From business development to software engineering
There are two skills I learned as a business developer which are helping me today become a better full stack engineer: communication and problem-solving skills. I am often puzzled by how my passions evolved from business development with 4 years of experience to software development.
My communication skills have really helped me convey my ideas to my teammates which has proven useful especially when it comes to pair programming. How? Prior to switching to software development, I was working remotely as a business development representative for an Indian company known as SkyNiche. I had the opportunity to go to India in 2019 and met with Rakesh Krishnan, who had an interest in expanding his company services to Kenya.
However, he did not have a point of contact and that is where my role as a business developer came into play. After my visa expired, I returned to Kenya and began searching for enterprise customers using paid ads and SEO (Search Engine Optimization). I managed leads and paying customers using CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and got intrigued by how that piece of software was able to operate so seamlessly and generate beautiful analytics from the data it was pulling from various sources such as Facebook, Twitter, and email and phone calls. CRM software helped me polish my communication skills as I was constantly using the dashboard to communicate with leads and customers from those different sources, that is, Facebook, Twitter, email, etc. In a day I would speak with over 10 people who had different inquiries about our services. The use of this software inspired me to make a switch to software development so that I was able to understand the buts and bolts of developing complex software such as CRM.
My problem-solving skills help me solve complex coding problems and locate bugs that are difficult to find. How? As a business development representative at SkyNiche, I was the point of contact between Kenyan enterprise customers and the company. I played the role of consultant to enterprises, whereby I had to advise the customer on which tech stack to choose to implement a certain solution to a problem they were facing. I had to go out of my comfort zone and have an overview of different tech stacks i.e MERN (MongoDB, Express.js, React.js, Node.js), etc. That experience sharpened my problem-solving skills as customers were confident in my opinions of the tech stack to use in solving their problems. This also triggered my interest to switch to full-stack development and practically learn how these stacks are built.
The key takeaway of this story is that passions can and do evolve so stay open-minded!
