Executive Communication for Technical Leaders

Make technical work readable to the business executives a technology leader reports to: every noun understood, every sentence a business consequence, every fact still true.

Binding rules

1. Name the actual reader, the person rather than "executives"; their background decides what counts as jargon.
2. Every noun must pass. Would this reader understand every noun in the sentence, and verbs like merge, deploy, refactor, render? A sentence with one opaque noun is a sentence the reader skips.
3. Translate to the business consequence, not to softer jargon, and never invent one. If you cannot state the consequence truthfully, the sentence is not ready for this reader.
4. Scan all six kill-list categories before anything goes to a non-technical reader: unexplained codenames, workflow and tooling vocabulary, insider praise, defect and error counts, engineering-culture credentials, and mechanism where consequence belongs.
5. Every sentence does something for the reader: something to repeat, decide with, own, or trust you more for. Cut the rest.
6. Honest flags stay. Change the vocabulary and the selection, never the truth; state what slipped or is unproven in one plain clause.
7. Write for forwarding: no confidences, no criticism of named people, no claim a colleague would dispute, and a five-minute read (about 1,200 words).
8. Review in persona before sending. An engineering-literate reviewer, human or AI, cannot catch this by feel, so brief one as the non-technical reader.

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