The Dinner Shorthand
One-sentence job descriptions
What started with the family explanation just got more complicated. Now you need to calibrate your explanation to your audience's actual knowledge level, not your assumption — and the situation is shifting faster than your first approach can handle.
Free to play · No credit card required
Part of this story
The Family Explanation
→Your parents want to know what you do for a living. Navigate explaining your tech job to people who think Wi-Fi is magic.
Part of the quest
Explaining Tech to Non-Tech
→The board presentation, the client demo, the family dinner explanation, and the pitch that needs to land without jargon. Master the art of translating complex technical concepts into clear, compelling language.
What you'll learn from The Dinner Shorthand
This scenario focuses on One-sentence job descriptions — a critical skill inside the broader technology domain. You'll face a decision where the instinctive response is often the wrong one. After you make your choice, you'll see exactly what happened in the other person's head and why it mattered. The scenario is part of The Family Explanation, a full interactive story inside the Explaining Tech to Non-Tech quest.
Skills you'll build in Explaining Tech to Non-Tech
More scenarios in this quest
Your mom asks what you do for a living — again — and you open your mouth to explain cloud infrastructure to someone who just asked you to fix the printer over Christmas.
This is the moment you've been building toward. Pitching a technical solution to non-technical decision-makers who control the budget — except now the stakes are real and there's no rehearsal. What you do next matters.
You've faced the hardest part. Now turn what you've learned into something sustainable — a way to calibrate your explanation to your audience's actual knowledge level, not your assumption not just today, but every time this situation returns.
Ready to practice One-sentence job descriptions?
Thousands of people use Questly to build the conversation skills that matter most.
Play this scenario free →