Asking the right business question

Last week I wrote about meeting the expectations of the end-user. That will definitely make your product easy to use and popular. But is that good enough?

To make a product useful, it has to solve a very specific business problem. Or else don’t write the code, at least not yet.

At CoreView Systems Private Limited We were approached by a customer, asking for a quote to convert his existing product from using SQL database to Document database. Technically speaking, we could have done the conversion well for sure. However, by doing this what business problem are we solving? We started digging deeper.

This was being done for performance. The users were complaining about the product being slow, and the thought was to change the backend database for speed.

This is where asking the “Right business question” helped.

Finally, the problem was solved by redeploying the servers in a suitable deployment zone. The performance issue was resolved without re-writing a single line of code, saving a significant amount of effort, money, and time.

What is your experience?

Will your software vendor ask all the relevant business questions?

Or will they come back with a number of engineering hours to solve the problem?