What Communicators and Engineers Can Teach Each Other
I don’t want to age myself, so I won’t tell you how long I’ve worked in communications, but I’m fairly certain my parents still can’t explain what I do for a living.
And while my high school-aged son might be able to give my job some justice, it doesn’t look like a career in communications is his path. Lately, he’s started talking about wanting to become an engineer.
It got me thinking about our two very different career paths. Comms careers aren’t always as easy to define as engineering careers, but the more I thought about the two, the more similarities I saw.
Both start with a problem to solve. Both require understanding how interconnected pieces work together. Both involve testing assumptions, adjusting when something doesn’t work, and finding a better way forward.
But there are also a few things we could learn from each other.
What can communications learn from engineering?
Communications can borrow some of the rigor engineers bring to solving problems, particularly around their willingness to look closely at what worked, what didn’t, and why.
One practice I’d love to see us borrow more from engineering culture is the post-mortem. This is a structured look at what happened, why it happened, and what should change next time.
Google’s Site Reliability Engineering teams, for example, use post-mortems to understand what went wrong, identify contributing causes, and put actions in place to reduce the chances it happens again. The point isn’t to assign blame. It’s to learn.
As communicators, we recap campaigns all the time. We show all the coverage, the numbers, key learnings, and the beautiful logos on the results slide. But a recap isn’t a post-mortem. A post-mortem digs deeper.
Maybe the story wasn’t strong enough. Maybe timing was the problem. Maybe one niche placement delivered more value than 10 larger ones. Or maybe everything worked beautifully, and we should understand why that happened, too.
The point is to learn something before moving on.
What should a communications post-mortem ask?
A communications post-mortem should be a structured review of a completed campaign that asks four questions:
What did we expect to happen? Write the prediction down before the campaign, not after.
What actually happened? Coverage, yes, but also how a story continued to build momentum and trust via the Trust Stack.
What surprised us? The gap between one and two is where the learning lives.
What will we do differently because of it? A post-mortem with no changed behavior is just a recap with better lighting.
How can systems thinking make communications better?
Another engineering process communications can borrow from is systems thinking, or “thinking about something as a system: the parts, the chunks, the pieces and the relationships between them.” It’s seeing how individual parts interact and work together instead of evaluating each one in isolation. That’s particularly relevant to communications, where almost nothing happens in a vacuum.
Most campaigns, to maximize success, require cross-functional collaboration, spanning media, social, owned content, influencers, brand advocates, executives, events, and search. All of this is happening while competitors, news cycles, customer reactions, and internal priorities are constantly changing.
Yet plans may still look like lists: press release, media outreach, influencers, awards, executive thought leadership. Check, check, and check.
And while I do love a good list, systems thinking asks a better question: How are these things supposed to work together, and how are they working together?
Executive thought leadership might build credibility for the next announcement while influencer content might reach an audience that later encounters the brand through earned media. Sometimes one timely conversation is what turns into an ongoing reporter relationship.
This is particularly relevant in product communications, but the principle applies to almost any campaign. Instead of asking only, “Did this tactic perform?” ask, “What role did it play?”
What can engineers learn from communicators about storytelling?
If communicators can borrow engineering’s rigor, engineers can borrow communicators’ obsession with the audience. Engineers tend to think from an “if we build it, they will come” mentality, but marketers know this is rarely the case.
We ask one question constantly: Who will this matter to, and why?
When someone spends months or years immersed in something, its importance can feel self-evident, knowing how difficult it was to design and build, and why every detail matters.
The audience on the other side doesn’t.
Good communicators don’t need to “dumb down” complexity; we translate it into who it benefits, and why.
Part of our job as communicators is to think like an outsider, no matter how well we know the subject. We have to step outside what we already know and ask what someone hearing about it for the first time will find interesting, useful, and worth paying attention to.
The people closest to the work often have the best stories, but they don’t always realize which parts will matter to everyone else. We surface those parts.
Are engineering and communications really that different?
Of course they are. I’m not going to pretend my communications career has prepared me to build a bridge, and I truly hope no one ever gives me that assignment.
But the two disciplines have more in common than I thought before my son started talking about engineering.
Both are about solving problems, understanding how the pieces fit together, questioning assumptions, and creating something that ultimately has to work for actual people.
If my son does become an engineer, I hope he takes some of the same things into his career that I’ve learned in mine: ask good questions, understand who you’re solving the problem for, and learn from the things that didn’t go according to plan.
And if, 10 years from now, I can actually explain what he does for a living, he’ll already have one up on me.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is systems thinking in communications?
Systems thinking in communications means evaluating how campaign activities interact — earned media, social, owned content, influencers, executive visibility, search — instead of scoring each tactic in isolation. The question changes from “did this tactic perform?” to “what role did it play?”
What is a communications post-mortem?
A communications post-mortem is a structured review of a completed campaign that asks four questions: what did we expect to happen, what actually happened, what surprised us, and what will we do differently. It is modeled on the blameless post-mortem used by engineering teams, and its purpose is learning rather than blame.
What is the difference between a campaign recap and a post-mortem?
A campaign recap reports what happened: coverage, impressions, results. A post-mortem compares what a team predicted against what occurred, identifies what surprised them, and commits to a change. A recap closes a campaign; a post-mortem changes the next one.
How can engineering culture improve communications?
Engineering culture contributes two practices that transfer directly to communications: the blameless post-mortem, which turns a finished campaign into a documented lesson, and systems thinking, which evaluates how channels reinforce each other rather than scoring them separately.
Why is storytelling important for technical teams?
Storytelling translates technical expertise into relevance by answering four questions an expert tends to skip: what problem were you solving, why did it need solving, what is different now, and who does that difference matter to. The people closest to the work usually hold the best story and rarely know which part of it matters to everyone else.
