Regardless of what your current role is in the business world, the odds are that you’re going to have to eventually work with a software development team. Whether you’re a founder, a product manager, or a project manager, you’re going to have to develop a comfort level with tech. Luckily, that’s not as difficult as you may think, provided you apply these strategies to building bridges with your tech teams:

1. Prioritize Capabilities Over Solutions

You want to build an e-commerce site? Great, build an e-commerce site. But simply asking software engineers for a solution (the e-commerce site) without considering the capability that you’re really trying to add (an improved customer experience) is the easiest way to set you dev team up for failure and drive away customers. Instead take time upfront to consider what you’re really trying to accomplish with your tech project.

2. Embrace the Whiteboard

Whiteboarding is a criminally underused tool for aligning teams as they work toward a common goal. Whether you’re mapping out a project timeline or drawing a system diagram, gathering stakeholders in front of the whiteboard to create a tangible picture of what you’re working on gives everyone (regardless of technological savvy) a shared view of the task at hand. Like they say, a picture is worth a thousand words—or in this case, a thousand hours of lost productivity.

3. Know Your Audience

When communicating with your development team, it’s important to remember that different people prefer to consume information in different forms. Which means that when sending, say, bug reports to your engineering lead, choose a format that works for them, not necessarily a format that works for you. But that should go both ways; it’s only fair that they take your needs into account when sending you requirements feedback.

4. Talk It Out

No matter what a given team member’s preference is for communicating, at some point in a conversation you’re going to exhaust that mode’s usefulness. (Even near–real time options like Slack have their limits.) The key to heading off miscommunication — or worse, conflict — is recognizing when you and that team member are redlining, and find a more direct way to talk. Pick up the phone, grab some face-to-face time, do whatever is necessary to facilitate a more direct conversation and clear up whatever is blocking you.

5. Talk Their Language

Generally speaking, engineers are much more literal than their more business-minded coworkers. So when you do need to go the face-to-face-communication route, skip the generalities. Ask for specifics. Say what you mean. That’s not to say you need to talk down to developers. Just keep in mind that they work better when your requests are concrete.

6. Know When to Say When

The upside of having access to multiple forms of communication is that you can always get in touch with someone. The downside of having access to multiple forms of communication is… that someone can always get in touch with you. And with increased accessibility comes the very real question of how quickly one should be expected to respond. Head off any confusion related to responsiveness within your team by setting clear expectations for what constitutes a timely reply to each form of outreach.

7. Sync Calendars—and Mindsets

A one-hour block of time has a drastically different value to a non-technical manager than it does to an engineer. As Paul Graham laid out in “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule,” those tasked with creating something—whether it’s code or content—are more productive when they can devote large, uninterrupted swaths of time to a particular task. So while a meeting here or there may not seem like a big deal to someone who’s used to a full calendar, it can be massively disruptive to someone who craves a day devoid of interruptions. It’s possible to sync those work styles, though, if managers can better understand the way engineers work and engineers respect the need for meetings by booking time at the end of the day for office hours.

8. Respect Emergencies

It can’t be overstated that how you handle emergencies can make or break your relationships with a tech team. If you’re experiencing an outage, chances are that your engineers know how to handle it; bombarding already-stressed people with your thoughts on resolving an issue will only exacerbate that issue. Instead, take a breath, trust your team, and redirect your energies toward triaging inbound requests. Not only will you smooth the path to a resolution, but you’ll also strengthen your relationship with those engineers.

9. Don’t Be Afraid to Show Vulnerability

No one likes a fraud. So if you try to fake your way through a conversation with a developer, you’re not only going to get sniffed out easily, you’re also going to build a wall between you and your engineering team. Try putting your cards on the table by admitting what you don’t know and acknowledging their expertise. Rather than a sign of weakness, it’s a sign that you’re willing to learn.

10. Embrace Your Superpower

On the other hand, don’t let yourself be intimidated by what you don’t know. The core skills of business leadership are exactly what will serve you best on tech projects that may be out of your comfort zone. Get everything out of the development team’s head and into a spreadsheet or onto a whiteboard. Take control of the situation the way you know how, and you may be surprised how quickly the pieces begin to fall into place.

Sodo runs two-day intensive workshops that help people understand and manage technical teams. Check out our workshops for business leaders and project and product managers.