Managing up to a non-technical CEO without losing yourself.
Translation is not dumbing down. It is the most senior skill you will ever build.
Most senior leaders lose six-plus hours a week to a translation tax: explaining their function's reality to a CEO who does not fully understand it and does not want to be told they do not.
The mistake is treating translation as dumbing down. It is not. It is selecting the one variable in your model that maps to a decision the CEO actually owns.
Capacity, technical debt, platform risk, brand spend, audit exposure, gross margin drag - none of these are decisions until you compress them to a trade-off with two named options and a recommendation.
Do this twice and the CEO starts coming to you. Do it ten times and you become the one person in the C-suite who makes meetings shorter instead of longer. That is the real promotion path.