Know your audience

After mentioning the title of my talk for apidays in Paris was “Data Contracts: The API for Data”, I had a couple of responses saying that data contracts are not APIs, and that they’re for communication and facilitating an agreement between the generators and consumers of data (or something along those lines).

And I agree! In fact, most of my book is about that. And they’re not mutually exclusive. At some point there is an interface from which the data is queried.

But since I was speaking at a conference called apidays, to a room where most would identify as software engineers and/or engineering leaders, I wanted to craft a talk that would be of most interest to them. And I thought the hook to build the talk around could be the interface (or, the API). I did still talk about agreements, about the change in responsibilities, etc, but in language I hoped they would understand most. For example, I drew an analogy to DevOps and Platform Engineering when talking about the shift in responsibilities and being supported by a good platform.

To communicate effectively you need to know your audience. I frame things differently depending on if I’m talking to a software engineer, BI analyst, Product Manager or organisation leader. They all have their own perspective, and maybe the most important thing I’ve learned over the last few years is how to communicate from their perspective.

P.S. sorry for the double send yesterday! Slight hiccup in the automation, which I’m still learning about (although at least the second one fixed the typo!).