You work your butt off doing business, you’re not doing very well, and that’s as far as I can help you…

preface

Front end as a business and fulfill the needs of the business at the same time, to deal with all kinds of problem come from line, busy work hard for a year, also be the boss said that is not enough to “think”, “there is no business sence”, go out an interview, I asked project, also could not say anything have window or a challenge, wanted to do something that the cow force, also found nothing valuable direction, It’s hard to find some direction, and you have to be scolded by your boss, what is the business value? ROI? You might just end up doing a little performance tuning and pulling out some reusable components… Can not help but let a person sigh, the business is difficult, the front end is difficult, the front end of the business is more difficult!

If you also have such feeling and trouble, I want to tell you, this is really too normal, in ali internal technical BBS has many to think about the problem, according to according to their own understanding and research, I also consulted a number of different front summary of experts in the field, into this article, the hope can help you.

1. Business front-end difficulties

1.1 Busy Service Front End

The front end of the business, as the name implies, is the front end of the business, directly in contact with PD and operation of the business, and directly responsible for the users of the product. In the actual work, the business front end is often busy with various business meetings, projects and q&A. Even if a business line is supported by multiple front end students, it may still feel difficult in the face of a mountain of demands. The reasons may be as follows:

1. User-side products often need to be launched quickly, most of the requirements need to reverse schedule, development time is especially tight
2. I am not familiar with the business and only attend the visual review when the project requirements have been determined. There is no way to judge whether the business logic behind the requirements matches the business rhythm, whether the requirements themselves can achieve the business goals, and whether there is a better way to achieve them. I can only accept the requirements and then schedule them
3. The maintenance cost is high, and I am busy solving various online problems every day, such as there is something wrong with the style here, why is it not displayed there… Small questions that make your life “fulfilling”
4. The demand response speed is slow, for example, the technical stack of the business is old, or the customization logic is too much, while writing code, you have to look up the documents, if not, you may have to look up the source code, the efficiency is greatly reduced. Or different from other business technology systems, difficult to reuse and precipitation, if you want to use, may have to rewrite…

1.2 Is the Service Front-end Resource?

Characteristics of front end position has a visual version can finish the work, do not need to understand the whole picture of the business, so in the busy period, it’s easy to let the front-end ignored business thinking, combined with previously described a variety of reasons, business front often reduced to “resource”, when you were reduced to “resource”, actually has lost the equal dialogue and business qualification, They will only take you as the mo’s emotional development machine, input requirements with you, let you spit out the page, and you in this relationship, originally written code is neat, in order to achieve rapid business requirements, also began to write the messy code, for what you’ve created products also have no voice, gradually lost the passion and patience.

The boss will not particularly recognize your hard work, because you have not made anything special. You will also feel that you do not think enough, do not have business sence, do not help the business, and do not make the business different because of your presence…

1.3 The service front-end wants to break through

Well, I decided to do something for a change, so I approached my boss with a series of ideas:

1. The technology system here is too old, in order to further improve the efficiency of development, we want to restructure the technology
2. It is a little difficult for the front and back end joint adjustment. We want to set up a data center for joint adjustment to improve the efficiency of joint adjustment
3. The display speed is too slow. We need to optimize the performance
4. …

Bosses tend to ask a series of soul questions:

1. Why do you do it? What is the business value? What is the technical value?
2. Why now?
3. Why did you do it?
4. What’s the ROI?

Before it even started, the restless heart was poured cold water by a series of “questions” from the boss.

If there is no good answer to these questions, to persuade the boss, naturally also can not get what resources, can only be a person to do, a person is often not good quality, no one to use, over time, they do not maintain, can only start to immerse themselves in demand.

Do not happy, also did not grow, finally can only dim leave, but changed a company will be good, it is likely to be a similar process……

This is really a “dilemma” on the front end of the business, so how do you break through this dilemma? First of all, we need to get our mindset right and start by understanding the business.

2. Understand the business

2.1 Services and Requirements

Before we can understand the business, we need to know that the business and the requirements are not the same. Understanding requirements is not the same as understanding the business. Requirements are the product of business digested by products, which may have been deducted or disassembled, so requirements are not the business itself. Of course, the more you know about requirements, the better you will understand the overall picture of the business.

So what is business? There are many definitions of “business” in the industry, but the main idea remains the same. A business is a process by which a series of people complete a task through a series of activities. Therefore, a business can be large or small, and can be infinitely split.

The businesses involved in this article generally refer to commercial businesses, which are directly related to the business model of the BU or the company or its components.

2.2 Why does the Front-end Need to learn business

Front-end even if you do not learn the business, in fact, does not affect the needs, after all, you just tell me what the interaction is like, the front-end can help you achieve, and there is a product manager’s role, everyone is not good, why a technology, to the dog take the rat, or the longterm to do it? Which brings us to:

1. Only by understanding the business, can we think of the place that the business side has not thought of from the perspective of technology; If you do not understand the business, you may not understand what the business side wants, or even the business logic of the demand. There is only one cooperation mode in this situation. When the demand comes down, you catch it and then schedule it. Maybe, the design of this requirement is not reasonable, you don’t know; This requirement has a better implementation, you don’t know; This requirement can be solved with an off-the-shelf associated product solution that saves time and labor, and you never know.

