Know your audience (5-year olds and managers)

I've done quite a bit of technical writing over the years and have recently noticed parallels between how managers and 5-year old Kindergartners think. When you are writing a document for justification or a technical specification you have two distinct audiences. In most companies, a justification document is written to get something or approved or funded. A technical specification (i.e. design spec, use-case, test-case) is written for a completely different audience (Normally with specialized details about a specific topic).

Most 5-year olds do not read yet. Most managers do not read what you write. 5-year olds must talk to you and try to get you to believe what they want is OK by any means possible. Getting some candy or buying something at the store comes to mind. Managers must get their jobs done by talking to you and having you do most of the work. See tha parallels.

What point am I trying to discuss? When you talk to a manager, you should know your audience and always keep a background thought process of "who am I talking to and what do they want me to do for this". The same applies to 5-year olds.

By the way, my son just started Kindergarten this fall. I'm sure there will be more interesting observations related to this topic.