What Are Business Roles in IT Industry?

Let me start it with a typical conversation during my career coaching sessions. I happen to spend significant time with mid career IT/Tech professionals in technology and related roles. Here is how it starts- “I have significant operations or technology experience and I am currently Project Engineer/ Project Lead at my company. But, I do not want to remain at this career path and would like to move to a business role“

It is a result of a belief that business roles will provide us a better growth path. We see our senior management taking important business decisions and want to set our aspirations for similar roles. Business roles do help you changing your career trajectory so it’s important to look for possible transition opportunities.

But, what does a business role mean in the context of a mid career IT/Tech professional who hasn’t been exposed to business a lot. Think about all the engineers and technical people in services, telecom, internet, mobile, electronics, manufacturing industries.

Don’t Get Fooled By Titles

The most common mistake I have observed, is linking a specific title with business roles and trying to get to that title.

I want to be a Project Manager, Delivery Manager, Business Analyst because these roles are considered business roles and I can get a better growth once I get these roles.

Not necessarily. There isn’t a standard template that Project Manager in all companies will have similar responsibilities. In one company, it can be an important business role, while in others; it can be simply an engineering role with minimal interactions with business.

So, What are Business Roles?

You can use two frameworks to determine how business centric is your role.

The first is distance from end consumer. Your ability to make business impact is inversely proportional to your distance from the end consumer. Look at the extremes:

On one hand, you have sales or marketing professionals who are working with clients to understand their business and explain how your company’s product can provide the right Return on Investment (RoI). On the other, you have a technical person managing the servers which will be used by the developers to deliver a tool, which will be used by another set of developers to build application for client.

As long as you are reducing your distance from end result, you are progressing in your career. Your experience and title might have little to do with it. Business Analyst or Technical Sales Analyst can be a more business centric role than a Project Manager.

Second framework is analyzing responsibilities in the role. Any title is about the responsibilities associated with it. Most of the responsibilities can be categorized in:

• Revenue related: managing revenue or similar customer metrics such as conversions, brand management
• Stakeholders related: managing important stakeholders in the relationship
• Team management: managing your internal team and getting work done from them
• Process oriented: following certain processes such as completing before deadline, measure results, quality control

You will have more of revenue and stakeholder related responsibilities in business roles. These are the type of responsibilities you would like to increase as you are growing in career. This is also a good test to evaluate the potential impact of your role. If you are carrying a $X million revenue goal, you are at the right place.

Professionals can’t keep growing simply by following a process and doing repetitive and predictable work. Hence, it’s important to keep thinking options to transition into business roles.  With growing consumer technology and data sciences, different business roles are available across sectors. The question is- how committed are you to make this change?

About Sunstone Business School

Sunstone Business School is India’s largest B School for IT Professionals. It helps experienced Tech professionals to move from Tech to Management / Business Roles. The course is 4 month duration and can be done with the Job. Sunstone students come from 350 IT companies from 11 countries.