Building what really matters

***Q: ***What’s an example of something that a team works on that does not matter to the business versus where it does matter to the business? Is it like you deciding what’s high ROI for the product or something else?

Here’s an example from a client:

The CEO may say that the website redesign is the top priority, but if you dig deep enough with calibrated questions, you’ll find they want an outcome.

Our goal is to attract premium brands to our platform. But, our current design is putting them off them because it looks dated.

Make it pretty → get premium brands → enable selling higher margin items → profit.

Now we’re getting somewhere. We want more profit, specifically through partnering with premium brands.

One way is to rebuild the website completely. It will take a while and cost a lot.

But maybe we can slap a new coat of paint on the old codebase and call it a win. Put the time gained into helping marketing prepare some fantastic landing pages.

It’s not the only answer, but it’s a way to get to the outcome faster and cheaper.

The thing is…

Business people are often not very good at articulating what outcome they want. They want a new website, a new feature a new product.

But unless you can define success, you may end up allocating resources to pursue the wrong solution.

Tech people are often not very good at finding out what outcome the client wants.

And here’s where my role comes in.

I help bridge the gap between the two sides so that the business gets what it wants faster and the dev team has a better time building what matters.

P.S. Next time you get a task, try to ask good questions to find out what the real positive outcome is. Perhaps you can come up with a better solution to achieve the desired result.

*The journey is often more important than the destination. *

Yours,

Taj