Imagine you’re a business owner who knows nothing about software development.
If someone were to give you thousands of lines of code, you’d have no idea what to do with it. Even if the code were the solution to all your problems. As a non-technical business owner you don’t have a way to know that or know what to do next.
Now, here’s a different scenario. Imagine you’re a non-technical business owner and someone says, “I can decrease your labor costs on manual data entry by 50%.” You’d think that sounds pretty good, but the proof is in the pudding.
You’d hire the person to actually implement the business outcome.
If that person can execute on the promised business outcome, that’d be incredibly valuable. You’d come to trust that person quite a lot. You’d also be comfortable compensating that person handsomely for their efforts, since you can easily tell how much they contributed to the bottom line.
Whether you’re a freelance consultant or a full-time employee, these dynamics play out.
How can you start to think about your job as solving business problems, instead of merely writing code?
Remember that leaders find it difficult to see value when it’s a technical contribution. Don’t point to the pile of code you wrote and say “look at all that value!”
The value comes from implementing a solution for the business that makes a real impact outside engineering.