| This is a super interesting question and a problem I’m struggling with too. Really excited to see how others answer but I’ll give my 2¢. To get people to agree to projects, you need to couch its goals in terms that management & other ICs care about. So for some groups, that will mean increasing revenue, or improving margins, or reducing latency, or automating manual work. But sometimes groups inside companies aren’t aligned with the overall strategic objective of the company: ie a company needs to improve its ROI, but its marketing group is working on increasing its revenue (if you’re not profitable, this could literally destroy your company if marketing does its job too well, even though that’s what marketing ~should~ be doing is increasing growth/sales). So you need to know how to align your group with corporate strategy. What do your top execs want? One of the best ways to figure this out is to listen to/read your company’s earnings calls. These will tell you what shareholders and management cares about. Read between the lines. What business lines are the analysts asking about? Which are they ignoring? If you’re in a group they never mention, you probably don’t matter too much… The business lines they’re asking about are the important ones. I write software in support of supply chain and operations, so the book I read about this was “Operations, Strategy, and Technology: Pursuing the Competitive Edge“ by Hayes et al. I’d also recommend the McKinsey Valuation book for understanding what’s motivating your management, shareholders, and company. Basically you’ve got to learn how to speak MBA and put your technical projects in that context. If your company cares about scaling growth in ecommerce, and your project works on customer journeys—translate your project into $$ made for the company. That’s what I’ve learned so far, hope to hear discussion on this. |