Enhancing Technical Podcast Quality: Addressing 11 Common Listener Frustrations
We all have unique interests and nuances of what pleases and engages us with technical podcasts.
I listen to many hours of podcasts per week and get exposed to many ideas, techniques and analogies.
No question that continuously producing episodes is time and effort-consuming and most are enriching and enjoyable. Some suffer from some childhood illnesses and improve as they develop and receive feedback from the audience.
Every once in a while though, there is an episode that really disappoints, and not because of grammar mistakes or an unfamiliar accent. Not everyone is a native speaker and that’s great for diversity and inclusion (although I believe it can be painful for native speakers to hear “freak control” or “distruption”).
And yes, I am well aware that criticizing others who make an effort to generate value is easy and unfair. I never produced a podcast. I only participated as a guest about effective leadership and engineering management curriculum and I was far from perfect myself. Heck, I even have mistakes in my blog posts! It takes practice.
Technical podcast quality frustrations
- Low sound quality — high background noise, low volume, robotic voice sound, or anything else that makes it hard to understand and follow
- Uhhs — extensive use of filler words (eh, ehm, uhm, so, right, like) that distract and impede the flow of the idea and might damage the speaker’s credibility.
Fun fact: at Toast Masters, at the end of every meeting, the “grammarian” for that evening lets each speaker know how many filler words they used - Halo guest — not challenging anything the guest talks about, abundant use of “sounds great”, “makes total sense”, or other compliments
- Novice guest — a guest that is presented as an expert in an industry, methodology or function, only to find out they describe the happy path with apologizing for only having started to use the technique or using a small portion of it, unable to dive deep
- Anecdotes — sharing information that is based on their own limited and unique experience as a global truth, e.g. a 7-year career in 3 companies.
“The plural of anecdote is not data” - Self-promotion — a guest that is obviously marketing their book or course, giving very little value, more teasers and referring to their paid materials
- False information — late realizations, outdated information and techniques, bad advice, e.g.:
We started experimenting with cross-functional teams, not separate frontend and backend ones
A manager of managers doesn’t need to have 1:1s
A manager must understand their direct’s thoughts and intentions before giving feedback
For a winning résumé, add “objective” paragraph and hobbies - Not answering — like skilled politicians, guests answering only what they really want, and diverging when they don’t have a good answer or it wouldn’t serve their purpose
- Trivialities — information that even a complete beginner gains no value from, like
“We should have good documentation”
“We should have good communication”
“We should resolve conflicts”
“The fewer changes we make, the more the system is stable”
Thank you, Captain Obvious - Assuming everyone is facing the same — small startups are different from corporates. B2B is different from B2C. Web SaaS is different from medical hardware. VC-backed companies are different from bootstrapped profitable ones. Not everyone is using Scrum.
- Assuming knowledge — episodes that claim to be introductory level content but mention terms without explaining, like “Kubernetes control plane”, “IP planning”, “flux capacitator”
Addressing
- Enhancing the sound quality of the recording, removing background noise
- Editing out filler words
- Asking challenging questions and steering the conversation to bring value
- Retroactively adding explanations or disclaimers
- Setting the right expectations in the episode’s title and show notes
- Archiving or redoing episodes
My hope is that they do improve and provide an excellent experience and even more value.
