Made for Engineers
Explain a Technical Recommendation to Decision-Makers
Also useful for: people in Software Engineers
45 min
Intermediate
Software Engineers
Engineer
Communicate Better
Career outcome:
Avoid Professional Risk
Build a decision-ready explanation that connects a technical recommendation to business impact, cost, timing, risk, and credible alternatives.
Create a free account to save your progress and use this Playbook.
Use this when
You need approval, funding, priority, or alignment for a technical recommendation from people who may not share your technical context.
You'll need
- Technical recommendation
- Decision needed
- Decision-makers and priorities
- Technical evidence
- Alternatives considered
- Business impact, cost, and timing
- Risks and constraints
- Decision deadline
You'll get
- A one-sentence decision request
- Evidence separated from estimates and assumptions
- At least two realistic paths compared
- Business impact, cost, timing, and risk addressed
- A 90-second spoken recommendation
- Likely objections answered without invented facts
By the end of this playbook
You will have:
- A one-sentence decision request
- Evidence separated from estimates and assumptions
- At least two realistic paths compared
- Business impact, cost, timing, and risk addressed
- A 90-second spoken recommendation
- Likely objections answered without invented facts
Sample
This is sample data, not your prompt. Pro unlocks this higher-stakes Playbook. On Free Playbooks you can still copy the assembled prompt into any AI.
Sample input
Recommendation: Move a failure-prone nightly export to a managed queue and worker service. Decision needed: Approve two engineers for three weeks next quarter. Audience: VP of Operations and Finance Director. Evidence: 11 failures in 90 days, four delayed deployments, and a prototype that cut processing time from 52 to 18 minutes. Alternatives: Tune the current job, increase server size, or adopt the managed queue. Impact: About $600 per month and three engineer-weeks, with an estimated eight hours of manual recovery avoided each month. Risks: Duplicate processing during cutover, limited team experience, and a November code freeze. Deadline: October 10.
Sample assembled prompt
Headline: Approve the queue migration now... 90-second recommendation: I recommend moving the... The current job failed 11 times... Our prototype processed the same load... The migration requires an estimated three... Tuning the current job is cheaper... The main cutover risk is duplicate... I am asking for approval by... Delaying the decision moves the migration... Decision requested: Approve the migration, staffing,...