If you’re a C-suite professional, you can probably talk to customers about strategic elements and big-picture goals—all while relating them to your own business’s goals. IT professionals on the ground, however, can have a harder time connecting one part of the process to the endgame.
One solution IT team leaders should consider is emphasizing the importance of soft skills and communication with clients. This, according to team leads, helps combat whatever friction might come up between a team that could lean towards cynicism and a client looking to solve a problem.
Sharpest tool. Avi Hein, senior product marketing manager for Checkmarx, said that IT professionals are often focused on their own goals, or their team’s goals, but not always those of the wider organization.
Hein offered that, on a project, the software-as-a-service team might not be the same as those who are scanning code or viewing the supply chain.
“If you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” Hein said. “You need a wide variety of tools in their tool kit.”
Adding tools into a professional’s kit could start with looking at how one’s area of focus or responsibilities tie into the overarching business, according to Hein. He added that implementing the “business language” from the top down ensures a shared sense of language that can prompt staff to consider how they can align within their organization and with the client.
The client-facing IT professional should be talking to the client to understand the technical problem and the business problem they’re trying to solve, according to Hein.
“Then they can think creatively as to how they can do it,” Hein said. “Dont think, ‘Hey this isn’t my responsibility.’ They need to be thinking about how they can align with their organization, how they align with the client and making sure…our processes are in place.”
Hit me hard and soft. Like Hein, Google’s public sector managing director for customer engineering, Elizabeth Moon emphasized soft skills. She says that Google engineers are trained to ensure that customers receive the “best possible solutions.”
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“So being able to help our customers understand that, oftentimes takes more than words, too,” Moon said.
Moon said that the company has a mantra of show don’t tell and emphasized co-building with customers, “so that we can take them along for the journey.”
“It’s not [that] we’re just prescribing to them how something’s going to work…because oftentimes, there’s learning for us too along the way, and that is part of the journey that we like to take with our customers together,” Moon said.
Question…? CEO and co-founder of Not Diamond, a multimodal AI company, Tomás Hernando Kofman told IT Brew that frequently customers will approach businesses with a solution that they need rather than the problem to be solved. He said that it can take time to figure out what the real problem is, because a team could build a solution that the customer never ends up using.
Hernando Kofman listed questions that take his team and the client through a “more traditional qualification process.”
- How much is the client willing to spend?
- Does the client have the authority to solicit or approve a solution?
- How urgent is the customer’s need?
Dean Mai, co-founder of early-stage venture firm Myriad, said that Not Diamond showed that it was effective at driving a “delightful interaction” with its product.
“That was our underlying thesis as well, around their ability to actually take that insight from customers and very quickly turn it into actual operational product and ship faster,” Mai said.
“Our role, whether we’re in an internal team or we’re building a company, is to be of service to others and to generate value for other people,” Hernando Kofman said. “And actually, people really want you to generate that value for them.”