it is right now? That's the first thing. But also understand the numbers, right? Again, as a technical person, you may not you may be familiar with KPIs. Maybe you heard of OKRs, but what's the real difference?
Ben Pearce (39:08.119)
Okay, okay. Yeah. Okay.
Ed Sant'Anna (39:34.01)
What is this CSAT thing, customer satisfaction, NPS? You need to understand that. And then again, everyone is in finance. understand things like return on investment, how to put together a business case. Can you look at your customer's annual report if they are a publicly listed company? And do you understand what's in there? How they make money, EBITDA, you know what that actually means.
So I know that sometimes it feels like teaching to suck eggs, but a lot of people not really thinking about this sort of things. So understanding in particular how your company makes money, how you help them, even if indirectly. Go back to that approach of good strategy. Can you connect the actions that you're making, your project, the code that you're creating? Do you understand why that has an impact on the user, which then has an impact?
on your company, right? And if you're providing services to other companies, you understand how your customers make money. That is the key thing that you think you need to understand. Really understand who the customer is, including on an individual basis, a person, a customer, you know, this whole thing about the customer being this entity, yeah, this limited company or something like that. That is not really true. It's a collection of people. So you need to break them down into
this particular person has this individual requirement. By the way, your boss is your customer as well. Understand how they are measured for performance. What are their goals? If you help them grow, you will probably grow as well. So that is what I mean. So highlight the numbers, make sure that you have something that you can show. And again, remove that indecision, demonstrate some outcome certainty.
and then take it forward. So there you go. That is training. Yeah. Can you do it again? Yeah.
Ben Pearce (41:33.879)
There you go. Tech. Yeah. Yeah. So tech is you go for it. What's T?
Ed Sant'Anna (41:39.992)
And this is train. So train your brain. Make sure you understand what you want. And then act on that.
Ben Pearce (41:48.82)
Explain?
Ed Sant'Anna (41:50.09)
Explain explain it to others up and down upside down if you have to right
Ben Pearce (41:55.639)
Okay, convince.
Ed Sant'Anna (41:57.986)
Convince your stakeholders, yes, you are in sales. And learn from those methodologies. Understand when you're actually going against the status quo or when they've already decided to go forward, but they are unsure about how. Identify that.
Ben Pearce (42:01.525)
Yeah. Yeah.
Ben Pearce (42:14.167)
Okay, and then highlight.
Ed Sant'Anna (42:17.154)
Highlight is all about the numbers, measure it, show the results. It's always about the results. If you can't show that, it will be very difficult to convince anyone of where you want to go.
Ben Pearce (42:28.449)
Yeah. Ed, this has been really fascinating. I'm just looking at the clock and do you know what? The minutes have slipped past fantastically quickly, but it is time for us, I think, to wrap up. So I guess final takeaways. What would be your key takeaway in a sentence that you'd like people to take away from this episode?
Ed Sant'Anna (42:49.506)
Kitego is don't be afraid of being a salesperson and convincing others. That is what I would say for technologists out there. But by all means, are the tools for you to use and study and try and try and be much better at simplifying complexity.
Ben Pearce (42:57.494)
Yeah. Yeah.
Ben Pearce (43:07.253)
Yeah, yeah, brilliant. I think for me, I think it's just completely the same, know, that idea that if you have a foot in the tech world, you also need a foot in the business world or a toe. If you've taken that time to understand and you can translate, that is when I see people that are successful, when I see people that get promotions, people that get hired, projects that work, is where there are people that are able to combine those two skills together.
really well. So I think that's a great way. And I love that tech acronym. So train, explain, convince, highlight. Brilliant. Now for people that have loved what you've been talking about and would love to get in contact with you, how can people get hold of you?
Ed Sant'Anna (43:50.593)
Amazing, it's very simple. It's the name of the framework, chifetechtranslator.com. Altogether, chifetechtranslator.com. And then you'll find me, you'll be able to connect and I'll be posting and releasing articles and more and more information about this framework. And I really want everyone to give me feedback and your examples as well of how you are trying to navigate.
the complexities of this world. So chieftectranslator.com is where you can find.
Ben Pearce (44:23.735)
Brilliant, and in case you missed that, I'll put that in the show notes so that you can go and click on that from the podcast. Well, Ed, the final thing for me to do is to say thank you so much. It has been really enlightening. It has been a wonderful start to 2025. So thank you so much for joining us on the show.
Ed Sant'Anna (44:41.003)
Thank you so much for having me. Thank you, man. Very, very exciting.
