The top reason developers struggle with business and design
Here is my personal opinion from switching from a web developer to product designer and recently to indie hacker.
It's the nature of programming that's make it hard to shift from dev to designer, business strategist and marketeer.
You have to get rid of the fully accurate calculations and structures mental model.
Programming is 1+1=2. It works or it doesn't work. There is no maybe.
Product strategy and design are more of: "this is a good practice, this is how people feel but nothing guarantees it will work".
The whole game is based on probabilities, timing and many more factors which is different to how coding works.
I believe that this is where our mind starts messing around, over-analyzes everything, and struggles to make the shift.
What do you think? What is the top reason in your opinion?
i don't know what the top reason is...
... b/c hoenstly, it doesn't matter.
... or, for the dev who wants to move into biz mechanics... if they are motivated enough, they'll figure it out. it's just another engineering problem, after-all... but you have to like the "problem space" to be great at it.
... if that makes sense.
Yeap indeed - business and design is also about problem solving. The only thing that actually changes is the "problem" and also the type of solutions you can apply.
I think it oversimplifies programming by saying
In my experience there is a wide range of "it works", meaning that the architecture and design of the programming can cause the quality of the code to vary a lot. These factors are crucial when working as a developer on a team, as devs are often maintaining code that they have never seen before.
I think programming and business/design are both complex, but in very different ways. Programming becomes complex with complex system interactions and layers of different patterns all culminating to a piece of working software. A joke I have heard among devs is that it requires a lot of RAM to comprehend the most complex parts of our code - which I think is an apt analogy.
For business and design there is a ton of complexity around human psychology and making decisions based on your understanding of how people think and act. Programming has some of this complexity in the art of writing maintainable code, but that is often regarded as secondary to the primary focus of shipping functionality.
I think excelling both skills is extremely valuable, but pretty rare in my experience - although I think a lot of Indie Hackers may fall into this category!
100% agree with everything that you wrote, thanks for sharing! Indeed coding can be extremely challenging and complex. It's just that it's complex in a different way compared to design and marketing. (system complexity vs psychology-related complexity)
Agree.
It's very hard to switch between rigid and fuzzy thinking.
Also: https://twitter.com/tylertringas/status/1301522334222819328
Damn, that's 💯
Oh, yeah. That tweet is pure gold. So true.
That's a really good tweet. Thanks for sharing it!
I don't know if there's a "top reason". It all comes down to skillset and experience. How many years have you been programming? Now how many years have you been designing UI, or running a business, or marketing?
I will say there's definitely something to be said for "thinking differently" about your customers and their needs. Developers are more likely to look at things logically and listen to facts. Your customers may not be the same way. They may need to be swayed by emotion.
For instance, maybe don't list out features if you're selling your app, instead show how it'll make the user feel when they use it or how it'll make their lives easier. Of course this depends on the product, but part of selling is getting outside of your own skin to see how your users think and feel.
"Developers are more likely to look at things logically and listen to facts. Your customers may not be the same way. They may need to be swayed by emotion."
This is really good point - In UX, marketing etc there is the "emotion" part that can be very tricky when it comes to coming to conclusions.
A lot of the skills required in business development involves communicating with people (via cold emails, setting up customer interviews, writing marketing copy with your customers in mind) and I suspect a lot of devs struggle with these. As a dev myself we can comfortably lock ourselves in a room, put some noise cancelling headphones on and concentrate on engineering challenges for days. It's a case of proactively stepping out into the real world and talking to people objectively. It's a totally different set of skills.
Exactly! I had the exact same struggle when I decided to switch from developer to design+maker.
It was like I had to grow another part of personality that I barely worked on the last few years haha
I think this is partly true. But I also think that may dev-to-designers/marketers forget that they have many years of dev experience and forget that being a beginner is hard.
I remember that at least for me, the first couple years of learning to code were just awful. Just pulling my hair out all the time frustrated as to why my code wasn't working. (By the way, it didn't help that my college professors thought C++ was the best language to start learning, and this was in 1999 before StackOverflow and Google for that matter existed).
I think many experienced designers/marketers have developed knowledge of what designs or tactics will "work" or "not work".
I just takes a while (i.e. several years) to get up the learning curve from beginner to expert.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts :)
"forget that being a beginner is hard" this is sooo true - I can 100% relate to that. I recently got into twitter content marketing and being a total newbie is really uncomfortable and took me months to get used to it.
This is totally true. I've long tried to prove that what I'm doing is the best way to approach the problem. While this works for software development, it doesn't work for business. It's more important to do just something instead of endlessly searching for the best way to do it.
Thank you for this unique perspective! 🎉