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“So, what do you do for a living?”: A BA/Product Manager’s guide to surviving cocktail parties

By James Hulgan

I used to dread hearing the question, “So what do you do for a living?”  This was often usually asked by a family member or other acquaintances not familiar with the software development lifecycle, IT, or business processes in general.  For business analysts, product managers, and other software requirements types, it’s difficult to give an answer without being convoluted or sounding like Tom Smykowski.

This great post expresses a similar insight beautifully, but many of us struggle with good, one-sentence responses to what it is we do everyday in simple English.  I thought I would plagiarize some ideas that I’ve heard from colleagues over the years and compile them here:

1. “We help businesses figure out what software they need to build to solve business problems.”  This is a personal favorite of mine that I stole from Marc (who posts under mtalbot on this here blog).  It’s especially relevant to IT consultants/contractors.  Just about everyone knows what software is, and a lot of people understand that just about every business runs on some sort of software to solve business problems.
2. “We help communicate the business needs of a system in a language software developers understand.”  A variation of this is, “We translate from business to geek”, although I am less fond of the second version because it veers into Smykowski land.
3. “We make sure the right software is being developed at the right time, for the right people.”  The emphasis here is on the right software.  This response is nice because it allows you to segue adeptly into a discussion about business objectives.
4. “We help the business get the most value out of their development dollar.”  This response stresses the fact that you are not just a scribe or secretary writing things down, formatting them, and delivering them to the development staff.  You are helping make the tough decisions on which features to cut and which bugs to fix, and quantifying those decisions in terms of dollars and cents.
5. “We work with the business to find the appropriate scope of a software development project and ensure that what is built is what the business expects.”  Whenever I am asked the dreaded WDYDFAL question, this is what almost immediately comes to mind.  Sometimes I fill in the details of working with pictures to help model current business processes (and desired business processes).

So how about all of our readers?  What answers have you come up with?  Do you dodge this question altogether, or do you sound like a fumbling Smykowski?  Hopefully we can all help each other find good answers to this question.  After all, you never know when you’ll be in a meeting with “The Bobs” and the pressure will be on!

To check out this full blog post:

http://requirements.seilevel.com/blog/2010/05/so-what-do-you-do-for-a-living-a-baproduct-managers-guide-to-surviving-cocktail-parties.html

http://requirements.seilevel.com/blog/

 Ealga,

This is a real issue for me: what DO I do for a living? However, I have found the best response is to not assume that people really want to know what I do for a living because my job is to analyse and the one thing people hate doing is formal, rigorous analysis (hence the Agile approach). So now I just say "I'm a business analyst". "Oh really, what's that?" "It involves all kind of stuff and sometimes computers." "Oh, computers, right. I have a laptop and recently it's started to [inset problem here]". Once we get past the "can you fix my laptop stage,  I ask them what they do and generally that is a whole lot more interesting.

Guy

As a working mom often attending functions with other parents, I am not always asked the "What do you do for a living?" question. The assumption is that I may not have a career (subject for another thread). When I am asked the question, I sometimes start with the generic "Information Technology". If the person asks any further, I then explain that I am part of a team that launches web sites for large retail companies (last job). I also use the analogy of the architect where the homeowners (business) articulate their needs and wants. I gather and document their requirements, and work as a liaison between groups in order to make sure the end product is built to their specifications.