Answer Data Questions for Non-Technical Stakeholders

As a technical person, it can be confusing sometimes how to communicate your technical findings to a stakeholder that does not come from a technical background. You stand up with your presentation and you start to talk your language and realise it’s completely going over people’s heads. A bit awkward right?

What you want to be doing is understanding how you can bridge the gap between explaining complex technical findings into actionable business insights for stakeholders to make decisions.

In this article, I will go through key elements that will help you answer data questions for your non-technical audience with ease.

Start with the Question

 
Before you start putting together your presentation or pitch, you want to start by understanding the questions that the stakeholders are asking. This will help you structure your presentation/pitch to ensure that you answer their question.

To help you structure your presentation, answer the following questions:

• What do the stakeholders want to know? Do they want to know the current trends? Outcomes that you have learned or are they interested in a specific metric?
• Is it part of the decision-making process? Does the question align with the business goal? Will it help them understand their next move?
• Based on the above, what information would the stakeholders need to know to help them understand your perspective in their language?

Speak The Same Language

 
The first thing you don’t want to do is speak in technical jargon which will have your non-technical audience more confused than ever. What you want to be doing is speaking in business terms, a language your stakeholders will most likely understand.

The only thing you want to remember when it comes to non-technical stakeholders who are part of the decision-making process is that your answer needs to relate to business outcomes. You want to:

• Focus on the impact of your findings. Does it impact revenue, and ROI, increase operational efficiency, drive more leads, etc?
• Use the language they understand, for example rather than speaking on linear behaviour or clustering techniques, use language such as correlation, decline, variation, outcome, etc.

Visualise It

 
Pictures can tell a thousand words. Visualisations can help take some complicated technical explanations and turn them into instant answers. Not everybody wants to sit there and listen, sometimes they want to see the outcomes and go deeper with visualisations and explanations in their brains.

There are various tools and technologies that you can use for example:

• Tableau
• Looker Studio
• Google Charts
• Grafana

The Answer is the Story

 
When you’re presenting, you want to structure it with one thing in mind: frame your answer as the story. The way you position it, the explanations you provide, and the questions that will be asked should all be focused on your answer.

This is the following approach you want to use:

• The problem: What are you trying to solve?
• Your findings: What insight does your data provide?
• The solution: What are the next steps based on the findings?
• Decision: What impact will the outcome have?

Wrapping Up

 
4 simple and easy steps to help you answer your data questions to even the toughest non-technical stakeholders. With the above 4, you will be able to anticipate any follow-up questions that may pop up, and you can also use this to highlight any assumptions.

All of these will help you and the non-technical stakeholders in the decision making process.
 
 

Nisha Arya is a data scientist, freelance technical writer, and an editor and community manager for KDnuggets. She is particularly interested in providing data science career advice or tutorials and theory-based knowledge around data science. Nisha covers a wide range of topics and wishes to explore the different ways artificial intelligence can benefit the longevity of human life. A keen learner, Nisha seeks to broaden her tech knowledge and writing skills, while helping guide others.