This is why most tech articles suck

If you would have said to sixteen-year-old Anna that when she turned twenty-one, she would be employed as a marketing intern at an IoT company, she would have said two things:

"What is IoT?"

"There is not a chance I could do that."

And now, here I sit in front of my company-bought laptop, at the ripe young age of twenty-three: I do product marketing full-time and I know what IoT is (most days). Product marketing is like marketing, only more. More value propositions, more back-and-forth with stakeholders, more market research, more go-to-market strategies, more acronyms and more jargon-filled meeting room discussions. Among other responsibilities, I write articles and I read them - a lot of them. A good portion of my day is spent researching, writing, and reading a fair amount about IoT.

I read a lot of the same stuff. Big words, long acronyms, and highly technical documents. Despite the movement to democratise technology, the supporting literature has yet to catch up. Industries are trying to convince the every-man that technology is important but they seem to be missing the mark by losing the reader in the first two sentences.

How do you expect someone to know the value of NAS-RADIUS architecture when your reader can't understand how networking works, to begin with? If I lost you there, that's my point. There are very few people that will know what all these complex things are let alone understand their value and how they could dramatically change the way a business operates. And while it's highly necessary that this kind of complexity exists, it shouldn't be the only literature that gets passed around.

It's no secret that second to resources, the biggest factor preventing people and businesses from adopting technology and embracing digitalisation is the fear of the unknown. Inertia. Clearly, we're not doing a terribly good job of making the unknown in tech become known.

I have been seeing an increasing number of posts on LinkedIn talking about the importance of storytelling in data analysis. And it's an important discussion, because yes, in order to benefit from hunting your prey, you have to know how to use the spear, and how to throw it. But to be able to throw a spear versus being able to kill for your dinner with that same spear are two very different things. It's about time we bring that argument to the world of tech at large.

I'll go first. Hi everyone, my name is Anna and I hate tech articles. Most of them. They use too many long words, there is not a drop of storytelling and they seem to get off on the fact that you're more confused after you read the piece than you were before you read it. Everything is one giant buzzword. "Leverage your data", "accelerate your TTM", "custom x,y,z to kickstart your venture", "redundant network architecture" - the list goes on. I noticed that there was very limited material available explaining IoT and supporting tech stacks in a way that was understandable to everyone. When I say everyone, I mean your grandpa, your mum and maybe even your Spanish-speaking cousin. I started changing the way I write. Instead of using my research to bolster my learnings in a way that forced acronyms as long as my surname and terms-so-long-you-had-to-hyphenate-them-to-make-them-whole, I started learning and writing about IoT in such a way that humans could understand it.

I use analogies, I draw pictures, I compare protocols to message-carrying pigeons, and I write stories about baking brownies to illustrate the 'build-or-buy' debate in IoT.

Not everyone agrees with me.

I sent an article talking about SaaS and PaaS to a tech publication and the appropriate business cases for each - you know the drill. I used a baking analogy to drive my argument home and received good feedback on my delicious take on software stacks. The publication, however, did not share the sentiment. They said they loved the article. It was well-written but they will have to remove the baking analogy because it didn't suit their audience. I said "sure" because maybe cheesecake wasn't their cup of tea?

They sent me the 'amended' version back. And what did they do? Acronyms. Long sentences. Terms-so-long-they-had-to-hyphenate-them-to-make-them-whole.

I am sure this is not the last time my articles will be amended, maybe even rejected, and littered full of overwhelming terminology. And I'm not perfect: I still have a habit of using superlongwordywords every now and then. The saying goes that there is a time and a place for everything. But I am sick of seeing the same kind of article attempting to encourage the adoption of technology - for the few that can understand it.

I wouldn't keep writing the way that I do if people didn't find it valuable. If using a baking analogy, or comparing a RADIUS to a bodyguard in a nightclub is what helps my grandpa understand the world of technology, then I know that I'm doing my job. If comparing our technology stack to a burger is what it takes to get a client to understand the importance of IoT in their business, then I know I'm doing my job.

Technology is ever-changing. It's rapidly evolving, and there are mind-blowing innovations released every day. If there are engineers, developers and professionals dedicating their livelihoods to building tools that truly make the world of business and human beings better, I want to be on the side of encouragement, not intimidation. My goal is to educate people and businesses on the 'what' so they can truly understand the 'why'. I leave it to the Builders to know about the 'how'.

So, here I sit in front of my company-bought laptop, at the ripe young age of twenty-three: I do product marketing full-time and I know what IoT is (most days). I write articles about IoT, devices, technology and software as I go about learning. And if my articles don't teach you at least one thing, then I'm doing my job wrong. It's an added bonus if they make you smile.

We shouldn’t need complex jargon-filled sentences to communicate the value of a product, nor explain its value in your world.