Clarity

Technical clarity means non-technical decision makers have good-enough practical understanding of what changes they can make to their software systems. Without it, VPs and product leaders make decisions in the dark. With it, they can actually run an engineering organization. The default state is very low clarity because software is genuinely complicated. Even senior engineers working on a system often can't definitively answer basic questions about how it works without checking the code first.

When you provide technical clarity, you're hiding your uncertainty. You might be 80% confident about whether a rollback will work safely, but saying "I think so, though I can't be sure since my understanding isn't perfect" is useless. The VP asking you has even less context than you do. That's why they're asking. They need you to commit to yes or no, and only surface caveats when the risk is extreme. Most of your technical worries aren't relevant information to them. They only have so many mental bits to spare on technical details. Fill those bits with what matters: what's possible, what's impossible, what's risky.

This feels dishonest to many engineers. They think careful, technically-sound engineers should communicate the exact truth in all its detail. But clarity for non-technical decision makers necessarily means simplified understanding. When you're the technical advisor, simplification in service of being understood isn't lying. It's doing your job. The engineers who refuse to commit unless they're 100% certain are abdicating their responsibility to help the organization make good technical decisions.

Being good at this requires three things: good taste for knowing which risks to mention and which to omit, deep technical understanding from actually shipping code and delivering projects, and the confidence to present simplified pictures when you're only 80-90% sure. Engineers who can do this reliably become the go-to advisors for senior leadership. They get positioned on the most important teams and projects. Not because they're playing politics, but because they're solving the highest-leverage problem in the organization: helping people who need to make decisions actually make them.