Ever since I started working with clients (that would be 6 years now!), and their evolving businesses, I’ve experienced these uncomfortable moments from time to time. These moments in the process of developing an application, when you’re not sure how to answer a client’s question (and how to deal with the awkward silence that follows). Or when you’re supposed to provide a business validation for a particular feature but, well, you simply can’t come up with one. Those moments sometimes occur at the outset of development but, in most cases, they catch you close to the final release.

Sounds familiar? You who have never had this moment, may you cast the first stone. And don’t get me wrong, of course, I don’t mean that you (or I) don’t have the foggiest idea of how the solutions implemented by us should behave. I’m sure you’re an expert in YOUR field, technical field. But how about the business aspects?

What I mean is that very often we don’t discover many edge cases in the process, because we don’t realize how some actions will impact completely separate parts of our app.

We all simply lack some business knowledge. But the good part is that we, developers, are not alone. These questions triggering those silent moments, usually occur to more than one person at the same time. What’s worse — business analysts or even potential customers don’t understand some issues either! And now you will probably say, “Is it a part of my job? Maybe it’s not my responsibility, I should concentrate on the implementation". Well, not exactly.

It’s been such a huge challenge to me until I discovered a method that diametrically smoothed this struggle. I find it the most powerful technique in the developers’ job. But it’s not limited to software development. You can apply it to practically any technical or business domain, especially those that are large, complex, or both. We used it to reevaluate…the HR onboarding process. Interested?

Let me introduce you the Event Storming technique.

#product design #agile #development