Comment by kube-system

Soft skills are broad in scope, for sure.

But I’m not talking about “smooth talking” here; in response to the above example —- where engineering is asking questions that that the business things had not answered because they are presumably “unimportant” —- there is almost certainly a communication breakdown happening.

Likely, one of the following is happening:

* The questions are important to the business but engineering has failed to articulate why getting the answers are critical to the business. (Some engineers have a tendency to describe problems in the scope of how it affects their own job or task, but neglect the larger picture or fail to articulate any consequences)

* The questions actually aren’t important for the business to answer and the engineer fails to understand how their task supports the goals of the business

* The questions are important but they cannot be answered by the business. The engineer might need to gather more information before to generate actionable questions, or maybe the questions should be answered by engineering themselves.