The most important thing you should do if you transit from a technical role to the BA role

The technical roles we are talking about here are about people with specific technical skills, knowledge, and expertise to perform functions, for example, the engineers and the QAs.

If you are technical people and you want to transit your career to Business Analyst, congratulations, you have lots of advantages, like,

• familiar with the systems
• understand how the software works
• understand the delivery process

,etc.

However, there are also gaps. The first and the most important thing is the mindset.

As technical people, what we used to care about most is the system. What we always ask are,

• How to implement the new feature?
• Can the system support the new function?
• What are the scenarios that the system might break?

, etc.

However, as a Business Analyst, the most important thing is that we should switch between the business and the system. We should be able to represent our stakeholders. Also, we should be able to provide system knowledge to the business. Business Analysts need to think very differently when talking to different people and working on different things.

Take my experience as an example. I started my career as a Developer, and then I transit to the QA role. While I was doing QA, I worked very closely with BA to write the Acceptance criteria. I thought it should be no gap for my transition to the BA role, but the fact is that I faced quite big challenges at that time.

I was thinking more about the system while writing AC, the edge cases, the bad path and the sad path, etc. However, I found it is hard to document the business requirements and solve the problem from the stakeholders’ perspective. I felt like a door in between. I kept practising my thinking, following the steps that a BA does typically really helps, and eventually, I can switch my mindset between business and system freely.

If our mind is not comfortable changing, don’t push it so hard. We should take care of our minds. We can write down these practices on paper and then follow the steps on paper to reduce the pain in our minds. After lots of practice, our minds will remind these steps themselves, and you will feel at ease to think this way.

First of all, put on stakeholders’ shoes to figure out,

• What is our stakeholder’s job to be done?
• What are their goals?
• What are their pains?
• , etc.

Second, converge to define

• the persona and the journeys
• the problem first before coming to the solution

Third, analyze based on assumptions,

• use BA techniques to analyze
• visualize your analysis

If you are interested in what do Business Analysts do or what are the values that the Business Analyst can provide to the organization or the team? You can visit https://gominibits.com/courses/introduction-what-do-business-analysts-do/ for more information.