Observations
Writing Content for Tech Products: How to Talk About Complexity Honestly and Clearly
Marketing in B2B is a constant tightrope walk. On one side is marketing “hype”: loud but unrealistic promises that provoke justified anger from your technical team. On the other side lies the swamp of dull technical pedantry: precise yet impenetrable texts that bore decision-makers to tears.
It seems that you always have to choose: be bright but bend the truth a little, or be accurate but boring. Which matters more—the respect of engineers or the attention of the market?
We believe this is a false choice. The strongest, most persuasive, and most effective content is not born from compromise but from the synthesis of two fundamental principles: Radical honesty, which your CTO demands, and elegant clarity, which a marketer must ensure.
In this article, we will break down both principles. We will demonstrate how combining them makes it possible to create technical content that provokes respect from engineers and a desire to buy from the business side, rather than facepalms or boredom.
Radical Honesty (Protection from “Lies”)
This principle primarily addresses the CTO and the technical team. It is the foundation of trust. A technical audience has an incredibly sensitive “lie detector.” The slightest inaccuracy, exaggeration, or misuse of a hype term will instantly render your message useless. Trust is binary: it either exists or it does not. Once lost, it is almost impossible to earn it back. Radical honesty is your only viable strategy. It manifests itself in three rules:
Rule 1: absolute precision in terminology. Marketing loves big words: Examples include “artificial intelligence,” “real time,” and “infinite scalability.” For engineers, however, each of these terms has a precise meaning. Using them as decorative epithets demonstrates incompetence.
- Bad: “Our AI algorithm analyzes data in real time.”
- Better: “Our machine learning model (gradient boosting) processes data with a latency of no more than five seconds.” The second option is less “hype-driven,” but it is precise, honest, and commands respect.
Rule 2: Talk about trade-offs. Any engineer knows that there are no ideal solutions, only sets of trade-offs. Presenting your product in marketing materials as a “silver bullet” that solves all problems without drawbacks makes you look like an amateur. Maturity and confidence lie in honestly acknowledging the choices made.
- Bad: “Our platform is the fastest and most flexible on the market!“
- Good: “In designing the product, we prioritized maximum performance by choosing technology X, which results in higher customization complexity. Therefore, our product is ideal for those who value speed over flexibility.” This immediately filters out non-target customers and builds trust with the right ones.
Rule 3: Be open about failures. Nothing builds trust in the IT community more than an honest postmortem. A story about how your system crashed, why it happened, the conclusions you drew, and how you changed processes to prevent it from happening again is powerful content. It demonstrates your company’s culture, maturity, and commitment to quality. One such postmortem can earn you more loyal followers than ten glossy success stories.
Radical honesty may seem “not salesy enough” to a CMO, but to a CTO, it’s the only possible approach. This honesty creates an environment of trust, making dialogue about the product possible.
Elegant Clarity (Protection from “Oversimplification”)
If radical honesty is about what you say, then elegant clarity is about how you say it. This principle is primarily addressed to marketers. It protects against “oversimplification” — the attempt to make the complex primitive by losing its essence. Clarity is not simplification; it is the art of revealing the essence without getting lost in the details. It can be achieved through three engineering techniques.
Technique 1: Use “levels of abstraction.” This is a key principle with which any developer is familiar. Rather than showing the user the internals of an API, you provide a clear endpoint. The same applies to content. The truth about a product should be “packaged” differently for different audiences.
- CEO Level: “A system that reduces warehouse storage costs by 30 percent.” (Focus on the business outcome.)
- Warehouse manager level: “A system that forecasts demand and automatically calculates optimal inventory levels.” (Focus on solving a functional problem.)
- IT specialist level: “A system that uses LSTM time series to analyze historical sales data.” (Focus on technical implementation.)
Technique 2: Build “analogy bridges.” It is almost impossible to explain complex technical concepts from scratch. The most effective way is to build an analogy bridge from your product to something the person already understands well.
- Without an analogy: “Our system uses a publisher-subscriber architecture…“
- Good (with an analogy): “Imagine a radio station. Our service works like a ‘radio station’ (publisher) that broadcasts news about events, and your other services (subscribers) listen only to the news that interests them.“
Technique 3: Focus on the customer’s “job” (JTBD). Clarity is born from context. People best understand what is directly related to solving their personal task. Therefore, content should start not from a feature, but from the “job” the customer is trying to accomplish.
Good: “How to automatically identify your most loyal customers and make them a special offer.“
Bad (focus on the feature): “Introducing our new feature: Dynamic User Segmentation.“
What This Looks Like in Practice
Let’s examine how these two principles work together using the example of a hypothetical blog article titled “Our New Predictive Lead Scoring Module.”
The headline should be “How We Learned to Predict Which Customer Will Buy: A Breakdown of Our New Scoring System.”
Introduction (Clarity + Honesty): “...this system is not ‘artificial intelligence’ in the Hollywood sense. It doesn’t work miracles, but it allows us to identify sales-ready leads with up to 85 percent accuracy. However, it has one limitation: it requires at least 10,000 historical data points for training…” We honestly state the limitations.
Technical Section (Clarity + Honesty): Instead of a wall of code, we provide a simplified architecture diagram and an explanation through analogy. “The system works like an experienced sales analyst. It ‘studies’ the profiles of your best customers and looks for similar ‘patterns’ in the stream of new leads…” (Analogy for clarity.)
Business Result (Clarity): “As a result, the sales team stopped wasting time on ‘dummies’ and focused on the top 20 percent of leads, increasing conversion by 50 percent.” (Focus on JTBD and business value.)
Honesty + Clarity = Trust (and Sales)
Radical honesty wins the trust of technical specialists and the smartest customers. Elegant clarity ensures understanding for a broad business audience. Together, they create content that has both depth and persuasive power.
When a company adopts this philosophy, fundamental improvements occur. Brand reputation in the market is strengthened, as you start to be perceived as an honest and mature expert. Sales cycles shorten, because customers understand the value faster and have fewer doubts. The quality of attracted customers increases, because you immediately filter out those for whom you are not a fit.
This is the shared philosophy that allows the CMO and CTO to work as a single, well-coordinated team, creating products and content they can be proud of.
Ready to create content your technical team will be proud of and that will persuade your most demanding customers? This is exactly our core work. Let us discuss how to apply these principles to your product.
