Writing people can understand and act on. Writing that ties several threads and abstraction levels when different audiences will be consuming it. For example, when writing an email and the recipients are executives, managers, sales people, engineers, advisors, and advisors, I write what I call "fractal communication": an email that makes sense at different abstraction and "zoom" levels. A pre-requisite to do this is to know your audience and what matters to them, and how they view things.
I'll write an email that describes the high level objectives and the strategy I think will lead to success, then describe why I think it is true, then describe the hurdles, and then go deeper for what needs to happen right to the issue number on our issue tracker, and a pesky line of code or pull request on a third-party library.
Everyone has a receptor to bind to or a port to plug into.
It is also useful to write the "bottom line up front", or "BLUF"[0]. Conclusion, then the underlying research and data that lead you to reach that conclusion. If there are actions people need to take, write those at the top properly tagging the people who need to do them.
Another useful "skill" is "problem solving". We're a tiny boutique consultancy specializing in machine learning, and we have good outcomes working with our clients because we spend the necessary time to extract the problem out of our clients and clearly define it, and then solve that problem. We're not "AI enthusiasts/influencers" and we don't shy away from telling clients they don't need machine learning for the problem we identified. We've been approached by many who want the stereotypical "AI blockchain IoT" and we don't like solutionism.
Books:
- "General Methods for Solving Physics Problems". It is a book that recognized the problem many students have: they know the formulas and laws but they don't where to apply them, when, and how to know what a problem is, or when a problem is solved. Its definitions are delightful.
- "The Complete Problem Solver" by John R. Hayes. The book This is not a quizz collection, but an abstract way to think about problems, and then practical techniques to solve them.
- I recently discovered a book titled "Cracked It!: How to Solve Big Problems and Sell Solutions Like Top Strategy Consultants". I only skimmed the table of contents for now and seen the authors talk about it, and it looks like what we do with clients.
- "Change by Design" by Tim Brown. There are many useful concepts in there, but that also describes our approach, especially when they talk about "desirability, feasibility, viability".
Finding the right questions to ask, identifying the problem, then solving it will save you.
The skill of reading and synthesis is useful when diving deep in a domain. We work in diverse sectors and industries, and we must quickly be able to communicate with domain experts to define problems and find solutions. There's a large amount of reading and understanding to do. That is valuable for the project itself, but also for subsequent projects.
Another extremely useful skill is interviewing. We talk a lot with domain experts, and we must know how to extract problems from what they describe, frame the conversation, drive them to explain more, etc.
Generally speaking, there are many skills like design, "business", sales, marketing, that are very useulf.
- [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLUF_(communication)