5 ways tech leaders can increase their business acumen

Developers, engineers, data scientists, and other technologists generally understand the value of earning technical certifications, experimenting with new technologies, and strengthening collaboration skills. However, developing business acumen is just as critical for those seeking more responsibilities and opportunities to work on strategic initiatives.

Business acumen sometimes refers to business skills, including leadership, understanding business financials, marketing proficiencies, strategic thinking, and problem-solving analytic capabilities. One definition of business acumen focuses on skills such as stakeholder awareness, organizational knowledge, and the ability to deal with ambiguity. Advanced business acumen skills for IT leaders include understanding key business drivers, business resiliency, data privacy laws, and the customer journey.

In this article, my focus is on how digital trailblazers can better understand the company’s business model, market segments, customers, products, opportunities, risks, and compliance requirements as essential aspects of business acumen. Without this knowledge and understanding, technologists will struggle with recognizing business needs that aren’t documented as explicit requirements, or with answering stakeholder questions without resorting to technical jargon. Some gaps are specific to certain roles:

• Developers may struggle with understanding end-user personas and how an application or feature enables different users to get their work done.
• Data scientists may not understand how business teams use a dashboard or machine learning model in critical decision-making.
• IT operations engineers and service desk administrators may lack empathy and understanding of how an outage, performance issue, or other incidents impacts customers and employees.

Developing your knowledge about the business side of your organization can feel daunting, especially given overloaded priorities and the effort required to learn new technical skills. One approach is to make this process part of the daily technology work. That way, more people working in IT can learn about the business and develop confidence as they address business priorities.

How tech teams can get smarter about business 

Here are the five ways that technology teams and leaders can increase their knowledge and understanding of the business side of a technical organization:

• Establish product management roles and disciplines
• Create customer-driven feedback loops
• Pique stakeholder curiosity
• Capture detailed workflows before automating
• Learn how to shift-left data quality work

Establish product management roles and disciplines

Agile methodologies assign a product owner role to understand business objectives, priorities, end-user requirements, and acceptance criteria when developing release schedules and prioritizing user stories. Larger organizations with many agile teams or ones developing customer-facing technologies assign product managers to understand end-user journeys, develop roadmaps, and establish success criteria.

These roles require understanding business value and strategic priorities so that agile development teams aren’t just pursuing a never-ending list of stakeholder wishlist priorities. Working with product owners and product managers to better understand customer value propositions and the why before the what and how behind a business need is a critical step to developing business acumen.

“Technologists who liaise between the product and customers are in an ideal position to lead clients to success while continuing to develop their acumen as a practitioner in the business,” says Jason Jablecki, SVP of procurement excellence at apexanalytix. “The key opportunity is understanding company-specific challenges and the actual strategy and opportunities available.”

Jablecki suggests that product owners and developers are susceptible to pressures to get things done and that developing a real understanding of business is needed. “Too often, product developers default to how their system works rather than what and why they need to deliver capabilities and value to the business,” he says.

Create customer-driven feedback loops

Going one step deeper into agile methodologies, agile teams must establish feedback loops from end-users and stakeholders into their backlogs and development process. Teams can do this during sprint reviews while demoing completed user stories, through user acceptance testing toward the end of a release cycle, or through surveys and interviews once the software is released.

“Embracing agile methodologies offers insight into customer purchasing behaviors and usage patterns by emphasizing iterative development,” says Dinesh Varadharajan, CPO of Kissflow. “Scrum or lean startup methodologies continuously incorporate customer input, enabling regular adjustments to products or services, ensuring that offerings remain closely aligned with customer desires and demands.”

Agile teams should study requirements and end-user feedback to separate the problem from the solution. Today, technologists can use different capabilities, including AI, predictive modeling, automation, and integrations, to solve a business problem in ways different from how end-users provide tactical feedback on a workflow.

“IT teams should incorporate AI when considering agile transformation as it is essential for business users to resolve inefficiencies as they analyze workflow processes, pinpoint bottlenecks, and suggest improvements,” adds Varadharajan.

Pique stakeholder curiosity

Developing business acumen shouldn’t be a one-way street of technologists learning business values and needs. There’s an opportunity to help business stakeholders advance their technical acumen and use the dialog to develop a shared understanding of problems, opportunities, and solution tradeoffs.

Humberto Moreira, principal solutions engineer at Gigster, says, “The opportunity to interact directly with technologists can also give business stakeholders a useful peek behind the curtain at how tools they use every day are developed, so this meeting of the minds can be mutually beneficial to these two groups that don’t always communicate as well as they should.”

Here are some options for tech teams to create a collaborative environment for developing technical and business acumen:

• Schedule a brainstorming session that includes drafting a vision statement around an opportunity and have technologists discuss and demo potential technology solutions.
• Establish learning programs about how one technology works, but start these programs with business stakeholders describing some of their business challenges and opportunities.
• Ask to shadow an end-user’s journey as they complete a workflow, share some expertise on how the technology works, and gain a better understanding of improvement opportunities.
• Schedule a hackathon requiring business stakeholders’ direct participation with the development and data science team to define the problem, learn the technology, and steer the solution.
• Request business participation in a problem root-cause analysis to share some of the technical hurdles and learn the business impacts of major or recurring incidents.

In these examples, the key objective is to create an inclusive knowledge-sharing dialogue between all participants covering business and technology concerns.

Capture detailed workflows before automating

Shadowing an end-user is one way to develop business acumen, and technologists can often use these reviews to find easy ways to automate steps or integrate data flows between applications.

“Automation turns days of work into hours, or even minutes, increasing productivity and efficiency for repetitive, rule-based workflows, says Leonid Belkind, co-founder and CTO of Torq. “Hyperautomation, the concept of AI-driven automation at scale, does this by handling simpler, recurring tasks so employees can focus on complex tasks that allow them to explore their creativity.”

Engineers must recognize the scale and complexity of automation before jumping into solutions. Following one user’s journey is insufficient requirements gathering when re-engineering a complex workflow involving many people and multiple departments using a mix of technologies and manual steps. Technology teams should follow six-sigma methodologies for these challenges by documenting process flows, measuring productivity, and capturing quality defect metrics as key steps to developing business acumen before diving into automation opportunities.

Learn how to shift-left data quality work

One type of defect concerning business stakeholders is poor data quality, especially as more organizations invest in citizen data science, machine learning predictive models, and generative AI large language models. When there are data quality issues, developers and data scientists often resort to addressing them downstream by cleansing the data before using them in data visualizations and data science experiments.

One way to develop business acumen is to trace the data quality issues from when end-users enter data into a system of record, like an ERP or CRM, or when data is aggregated from a third-party source.

“One of the primary challenges confronting IT leaders is delayed execution of data quality test, says Rohit Choudhary, co-founder and CEO of Acceldata. “Conducting tests in the consumption zone can be both expensive and time-consuming, making it crucial to implement checks before data enters the transformation zone.”

Here, Choudhary uses the term consumption zone for when data is used for analytics, models, and decision-making, while transformation zone refers to the dataops between data collection, processing, and storage.

The best practice to develop business acumen on data quality and other issues mentioned in this article is to request to observe the business processes, learn end-user needs, and ask many questions to separate the why from today’s how. By instilling these steps, technologists are better positioned to translate problems into solutions and present them in a language stakeholders can more readily understand.