Soft skills like empathy, communication, and decision-making endure far longer than technical expertise, cutting risk and lifting team performance in product development.
Technical expertise fades quickly as tools, frameworks, and architectures become obsolete, but the ability to collaborate, make decisions, and empathize persists and even strengthens over time. The article points out that the half-life of technical skills has dropped from a decade in the 1980s to under two years today, making long-term investment in soft skills a strategic advantage.
A vivid example shows a programmer demoing a feature to nurses that inadvertently suggested giving newborns Saltine crackers. The technical mistake was quickly mitigated not by fixing code but by the project manager's soft skills: calming the clinicians, acknowledging concerns, and restoring trust. Without empathy the project would have stalled.
The piece argues that soft skills reduce product risk by turning uncertainty into informed, collaborative action. Empathy helps teams understand user contexts, clear communication builds trust, and strong collaboration prevents small misunderstandings from exploding into costly rework. When these capabilities are weak, teams pay with delays, damaged relationships, and lost opportunities.
Leaders who invest deliberately in soft skills create durable capabilities that compound across teams and survive technological churn. Training, coaching, and hands-on practice in facilitation, decision-making, and collaboration yield teams that navigate pressure points smoothly, make better choices, and maintain high performance over the long haul.
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