2. Only by understanding the reasons behind the business can we plan the future of technology from a global perspective. If you don’t understand the business, you will be far away from the real needs of users. The harder you find some of the pain points and challenges, you can’t really put forward your thinking and solutions to solve the problems of users.

3. As a product research and development engineer, I naturally want to polish a product that solves user problems and has friendly experience. If the product can be recognized by users and have influence, I will naturally feel a special sense of achievement.

4. Ali as a commercial company of science and technology, the technology required is the combination of technology and business, on the basis of meet the business requirements, and becomes a bridge between technology and business, actively into the business, think about how to use technology to help business to do to win, to meet market and user needs, first step technology planning, talent pool, technology architecture and technology advance research.

2.3 Do you understand the business?

So what do you know about your business so far? Try answering the following questions:

1. What does the business do? Do you have a big picture of the product?
2. What are the core metrics of the business? What are the KPI targets and what is the meaning behind these numbers? What is the business strategy to achieve these goals?
3. Who is the user of the service? How is traffic stratified? What’s the percentage? Where does each fit into the business?
4. The business model of the business? What to rely on to attract traffic, what is the profit model?
5. What are the pages we make? What value does it bring to the business? What can we do to create more value?

2.4 How Do I Learn About Services?

2.4.1 Reading business domain knowledge

Find books with good scores in the field and read them to quickly form a knowledge framework.

2.4.2 Understanding the Service background and planning

1. When you just take over a new business, you can invite the boss of the business side or a senior operation/product classmate to tell you about the past, present, future, vision, fiscal year planning and expectations of the technical classmate.
2. Spend time reading partners’ (operations, product, R&D) weekly reports to find out what’s happening and if you’re getting closer to your goals.
3. Understand business goals, landing strategies, data caliber to measure goals, pay attention to the data, pay attention to whether the current project is fighting to achieve goals, if not, offer your ideas and suggestions;
4. Attend more meetings to establish product sense. The best way to collect information is to attend KO meetings held by the business leader. Various KO meetings will organize the strategic disassembly and the thinking behind it, and then deliver the speeches to students in BU or departments.

2.4.3 more communication

Chat with server students, PM chat, chat with users, multi-perspective business, but it should be noted that for professional business, need to do homework first, at least some English abbreviations to clear understand the meaning.

2.4.4 Remember the numbers

If it still takes a long time, then this one can be done now, that is, remember the business-related numbers as detailed as possible, as specific as possible, and as comprehensive as possible. This has two benefits:

1. The numbers that are written down by the metrics themselves largely cover the value direction of the business, so you know what dimensions the business is focusing on
2. These numbers can serve as a source of “equal dialogue” with businesses and products that would otherwise be lacking even at the most basic level

2.4.5 Start with daily requirements

Behind the demand for the project, we try to analyze the purpose and value, and what’s expected earnings, after doing why can achieve the benefits, with the overall goal is fit, the point is to judge the business mentioned effective solutions or cost too much, can see give alternative, Satisfy the business side with existing solutions or in a low-cost way.

After the project is launched, careful analysis and more attention should be paid to the business data and effects after the launch, which will have the following benefits:

1. Ability to improve their understanding of the business, you are paying attention to the business data at the same time, also will be more from a business perspective to see whether the function of value in line with expectations, when there is not in line with expectations, may and business data analysis of the funnel together in order to find the problem, to avoid our work achievement to be a one-off.

2. At the same time, the summary can help me to sort out my shortcomings in this project, or what problems exist in the relevant promotion, and how to improve it in the future, so as to improve the iteration efficiency and quality in the next project. For example, whether there are problems in this project such as inadequate understanding of requirements, rework, inefficient communication and joint adjustment, unstable environment, whether the scheme designed by myself is reasonable, and how to solve them in the future.

3. Can also judge from the data and summary of what kind of demand is reliable & what kind of sample business side is reliable, frequently strive for resources online effect is bad business side, next time again need to add a mind and thinking process.

2.4.6 insist

Business thinking is not effective for at least half a year

3. Help business

3.1 thinking

Although the business is very busy at ordinary times, but no matter how busy, also want to take time to think, so what to think about? Here are some examples:

1. Make it a habit to remember your work every day. Analyze where you are spending your time
2. Is there a particular point in business development that you want to make fun of? Think about the reasons behind the problem, what’s the way to avoid it next time, can you refine it into a more general solution, what did other students do, what can I do?
3. Constantly input, observe, what are the real needs of the business? From the perspective of the business side, where are the pain points and challenges encountered by the business?

3.2 communication

Focus with the boss, team members and business side to confirm whether “what I want to do” is “what everyone wants”.

