What Biz People Need to Know About Tech: Series Intro

This series of posts is for business people who work on projects that involve software development. The goal is to help those business people to better understand the work their developers are doing and what value it adds to the business.

If you are a non-technical founder of a startup, a CEO of a large or growing company, a product manager, or a director of operations, the posts in this series can help you to better understand what to ask of these strange t-shirt wearing beasts we call software professionals.

You can’t (and probably don’t want to) follow along with the details when engineers start talking to each other. However, you can learn how to understand at a high level, what aspects of the project they are talking about and why it’s important to your business.

*How* things are built can contain as much business value as *what* things are built

When launching a development team, there’s tons of decisions made by engineers that involve various trade offs. They need to find the right blend of many different aspects of the project.

The truth is, you don’t want a business person making many of those decisions. They are engineering decisions for a reason. However, you want to be able to understand that those sorts of decisions are being made so that you can give input to the engineers.

This series of posts intends to make you a better partner with the technical people you rely on for building your products.

Assessing the fit of a technical co-founder or engineering leader.

These posts will help you to come into a discussion with a technologist with an idea of what you’re looking for. You will have you an outline of the value that you want a technology professional to be able to deliver.