Your business is penetrating the market with a new product. C-suite leaders ask for: the cost to launch and integrate, the long-term savings versus setup time, and the overall return on investment (ROI). Who can answer them? The developer. Yasser Jilani, COO and co-founder of Code With Us, discusses the benefits of cultivating the developer mindset and how it can help C-suite leaders make smarter decisions.
Developers face challenges daily that take a variety of perspectives to solve. Their choices require trial and error, and solutions are rarely found by one developer alone. Collaboration, feedback, perseverance, and durability are fundamental characteristics of the minds that create the world’s latest innovations.Â
Mindset is a set of beliefs you develop throughout life and can be categorized into two types, fixed and growth. And this influences how you interpret different situations: While fixed-mind leaders may praise their team for being smart, the growth-mind inculcates an inherent hunger to learn in their subordinates by praising actions rather than a set state. Knowledge is not given at birth but something that requires curiosity and resilience.
See More: The Rise of the Citizen Developer: Pros and Cons
Five Key Benefits of Thinking like a Developer
It’s a growth mentality that enables developers to question and analyze various circumstances to reach success. The decision-making that developers go through is similar to that of the c-suite. As a previous developer and current COO, I believe there are five key traits all c-suite leaders require to make smarter decisions, and it was my developer days that polished them. Let’s take a look.
1. Analytical research skills
Once they make it as a developer, problem-solving is in their blood. Intuition guides fact gathering, obstacle analysis, and judgment makes a choice. Their skills do not depend on the technology used but on their ability to understand the audience, meet the users’ needs, and comprehend the situation.
Creating a product-consumer fit requires user research. Nevertheless, good developers will explore their clients, too: Are they trustworthy? How much input will they add? What’s their track record? After all, they become a somewhat new life partner. Profitable products last a lifetime, as does the relationship with those developing the latest features.Â
It’s like finding an investor for a startup – whether they are investing knowledge or financial support, it’s essential to research reputation. As a COO, when I’m running online education platforms in multiple countries, I focus primarily on finding advisors for the culture, curriculum, and ways of working in the area – a local expert I can trust. Without realizing lifetime value for both parties in the initial stages, the foundations could crack and damage the entire local proposition.
The researcher mindset can help C-level executives distinguish the exaggerators from the realists and support a project or partnership built with reliability and confidence.Â
2. Self-belief
While it’s essential to trust your partners, you must first trust yourself. A benefit from developers’ extensive trial and error periods when proving concepts is they learn to put their gut to the test and fine-tune their intuition.Â
An ego-mind withdraws from reality into a defensive posture because it cannot function in the present moment. Leaders need to learn to trust their inner voice and not let fear take control of their ego in times of distress. As Henry Ford once said: “Whether you think you can or can’t, you’re right.â€
Listening to your inner values will create strength within your business – if you are consistently true to yourself, your teams will believe in you. Consistency is pivotal.
3. Being feedback-hungry
CEOs must demonstrate self-assurance to lead a business down a new path – and believe in themselves for others to follow. But, the value of feedback cannot be forgotten. Collaboration and learning from one another is the most significant source of innovation.Â
For example, our teams noticed many schools having problems accessing the online classroom during the pandemic and needed to develop a university-accepted platform. The solution required the customer service team to gather information from schools, the engineering team to discover what was possible, and teamwork generated the key. Single-handed decisions don’t take you anywhere. You will never satisfy 100%, and an explanation for four-fifths is worth a go.
In any new project scenario, a team of developers will tackle the objective from different angles. While one thinks the chicken lays the egg, another thinks the egg makes the chicken. Developers challenged to speak their minds daily, presenting ideas and intuition, may not always share the dominating perspective of the user, but they know and justify their reasoning. These situations don’t require self-validation. The developer’s task is to find the best fit for their users and consolidate feedback to highlight favorable outcomes based on inputs from all stakeholders.
This collaborative and pragmatic, feedback-hungry mind is precisely the characteristic that underpins a successful c-level executive.
4. Resilience to failure
In Robert Kiyosaki’s words: “I have never met a rich man who hasn’t lost money, but I have met plenty of poor who have never lost a dime.†C-level leaders require courage, durability, and an ability to bounce back from failure if they are to make the choices that set them apart from what has already been done.
Leading a team to stay motivated in times of failure can be challenging. In one case, my company relied heavily on social media marketing to share the thoughts of our academic influencers. It was not a fruitful tool for educational institutions. Since blaming our marketing team for the financial loss could have harmed creativity, we absorbed the lessons as a whole.
Support a mindset of empowerment and growth, and you will see results. Our team came up with the winning strategy to focus on human, one-to-one relationships: Hiring our leaders to speak with principals at digital (at the time) education expos instead. Now, ROI is higher than ever by targeting the market where they are present.Â
It’s the developer’s duty to find solutions to hurdles that have never been jumped before. There is no textbook answer or uniform response. The task requires an abundance of hypotheses, calculations, tests, and circles back to the drawing board. It’s this resilience and drive that sets them apart and prepares them for life in the c-suite.
5. Integrity
Businesses face challenges whether they expect them or not. Whether due to changing requirements, unforeseen issues, or over-optimistic planning, software projects often exceed the estimated time to build. Without honesty from the developers, clients can lose trust and take their projects elsewhere.
As a young, three-year company pivoting its education program online to keep the business afloat during the pandemic, we needed to be transparent with our team and investors. The duration of school closures shocked many of us. And wages took the cutback. By being honest with our employees, very few left the business. Instead, we maintained a sense of security and trust.Â
See More: 3 Digital Workflow Management Best Practices To Boost Developer Productivity
“Fake it ‘till you make it†is not a philosophy about playing with the truth. It’s the adoption of a mindset that you’ll succeed, even when you still have some big choices to make.
Developing Smarter Decision-makers
Decision-making drives choices by identifying a question, judgment, or objective, gathering information, and evaluating alternative resolutions. C-level executives can support more purposeful, thoughtful organizational decisions by following the developer’s step-by-step approach: Create objectives, test hypotheses, and be resilient to changes when things don’t turn out as expected. The intuitive, collaborative, and growth mindset is at the heart of any successful developer and C-level decision.
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