Howto: focus on creating value before thinking about a software solution

After 16+ years of development, I noticed that I evolved in a couple of phases:

• first I was doing simple programming chores
• later I started doing consultancy work.
• in recent years, I started focussing on providing value instead of defaulting to tailored software solutions

As a consultant, you’re not only working on developing solutions for your customers, but you are also responsible for finding out what the core problems or challenges are and if the suggested route (if any) is the right path to follow.

You need to think about the challenges and compare the solutions that are applicable to find out what is the best solution for the buck and what will help to support any goals people and/or companies might have regarding the solution you’re defining and estimating.

I’ve come to believe that we can do one even better: instead of diving at the code, or thinking about a possible solution, we need to focus on finding out what value a solution – any solution – might bring along. If we focus on how a solution needs and might bring value to the table, we can then find out if developing a custom software solution is really the best one.

What about putting together some services? Or changing the process? Or using non-code for a simpler solution that brings enough value to get going for the next 2 years? Maybe a specialized other SaaS product is better suited to help the customer out and referring them to it is all it takes to make them happy?

As a developer, I really dig creating new solutions from scratch, but I truly believe that alternatives might sometimes be the better way to go at a customer’s solution.

In this article I go more in-depth about my mindset and how I’ve found out that looking for the value and focussing on providing value first, I’ve made more companies and people happy that I could have by using “building a tailored software solution” as my default service.

What is your vision on this? Do we – as tech people, developers, and makers – tend to focus on building software too often? Or could we be of more service by helping people out (even if that means not spinning up another solution for the next customer)?

Let me know, I’m curious about your thoughts.