What are the roles of the four non-technical employees who have complained? You mentioned elsewhere that they are submitting requests directly to this engineer--what sorts of requests?
When I've encountered and had to help solve for this sort of thing in the past, there was usually something deeper at the root of it. In one case it was the fact that people on the marketing team were not able to formulate their engineering asks to a sufficiently technical degree, or understand the ideal workflow of an engineer. So what would happen is engineers would get frustrated fielding these requests because they lacked most of the necessary information needed to build anything, and were constantly asked to support multiple significant scope changes throughout the process.
That would understandably frustrate many people. But once we identified that as one of the big issues, we were able to develop process to help address it. Things like documenting commonly asked technical specifics up front, or setting milestones and making sure everyone understood the impact of changing things helped streamline things.
Another big piece of that was having someone who could bridge that gap from a communication standpoint. That ended up being me for a lot of it, which was fun since while I am a marketer, I'm fairly technical and usually get on very well with engineers. If two people can't speak a common language, sometimes the easiest solution is to work through a third person who can translate.
When I've encountered and had to help solve for this sort of thing in the past, there was usually something deeper at the root of it. In one case it was the fact that people on the marketing team were not able to formulate their engineering asks to a sufficiently technical degree, or understand the ideal workflow of an engineer. So what would happen is engineers would get frustrated fielding these requests because they lacked most of the necessary information needed to build anything, and were constantly asked to support multiple significant scope changes throughout the process.
That would understandably frustrate many people. But once we identified that as one of the big issues, we were able to develop process to help address it. Things like documenting commonly asked technical specifics up front, or setting milestones and making sure everyone understood the impact of changing things helped streamline things.
Another big piece of that was having someone who could bridge that gap from a communication standpoint. That ended up being me for a lot of it, which was fun since while I am a marketer, I'm fairly technical and usually get on very well with engineers. If two people can't speak a common language, sometimes the easiest solution is to work through a third person who can translate.