Business 101
Tags: mentoring, startup, beginners, discuss
Published: 2019-11-13 07:58:11

# Introduction 
Why bother about learning the business concepts? 

Surely it's much better to focus our time to learn the latest technology, adopting developer practices and design patterns to deliver software.

This is probably the first thing that comes to your mind when you are building software for your users. 

But what we miss out the most are the **feedback** from your **users** or understanding **business problem**. 

Which results in not meeting the needs or expectation of the user. 

This was precisely the rationality of last week's mentoring session for **JuniorDev SG**. 

Which we hope to allow the mentees to gain the **perspective** & **mental models** to deliver **value** and **help** the bottom line of business they are working in.

# Key Business Concepts
These are the business concepts covered by the mentors.
 
## What are the Pain Points for Your Organisation/Customer? 
Most technologies are used to solve the pains point encountered by your organisation or customer. 

Therefore understanding them can reduce the time taken to design and build to service their needs.

## What is the Value Proposition of the Company & How Does It Make Money? 

> The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer. - Peter Drucker

Whatever product or services you build are towards the **creating** or **maintaining** a customer.

So that you will be paid by them to pay the bills or keep the lights on for the business

## What Are the Business Processes Involved in Delivery of This Value?

Understanding this allows us to design and build software that is both an effective & efficient manner for the business or the customer.

## Understanding the Company's Mission & Vision
This provides insights into the type of users or customers. 

Who will be using the software that you had build into products or service to address their pain points.

# Business Case Studies
During the mentoring session, We created **3** case studies and did the role-playing as **stakeholders** for mentors.

Whereas the mentees, they act as **developers** for their company to gather project requirements from us. 

We did it so that they could understand the process of building software.

To understand business impact, project constraints and to lock down the scope of a project to prevent [Scope Creep][1] scenarios. 

One group **agreed** to all the requirements set out by the stakeholder even outrageous one like the use of **blockchain** or **AI** for their project.

The other group **negotiated** with the stakeholder to just delivering a few core feature. 

Since they were able to understand the case study & constraints through a consulting technique called [The 5 Whys][2] with the stakeholders.

# Conclusion
Without understanding business, we will not be **empathic** as shown under [Silicon Valley has an Empathy Problem][3] to design products or services addresses the needs of the customers or users.

Problems might arise like understanding customers/user's **pain points** or **effectively communication** through their terminology to create **value** through technology that is needed by the business.

PS: I will be attaching the [slides][4] we had used in the mentoring session so that you could adapt it to help to mentor your junior developers.

# References
* [Scope Creep][1]
* [The 5 Whys][2]
* [JuniorDev SG Mentoring - Business 101][4]
* [Silicon Valley Has an Empathy Vacuum][3]


[1]: https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/top-five-causes-scope-creep-6675
[2]: https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMC_5W.htm
[3]: https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/silicon-valley-has-an-empathy-vacuum
[4]: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1BrYJCP1re1GA17Q3GyjWTl7airQUyJ4OcvjAjz7tyJA/edit?usp=sharing