As software engineers, we often pride ourselves on writing clean code, optimizing queries, or mastering the latest frameworks. But after six years in engineering and over a decade in business development and strategic planning, I’ve learned something that’s equally valuable: understanding the business behind the product can be a developer’s unfair advantage.

Before transitioning into tech, I spent years leading business development at Helio Media — negotiating media deals with global partners like Fox, Viacom, and Discovery, and launching scalable digital products. That experience gave me a deep appreciation for how revenue models, customer behavior, and market timing shape every product decision.

Today, I apply that same mindset in my engineering role at Workday. Whether I’m building a Rails gem for ICU-style localization or cleaning up millions of stale data records, I think not just about the code, but the impact. Will this help unblock users faster? Does it reduce customer support load? Can it support new growth markets?

Why Business Context Matters in Engineering

  • Prioritization: When you understand the value behind a feature, you make better trade-offs — simplifying what doesn’t matter and refining what does.
  • Empathy: You align better with product managers and customers, because you see the problem through their lens.
  • Impact: Your work directly supports business outcomes, whether it’s user retention, monetization, or operational efficiency.
  • Autonomy: You can lead more confidently — identifying gaps, proposing solutions, and even shaping the roadmap.

At Workday, I’ve led feature development across epics, resolved production issues directly affecting enterprise clients, and contributed to internal tooling that sped up localization and improved compliance. None of that would’ve been possible without thinking beyond the codebase.

Final Thought

Too often, developers are seen as executors of someone else’s vision. But when we understand the business, we become partners in shaping it.

So if you’re a developer looking to grow — learn to speak the language of business. Ask why, not just how. You’ll write better software, but more importantly, you’ll build better products.

🧠 Want to see this mindset in action? Check out my Healer project — a self-adaptive error mitigation prototype from my master’s thesis, designed to unblock users when enterprise systems break down.