Explain a project to non-technical stakeholders
Company: Imc
Role: Software Engineer
Category: Behavioral & Leadership
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Technical Screen
You are speaking to a non-technical audience (e.g., business stakeholder, operations team, or a friend with no engineering background).
Describe one project you worked on:
- What problem you were solving and why it mattered
- What your role and responsibilities were
- What you built/changed (high level, no jargon)
- The outcome and impact (metrics if possible)
- One challenge you faced and how you handled it
Quick Answer: This question evaluates communication, stakeholder management, and leadership competencies by requiring a succinct, non-technical description of a technical project, including problem significance, individual responsibilities, outcomes, and challenges; it is categorized under Behavioral & Leadership and targets the practical application of communication and impact-reporting rather than abstract technical knowledge. Interviewers commonly ask this to assess an engineer's ability to translate technical work for business audiences, demonstrate measurable impact and collaboration, and reveal real-world problem-solving and prioritization in cross-functional contexts.
Solution
### What interviewers are evaluating
- **Communication & empathy:** Can you adjust detail level to your audience?
- **Clarity of thinking:** Can you express goals, constraints, and trade-offs without hiding behind jargon?
- **Impact orientation:** Do you connect work to measurable results?
- **Ownership:** Do you clearly state what you did vs what the team did?
### A simple structure that works (1–2 minutes)
Use **“Context → Problem → Approach → Result → Reflection”**.
1. **Context (1–2 sentences)**
- What product/team and who the users are.
2. **Problem (1–2 sentences)**
- The pain point in business terms (cost, time, risk, revenue, user experience).
3. **Approach (3–5 bullets, jargon-free)**
- Translate engineering work into plain language.
- Replace terms like “microservices / cache / sharding” with “split into smaller components / kept frequently used data handy / spread the load across machines.”
4. **Result (1–2 sentences, ideally numbers)**
- Latency improved by X%, reduced failures by Y%, saved Z hours/week, increased conversion by A%.
5. **Reflection (optional, 1 sentence)**
- What you learned, or what you would do differently.
### How to de-jargon your explanation
- Start with **what the system does**, not how it’s implemented.
- Use **analogies** sparingly (one good analogy beats many).
- Define any necessary term in-place: “A queue (a waiting line) …”.
- Avoid internal tool names; describe purpose instead.
### Example answer (template)
> “On the payments team, we noticed customers were abandoning checkout because payments sometimes took too long or failed. My role was to improve reliability and speed. I added a ‘retry and fallback’ mechanism so temporary issues wouldn’t immediately fail a purchase, and I reorganized the flow so the most common checks happened first. We also added monitoring to alert us before customers noticed problems. After the change, payment failures dropped from X% to Y% and average checkout time improved by Z ms. The biggest challenge was ensuring we didn’t accidentally double-charge customers, so we added safeguards to ensure each payment is processed only once.”
### Common pitfalls
- **Too technical:** “I implemented Redis + Kafka + CQRS…” without explaining why.
- **No impact:** Only listing tasks, not outcomes.
- **Unclear ownership:** “We did…” without specifying your contribution.
- **No trade-offs:** Not acknowledging constraints (time, risk, compliance, cost).