You may have a lot to say, but your boss or business partner will reject you ruthlessly and ask you a question like this:

1. In the context of the current business, why? What is the business value? What is the technical value?
2. Do I have to do it now?
3. Why did you do it?
4. How to do? (Systematic, full-link, single-point technical challenges)
5. What are the business and technical results? Can it be reused?
6. Future planning (can we combine and build with the plan of BU or the group)

And that’s often because you’re proposing to do something that’s valuable but not necessary, and that doesn’t align with what the business needs at the moment. In other words, the technology you want to do is based on personal and purely technical considerations, without considering the technical solutions based on the current situation and pain points of the business, which is not grounded and the input-output ratio is not high.

So find a good business position for technical output first, see if there is a place to borrow, do not repeat the wheel. Quickly verify the correctness of this direction, and then gradually more investment, plump technical design. Don’t YY yourself, quietly finished, so that the things made without business scenario pay.

3.3 Technical Planning

Business enablement actually requires us to develop technical plans and solutions in line with business planning. After understanding the key points of this year’s KPI of the business side and the expected disassembly and implementation path, and then considering the situation of myself and my team, think about what I can do to help the business achieve its KPI. Here are two points to pay attention to:

Grasp the essence from the point and the surface, consider: Most of the time, we have received the pain points and business needs are single point, before we can’t focus on a single point of problem, and need to overall consideration, such as SEO page facing the performance is very sensitive, often may receive some business to feedback, said that at present our SEO has this place, that place need optimization, Solving these problems on a single point may not be a great benefit to the business, nor will it increase your skills. At this time, if you consider this proposition, in fact, you will find that the optimization of SEO pages is actually to improve the inclusion and ranking of SEO pages. In fact, there is not only a path to improve the performance of SEO pages, but also some other paths: such as optimizing keywords & long tail words, using Google’s AMP technology to transform SEO pages, optimizing the time spent crawling pages to improve the crawl rate and so on. In this way, the point of the problem can be transformed into a surface problem, in order to develop a more effective and comprehensive grasp to empower the business.

We should not only solve the immediate pain points, but also make long-term plans: in many cases, we cannot only be satisfied with the immediate KPI, but also need to understand the long-term ideas and foreseeable plans of the business side. For example, for a pilot new business, the first level of planning is to ensure that the business project can be launched on time. Considering the future, the other level of planning may be how to achieve the replicability of technical solutions.

3.4 Standing on the shoulders of giants

When you need to develop a productization solution or tool or framework, it is best to look within the group and industry to see how the industry and others are addressing the problem. Try to stand on the shoulders of others to make innovations or participate in the building, to avoid small teams to build repetitive and low quality wheels

4. Technical depth

4.1 Technical knowledge and ability

“Technology” cannot be a general term. I think it can at least be divided into “technical knowledge” and “technical competence”.

What is “technical knowledge”? I don’t KNOW

• TypeScript From Starting to Quitting
• React: Starting to Give up
• Webpack from Getting Started to Giving up
• .

What is “technical capability”? Ability means I CAN

• I refactored a large system in TypeScript, and the code’s robustness and development efficiency were greatly improved.
• I used React Hooks to conduct front end training for full-stack students, and the training effect was greatly improved.
• I went deep into Webpack, optimized the configuration, and made the system build much faster.
• .

4.2 Cultivation of technical vision

1. Keep an eye on new technology in your industry. You don’t have to know much about it, but you have to be curious about the new technology, have a general idea of what it does, and if you come across a suitable landing environment at work, think about writing a demo to see if it’s worth it
2. Focus on group and industry solutions. When we find problems in the business and make solutions, it is easy for us to get caught up in our own design and want to make everything by ourselves, but the investment will be very large. Is the output value the same? I don’t know. Most of the time, what you want to do is you can find a hole in ATA, or a mature solution, and you can easily access it as long as you communicate with it. Why spend a lot of time building a wheel? Borrow where you can, and use the time you have left to work on the more central and valuable aspects of your solution.

4.3 Technical Depth

When you talk about “technical depth,” it might be natural to think of it as digging deep into a technology or solving an industry-recognized technical problem, but that’s only part of it:

1. Systematic thinking is a way to understand things. When facing problems, it can list the key elements and solutions for complex problems, and turn the disordered problems into logical and orderly ones to follow. In the positioning of the problem and the embodiment of the solution, from the appearance to the essence, the causes behind the problem are disintegrated, and the essential causes are targeted to solve, rather than treating the symptoms without addressing the root cause, and the solution is rhythmically solved.
2. In addition to the front part of the full link, forward and backward technology stack, how deep can be dug.
3. Single point of technical challenge What is your thinking and solution for a particular technical challenge?

4.4 Technology and Business Win-win

Truly groundbreaking and valuable business results are bound to be accompanied by technical depth and even innovation, so when doing business results, there must be scenes that let us increase the depth of technology.

5. It gives you more body feel

Develop business sense it is a very difficult thing, he asks you to business and technology as the first perspective, it may be against the inner “adhere to the” technology, many people but if always do technology, actually it is very difficult to have the very big breakthrough, at work, if the technology and to achieve win-win business, will help you to reach a higher level.

Change is hard, but the results are worth the risk.