Women own the most underrated skill in tech: Translation

Even the most innovative technology is useless if you can't make sense of it. Take AI, for instance; AI is making teams faster at everything, from writing to prototyping to troubleshooting. But speed doesn't help much if you're pointed at the wrong problem. If you ask ChatGPT a vague question, you tend to get a vague, yet confident, answer in return. Translation is the missing puzzle piece; and if we don't take the time to translate our goals and ideas into something concrete, sloppy AI outputs are the least of our worries. 

After 20 years of working in and around networks, I've built my career on translation. It's a crucial skill for getting teams aligned and moving, for turning "we should" into "we will." You not only need the technical expertise to ask the right questions but also the strategic outlook to scope projects and set metrics for success. There's no question that this is high-impact work. So why is it often treated as a mere "nice-to-have"? 

This perception has a huge impact not only on organizational success but also on individual careers. It wrongfully defines who is "technical," who can be trusted to lead projects, and who gets promoted. 

But the rise of AI also brings a reckoning of sorts. Soon, we'll see that the organizations that thrive are the ones that treat translation as core technical work and recognize the people - mainly women - who are delivering it. 

AI Makes Translation More Valuable, Not Less

"Prompt engineering" may be a new term, but the skills to do it are not. Humans, like AI, can only succeed if you tell them how. 

Imagine you're building a prototype with AI. Sure, the tool you use matters - but what matters more is the quality of your inputs. If you offer a clear problem statement, constraints, and criteria for success, you're more likely to get a useful output. If you only provide a vague outline, odds are you'll get less-than-desirable results. 

This pattern shows up everywhere, whether you're managing AI or humans: to achieve your goals, you need to be able to articulate them clearly and in context. 

Ambiguity Is Expensive

If a customer complains that an application is slow, they don't care about BGP, DNS, or packet loss. They're asking a business question: How will this impact our performance, our risk, or our revenue?

To answer that question, you need to understand the layered, technical reality that underpins it. Perhaps the cause was a network change gone wrong or a dependency no one knew existed. The business concern may seem simple, but the technical explanation rarely is. 

Translation lives in this gap between the question and the reality. If that gap is left unfilled, it can mean stalled projects, wasted budget, and higher risk. Forward-thinking organizations can reduce this gap by investing in translation as a skill, choosing leaders who are able to drive technical outputs while always keeping business impact in mind. 

Translation as Invisible Labour

Women in tech often end up doing translation work early in their careers, whether they choose to or not. They're the ones writing documentation, onboarding new hires, and smoothing communication between teams. The women who do it well are the ones you rely on when things are unclear - but they don't always get the credit that comes with the responsibility.

Translation can be a career accelerator, priming skilled individuals for leadership. But more often than not, it's a form of invisible labor, a "career tax," especially when it's not tied directly to business outcomes. If this sounds familiar, the goal is not to stop translating but rather to make sure your efforts are tied to measurable, strategic goals like cost savings and revenue generation. 

A Practical Framework

Translation is not a "soft skill." It is a technical skill, full stop. 

The next time you're leading a meeting or kicking off a project, you can exercise your translation skills by asking yourself and your team a few key questions:

• What are we trying to achieve, and why? 

• Do we have any constraints in terms of time, risk, or budget? 

• What trade-offs are we willing to make? 

• How can we measure success? 

• If we succeed, can we repeat this process? 

These questions slice through ambiguity, ensuring that your teams are completely aligned before you start spending valuable resources. Over time, this discipline will be ingrained in your team culture. It'll make meetings more decisive, projects more focused, and outcomes more measurable - which you can use to prove the value of your work. 

This Women's History Month, it's worth asking how we can define the impact of the women who are quietly shaping the tech industry and beyond. If we want to build more effective teams, we need to name translation for what it is: core technical leadership. And if we want a more equitable industry, we need to recognize the women who have been doing this work all along.