I’m a business analyst, and a big part of my job involves working with engineers and product managers to gather detailed, in-depth information. For reasons I don’t fully understand (though I have my theories), I often find that engineers, in particular, seem oddly reluctant to share the information I need. This makes the process more challenging than I’d like. Does anyone have tips or tricks for building trust with engineers to encourage them to share information more willingly and quickly?
EDIT: Here's a summary with more details for those who requested more info: I’m working on optimizing processes related to our in-house file ingestion system, which we’ve been piecing together over time to handle tasks it wasn’t originally designed for. The system works well enough now, but it’s still very much a MacGyver setup—duct tape and dental floss holding things together. We got through crunch time with it, but now the goal is to refine and smooth everything out into a process that’s efficient, clear, and easy for everyone to follow.
Part of this involves getting all the disparate systems and communication silos talking to each other in a unified way—JIRA is going to be the hub for that. My job is to make sure that the entire pipeline—from ticket creation, to file ingestion, to processing and output—is documented thoroughly (but not pedantically) and that all teams involved understand what’s required of them and why.
Where I’m running into challenges is in gathering the nitty-gritty technical details from engineers. I need to understand how their processes work today, how they’ve solved past issues, and what they think would make things better in an ideal world. But I think there’s some hesitation because they’re worried about “incriminating” themselves or having mistakes come back to haunt them.
I’ve tried to make it clear that I’m not interested in punishing anyone for past decisions or mistakes—on the contrary, I want to learn from them to create a better process moving forward. My goal is to collaborate and make their jobs easier, not harder, but I think building trust and comfort will take more time.
If anyone has strategies for improving communication with engineers—especially around getting them to open up about technical details without fear—I am all ears.
there’s a few things here that trigger red flags for me:
oh good! because it’s probably ill-defined and nobody really knows and figuring that out involves a lot of reading other people’s shit code and we have work to do
oh you mean do worry - you want to know exactly how it works… sorry bud, no time, that’s a lot of energy
ugghghh documentation is for people that don’t understand that documentation is out of date the second you write it: don’t drag me into your futile attempt to make a static artifact that i’ll need to maintain in the future when i update a living system
okay but that’s really dismissive… this is work that people have put in - even if it’s shit and everyone knows it’s shit, it’s disheartening to have things thrown out… and what they do now they know how it works, they know the caveats… you’re talking about coming in, getting a cursory understanding (what you think you can understand everyone’s problem when the people that built the thing don’t have the full picture?) and then planning out and telling them what to do
if you want help from engineers, ask them for help to build a new thing: don’t ask them for help to explain something so you can tell them what to build. we’re creative, and we love solving problems and we hate robotically implementing someone else’s vision