A common mistake I see a lot is letting business analysts drive the technology. Business analysts, should identify the problems of the business. That is the role’s basic function. However, what I often see instead are the business analysts driving the technology choices and direction. What is worse, is the technical leadership often defers to them when the corporate culture is not in balance.
Let me explain. The process of developing software is part manual labor/logical in nature and part art form. This cliche is quite accurate and is often what drives people to software development. There is a logical direction and yet a very creative outlet as well. There is art to providing solutions that are usable, scalable, maintainable, and perform. In fact, each of these areas can be disciplines unto themselves. A corporate entity that has hired or developed domain expertise in these areas would be silly not to leverage them. Unfortunately, this is exactly what happens when a Product Manager or Business Analysts tells the technical staff how a problem should be solved. This has huge repercussions later as the product becomes difficult to maintain, support, and extend. What is worse, these problem are technical in nature and rarely bubble back out to the business departments that created them in the first place by driving the technical direction of the product.
So how does this happen? How do the product managers and business analysts become the driving force in a product. Well, lets first start by looking at what makes a technology company successful. Technology Businesses don’t succeed or fail on the technology alone. There are a lot of moving parts within a business: sales, product, marketing, support, development, accounting, human-resources, etc. Each of these parts makes up an important part of the business. Balancing these to achieve the greater goal of the company is no easy feat and often one or more of these business areas becomes more influential than the others.
One of the most common imbalances is when the product group controls the “what”, “when”, “why”, and “how”. The product group is an important player within the business as it often sits right in the middle of everything. Product Management, works directly with Sales, Marketing, and Technology. They are knowledgeable in most aspects of the company, but really masters of none. Product Management analyzes the business landscape, identifying areas of weakness within the marketplace that the product could and should take advantage. Product Managers role in the simplest terms should be the identifiers of problems that need to be solved. They are the “what” and “why” people. They should not be the solver of those problems as that level of detail is outside the realm of Product Management and there are other groups that are more prepared to handle that level of detail. Product Management must fully understand the problem that is being solved and will be invaluable when armed with that knowledge but the design, implementation, and integration of the solution must be driven by those best prepared to achieve success. .
If Product Management is able to keep their hands out of this “cookie jar” and let the domain experts work at solving the technology problem, everyone benefits. In fact, they should try to stay out of the kitchen all together except to answer questions about the business problem that is trying to be solved. This means, no proof-of-concepts or demo-ware from Product Management as these often lead to a false narrative on what the actual solution will be. The product design, development, deployment and delivery, support, marketing, sales, etc. should be left to the various roles and responsibilities. Product Managers should however be part of the process. They should be included in the review of the design, implementation, and deployment. This gives them ample time for input into the solution and ensures that the solution actually solves the problem.
Another problem arising out of the Product Management imbalance is setting the product priorities of the company. When the priority is always new features and never or very rarely maintenance on the product it leads to disastrous effects on software. We have already read how non-technical drivers of technology can lead to poor software design. However, when the corporate culture supports this methodology they almost always also support the feature only mentality. The product becomes so mismanaged technically, that you have a patchwork product that works so poorly that customers are not happy. Even if it has every feature under the sun, it is almost guaranteed to be extremely difficult to work with, perform poorly, and be very buggy.
There is a very simple solution to combat the Product Management imbalance: clearly defined roles and responsibilities and trust in your people. Companies that adhere to these principles will often be well on their way to a balanced work environment. It is these balanced work environments where people are valued that promote effective Corporate Culture.
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