The most employable technical people aren’t the best builders
What I learned watching good engineers disappear from spreadsheets
This is Empathy Elevated - your weekly guide and shortcut to mastering emotional intelligence through the power of empathy. Last week, I did a live with Dennis Collins about The Truth About EQ at Work. Missed it? Catch up here!
I am excited to announce a guest on Empathy Elevated today, Mike Watson!
Mike has spent the last 15 years in tech, primarily in fintech product roles. He is currently working as a product owner in the auto finance space. Separately, he has built mobile apps leveraging AI with several revenue-generating (non-hobby) apps within the app store since January 2026. Amazing!
Today, Mike takes on a deep dive on why technical people are not always the best builders, what that means, and what to do about it.
Connect with Mike and subscribe to Product Party!
I’ve been in tech long enough to watch the same pattern across four or five rounds of layoffs.
The people who get cut aren’t always the worst at their jobs. Sometimes they’re the best technically. But when leadership stares at a spreadsheet deciding who stays, technical excellence isn’t what makes someone visible. Translation is.
The technical people I’ve watched stay employable through every cycle aren’t the best builders. They’re the best translators. Up to leadership. Down to the engineers. Sideways across teams that don’t share a vocabulary.
This isn’t a magic shield. People with great communication skills get cut, too. But when communication misses happen, people who deserve to stay can quietly slip under the radar.
They’re doing the work. They just can’t make it legible to anyone above or beside them.
In 2021, I was the PM running an affiliate marketing implementation at an auto refi startup. The VP had a simple ask: a pipeline where marketing and our affiliate partners could exchange data, track conversions, and get paid.
The engineers had no idea what any of it meant. There were no affiliate experts in the building.
So I learned it myself. Postbacks. S2S tracking. Conversion windows. Net 30 payout cycles. Picked up the vocabulary slowly, with a lot of stupid questions.
I walked Engineering through the product. Walked the VP through what was technically possible. Sat in meetings between two groups who needed each other but couldn’t talk.
The VP would say he needed real-time payout reconciliation.
I’d turn to engineering: match conversion events to completed loan applications and flag mismatches for audit within 24 hours.
Engineering would say the network’s webhook format wouldn’t map to our schema.
I’d turn back: we can build this, but we need a week for a translation layer, and we need to decide now whether mismatches route to finance or marketing.
Both sides nodded. Different reasons. Same nod.
The project shipped. Affiliates got paid.
The part I want to flag isn’t the project outcome. It’s what translation actually does for visibility.
When two different leaders can describe what you contributed in their own terms, you exist in two different rooms. When only one can, you exist in one. When neither can, you’re a line item. That’s the math layoffs run on, whether anyone says it out loud or not.
Doing the work is necessary and not sufficient. The people who decide your fate often don’t speak your language. If nobody on that side of the room can describe what you do in their own terms, you become invisible to the decision.
The good news about translation is that it isn’t a personality trait. It’s a set of habits, and most of them are small enough to start practicing this week.
A few that build legibility over time:
Translate up. When leadership asks for something hard, lead with what’s possible inside the constraint, not the constraint itself. “Two weeks if we accept X tradeoff. Six weeks for the full version. Which matters more?” “We can’t” is a wall.
Translate down. When a leader says “we need to improve engagement,” don’t push the fog onto your team. Reshape it. “Leadership wants a seven-day return rate from 22% to 30% by the end of the quarter. Here are three things we could test.”
Translate sideways. If two teams are using the same word to mean different things, name it. “Quick check, when sales says ‘qualified lead,’ do we mean what marketing means?” That sentence has saved more projects than I can count.
None of these requires a title change or a new role. They happen in the meetings you’re already in. Do them consistently for a year, and the people one and two levels above you will start describing your work in language that didn’t exist on your last performance review.
That’s the shift. Not “Mike does data infrastructure.” But “Mike’s the one who keeps marketing and engineering pointed at the same problem.”
That’s the description that survives a spreadsheet.
Layoffs aren’t fair. I’ve watched great people get cut for reasons that had nothing to do with their work.
But I’ve also watched solid technical people stay because three different leaders could describe what they did.
Don’t be the person whose value only one team can see.
Subscribe to Mike Watson and his Substack Product Party
 | A guest post by
|
Thanks for sharing! I would add that that’s why we need PM and EM to be the cushions and why most successful engineers are those who can translate both sides