Published on: 2026-02-16
“Client A wants to build X and Y. Three months.”
In IT vendor industry, the what and the how arrive gift-wrapped. The why? Should be a need-to-know—but apparently, you just get none (duh). Simon Sinek FWIW insists we must start with THE WHY to inspire teams.
Lovely theory (hehe)
In practice, half our clients guard their business rationale like state secrets—kudos to their infosec team—leaving me, as a Business Analyst cum Product Owner to rally developers with nothing but JIRA tickets and educated guesses.
It’s inevitable: we become digital archaeologists.
We read between the lines of legacy systems, scrape patterns from competitors, and cobble together a narrative solid enough to build against. We know it’s probably ~40% fiction, but it’s the only scaffolding we’ve got.
Well, MAYBEEEE the direct order isn’t merely to ship the features. MAYBEEEE it’s to look at the technical requirements and decide—against the void where the strategy should be—that this thing actually matters enough to exist.
That manufactured conviction? MAYBEEE that’s the sole value I could provide in this line of work.