How to Think Commercially as a Tech Person

When you were starting out as an engineer, you probably thought that tech and commercial thinking were as different as chalk and cheese. One is the sweetest fruit of your hard labour, to be untainted from commercial desires. The other, a marketing gimmick that your customers would be able to see through. 

Unsurprisingly, this pervasive train of thought is why many engineers leave the industry. For example, before we were Fave, we were KFIT, and we focused on the fitness industry. We pivoted from that to the present-day Fave, which is known for loyalty and payments. I witnessed many team members leaving because they didn’t understand the reason for the shift. They no longer shared the same conviction they previously had when we used to be KFIT.

Those who stayed made an effort to empathise with the business and kept themselves informed of changes in the industry to see why we were heading in this direction. Not everyone who stayed agreed with the decision, but they understood the company’s rationale. This understanding sets the stage for a sense of purpose that any engineer needs to have.

Why You Need to Develop A Commercial Mindset

Additionally, developing a commercial mindset will help you to communicate relevant information to your team. If you don’t understand why you’re building a particular product as an engineering leader, don’t expect your team to be able to either. Your team can see through your lack of conviction. They’ll know if you’re just following orders or if you truly understand the business context behind a product.

Secondly, thinking commercially will go a long way in helping you to build a better product. Engineering, at its core, is all about trade-offs. Should you spend three months building a product and making it really awesome, or complete a simple proof-of-concept that takes only two weeks for you to launch it? Well, the answer depends on the commercial reasoning behind your product and your business’ needs.

How Your Career Aspirations Come Into Play

The extent to which it is important for you to develop a commercial mindset also depends on your career aspirations as an engineer. If you’re looking to move into the management career path, it becomes even more crucial for you to understand the business part of things. It is a required skill set to help you manage people under you and to collaborate well with other departments. Otherwise, it will be difficult for you to move up the management path. 

However, if you’re hoping to move into a more specialised career path like a Principal Engineer in Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning, technical skills are still foremost. This does not mean that you should neglect developing a commercial mindset. It just means that your focus at the present should be on honing your craft.

Having started out as a CTO, and having been a CTO for the majority of my career, I’ve been lucky enough to have conversations at the C-suite level that have helped shape my commercial mindset. 

Understandably, this may not always be possible for larger and more hierarchical organisations. Hence, start small. Begin at the team level. Treat the product manager within your team as a mini CEO. Work closely with him or her to administer the technical direction of your product, while ingraining it in firm business understanding. We’re currently experimenting with this approach at Fave, where we replicate the whole startup environment right down to the individual team level. 

Secondly, tie the Objectives and Key Results of your engineering team to business goals. For example, if you tell your engineering team that their target is to achieve a million dollars in Gross Merchandise Value (GMV), they need to have an understanding of what GMV is and what they need to do to reach this goal. This therefore helps to achieve better understanding and alignment with the business’ aims. 

Keep Yourself Updated of Changes in Your Industry

Next, pick up the habit of keeping yourself abreast of the trends in your industry. This requires both initiative and discipline on your end. Subscribe to a few newsletters to keep the pulse on your industry. For example, if you are in the fintech industry, a platform I highly recommend is Finimize, which gives you daily snippets of financial changes regionally or globally. You don’t have to gain a deep understanding of your industry’s happenings; just enough for you to know what your business is doing to keep up with the times. 

From there, reflect critically. Back when I was at SAYS.com, one of the founders, Khailee Ng, encouraged the team members, regardless of whether the person was an engineer, to write a piece of analysis on industry events regularly. For example, write about a recent merger between two companies. It doesn’t even have to be a deep-dive analysis, just focus on what you understood from the event and write about it from your perspective. 

If you abhor writing, you don’t even have to pen a written critique if you don’t want to! Every week, you can have a discussion amongst your team on the latest trends in the industry. You can talk about tech internally as a team, but try to steer the topic clear of tech once you’re outside the team. Have informal, light-hearted discussions with your colleagues about the business or the product.

If You Still Don’t Know Where to Start...

Understand that starting is always the hardest part. Take baby steps. Begin by stepping out of your comfort zone to talk to the relevant people in your company, like the people from Business Development or Strategy. Don’t just live within your engineering bubble. Know what role you play in the bigger picture. 

Talk to your product managers, get them to walk you through the product decisions. Try to get a grasp on all the moving pieces. You are not here just to code, seek understanding. For example, when we acquired Groupon, we had to work hard to ensure every level of the hierarchy understands the goal behind the move. Engineering leaders had to be able to communicate the decision well to their subordinates. Your team members will look at you as the first point of contact to provide clarity. 

If your company possesses good documentation such as meeting minutes, also check them out. These can help you to understand why your company made particular decisions at a certain point in time. 

Secondly, practise empathy. For example, every time I visit a new website that has a horrible user interface, my first reaction as an engineer is to get annoyed. But have you ever taken a step back and asked yourself why the engineers built it this way? Could a longer sign-up process be a necessary evil of adding a few more verification steps to make the sign-up process more secure? From my experience, there’s probably a good business reason behind every decision that makes poor engineering sense. You may not agree with the reasoning, but it’s a good exercise to expand your business and product knowledge.

In conclusion, everyone likes to put technology on a pedestal. Everyone thinks too highly of tech. But what many don’t realise is that without the business piece of the puzzle, even the best software or the most elegant architecture means nothing. To make better decisions, you need to be able to make sense of the different contexts that your product is going to thrive in. Otherwise, you’ll just be set up to fail.  

1. Speak to Colleagues From Different Departments

No department in your company operates in silo. You’re no exception. Leverage the expertise of your colleagues in other departments to gain a better understanding of how business works. 

2. Keep Abreast of Market Trends

Think critically about why the winds are changing directions, and how this will impact your company. 

3. Understand The Why Behind Decisions

This will help you to better communicate the rationale behind certain decisions to your team. It will also help you to ensure greater alignment in the decision-making process.