Thank you for reading. Every day on my two walks, I listen to different podcasts. Lately, one ad keeps stopping me in my tracks. It is from Pega Systems, and it is a masterclass in what I call "Geek to English" translation.

We often see tech leaders try to manipulate the message. They want to explain the how—the architecture, the spaghetti code, the APIs. They think complexity equals value. Pega’s marketing team (and their agency) went the other way. They let the experts do their job, and the result is brilliance.

The Kitchen Metaphor

Instead of talking about "legacy technical debt," the ad uses a visceral metaphor we all understand: a restaurant kitchen.

It describes the nightmare of trying to cook a five-course meal with broken ovens and expired ingredients. That is your legacy system. You are working twice as hard for a mediocre dish. Then, it flips to the solution: a kitchen where knives never dull and recipes adapt as you cook. That is the Pega platform.

A Tip of the Hat

I recently had the opportunity to congratulate Don Schuerman (CTO at Pega) personally. It is rare to see a tech company this large commit so fully to a narrative strategy that avoids jargon.

This is a reminder that the best marketing doesn't come from the engineering team rewriting the copy. It comes when leadership steps back and lets the storytellers translate the complexity into something human.