I recently gave a talk at 1871 titled "Working with Developers as a Non-Technical Person." Below is an abstract of the talk, which will appear again at 1871 in the future. I also wanted to make the slides available, which can be found here.

OVERVIEW:

This workshop will cover best practices for working, communicating, and collaborating with a technical team, especially from the perspective of a non-technical person. It will help you understand some of the terminology (Ruby on Rails, PHP, Wordpress, Javascript, HTML/CSS, etc.). It will also help you understand some of the available technologies out there for building a web or mobile app and why and when you would choose certain ones. Lastly, it will cover best practices for the process of building software -- how to define scope & requirements, how to structure a development timeline, and how to communicate with developers.

BENEFITS OF ATTENDING:

-Learn & understand technical terminology so you can understand what your developers mean when they use industry lingo.

-Understand available technologies & when/why you should consider using each.

-Learn how to define scope & requirements in a way that will communicate your product vision to developers.

-Learn how to communicate with developers in a way that keeps you in the loop, but isn't disruptive.