Don't Stop at Writing Code, Create Business Value

Knowing the business and its needs/problems can help you to grow faster.

If you don’t know WHAT and WHY, you can’t think of HOW.

For any organization/customer, you are not just writing code but contributing toward the business and helping it grow. In that case, knowing the business needs; problems of the organization/customer is very important.

Once you know the business needs of the company/customer you are working with. It will become clear where your specific tasks fit in and how it contributes to the vision of the organization/customer.

To Align with the business needs, you should learn the following before starting any project

1. Who the application is for (you should know the users and their expectations).

2. What the objective of the application you are working on is

3. The values that the application offers

4. The impact it will have on business

5. How it is used

6. What the priorities and deadlines for the given project are

7. All the documents, written for the given project.

8. If there is anything similar that already exists in the organization or outside(you don’t need to reinvent the wheel).

9. What is the vision of the company?

10. How does the company’s business model work?

11. How does that application fit into the organization?

12. What is it that makes the product important for customers/users?

13. How can your expertise fit in there and What else do you need to learn?

To collect this information, talk to as many people as you can in the same domain , talk to your colleagues, customer service team, sales team and product owners. Understand what they think about product and understand the pain of customer.

You don’t need to know everything about the strategy of the company or the financial details of all operations.

Knowing the basic business needs will help you

1. By Combining your business knowledge and technical expertise you can create better solutions.

2. You will have a common vision with the company/customer and it will be helpful while discussing any feature or user requirements.

3. Asking all the necessary questions will help you and your stakeholder/PO/BA to realize if anything is missed during the definition of the project.

4. It will help you to estimate better and prioritize.

5. You’ll be able to work faster because you know how everything should work and why.

6. You will win a lot of time in feedback loops. when you’re developing the feature and testing it, you’ll know what it should do and how it should feel like rather than having to wait for business feedback.

7. As an Engineer confident in the business domain, you can take a step back and ask more questions rather than accepting requirements as it is. It will also help you to identify an even better solution, identify possible flaws and point out errors.

8. Knowing what cause you are contributing to will give you sense of purpose.

Your job is not to write code. it is to create business value.

Ask a lot of questions, and make sure you understand what you work on, who you work for, and why you do it. It will save you a lot of time and improve the quality of the work.

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Also published here.