What to bring to a technology conversation

A list of products is a weak brief. The useful facts are how many people depend on the systems, what is already in place, what fails, and whether the failure can wait a quarter or cannot wait a week.

Separate support from security from infrastructure. A password problem, an outage, and a network that cannot reach a second office are three requests. They can share a conversation. They should not share a vague label like “IT.”

Say what must keep working while a change is made. The constraint is often the Tuesday morning the company cannot skip, not the diagram of the ideal stack.

If you do not know the product names, describe the task people are trying to finish. That description is enough to route the work.