What Really Makes Software House a Good Business Partner

Miko Lehman
gmi-group
Published in
6 min readMay 30, 2019

How do you recognize software developers that will bring significant value for your technology project? What makes a dev team worth your attention? To achieve success with your product development, you will need to track down a software house with business and marketing-oriented developers. Why? Let’s break it down.

Tech nerds who focus entirely on writing code, and don’t give a damn about anything besides it. Looks familiar? It does because this reputation lives its own life in social media channels and offline business reality.

How far is it from the truth?

Although you can perhaps run into software developers who fall under this cliché, luckily the reality is much more optimistic.

Meet the new business-oriented developers

In today’s hyper-dynamic professional environment, developers also have to adapt to market requirements. And those keep on evolving, whether we like it or not.

Right now, dev teams build by open-minded and versatile people are pure gold when it comes to collaborating with the client.

A developer who can understand the client’s mindset, and who doesn’t roll over his eyes when hearing about the business needs, is a fantastic asset for your technology project. In fact, the ideal dev is a business-oriented specialist.

Why should you care about it?

Most of start-ups fall

Although we’re far from discouraging you from building an online product, the market is ruthless for the majority of start-ups. A while ago in the US, nine out of ten start-ups had to face a defeat. Currently, the situation is slightly better, and “only” eight out of ten start-ups have to say: “lights out”.

This tendency tells us one thing — that dreams and vision of the product are not enough to survive. If they don’t come in line with the business reality and their clients’ needs, then it’s all for nothing.

Moreover, since achieving commercial success refers only to the minority start-ups, getting an angel investor onboard, becomes a heck of a challenge.

That’s why whether your goal is building an application or a complex IT system, finding a business-oriented dev team is a milestone.

Five deadly sins developers commit and why they ruin the collaboration with a client?

We’ll start with a negative scenario. You will find extremely difficult to work with developers who:

1. Don’t feel the “business first” approach. The big idea behind your decision to invest in your future product, is the ROI and how your application will generate or increase your revenue. It’s mind-blowing that some developers don’t get it and all they think about is how the project will stimulate them.

The big picture is, however, all about business and expansion. The more conscious you are about your product, the quicker you will understand what sort of developers will help you out here. From the perspective of valuable devs, the most exciting projects are those with high risk.

To deliver them successfully, software developers need to have a business approach tattooed in their minds, plus — they will enrich themselves with extraordinary work experience.

2. Don’t understand the product-centric approach. By a product, we mean a concept which is in close relation to your business needs, marketing, and your future clients. It’s far beyond the project approach, which means the scope of work and a deadline.

Product, on the other hand, needs to be built, wrapped up, and delivered to you. This idea is crucial for both sides, you as a client and a developer. Instead of focusing on features, developers have to focus on values those features offer for your target audience. Those ultimate values will trigger your leads’ buying decisions. That prioritizes all the work done within your project.

Here’s an example:

Imagine building an MVP product. Does it make sense to force a front-end developer to remodel your website contact formula if we know that the order formula is the one responsible for the conversion?

At the end of the day, having a top-notch developer who is fully aware of the priorities and business needs is a dream situation.

3. Don’t understand marketing. Unfortunately, many developers don’t pay attention to marketing dynamics and social media, that are nuclear engines for companies of all sizes. It goes to the technology sector big time because tech companies target their clients scattered around the globe.

Executing marketing strategy for your product kicks off long before the product enters the market. It’s more than that — marketing of your product starts before developers lay their hands on it.

Building up emotions and demand generation is crucial for creating a long-term relationship with your clients. That’s why it’s worth to put a lot of heart in designing a website to light up their interest and curiosity.

4. Don’t understand sales. Sales results are the meta-goal for every single entrepreneurship. Understanding the connection between product development and increasing revenue should be fundamental for each developer writing code for your app or other IT solution. It’s disheartening, but very often it isn’t.

Ideally, you should spotlight a software house with developers who are aware of the fact that all their work serves one clear purpose — the product must generate revenue.

5, Focus only on coding and ignore all the rest. As soon as you recognize developers with an aversion towards learning other disciplines, or at least acquiring knowledge about them, you will know they won’t think out-of-the-box. With means your future online product will be okay, but nothing more than that.

Quoting after Alvin Toffler, the author of the bestseller “Third wave”:

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.

Although we don’t want to sound like a broken record, the professional reality is changing like crazy, and developers also need to keep the pace. Reaching out for new knowledge and gaining new skills — that’s the key.

Versatile software house is not just a dev team

Like in other technology companies, software houses can’t live without sales and marketing teams. And to strike you as a valuable partner for creating your product, business developers, account managers, and digital marketers need to be laser-focused on your business needs.

Moreover, sales and marketing specialists have to consume more knowledge, game-changing insights continually, and dig into new, significant data.

What’s also meaningful, all the software house departments need to collaborate smoothly and share intel.

Here at GMI Group Software House, we never quit improving our skills and broadening our horizons.

That’s why we attended the infoShare conference.

Dev trends vs Growth and Inspire

The hype behind the infoShare is well-deserved. It’s a must-be and must-see technology event, and a software company we had to be there.

Apart from our overall excitement about the event, the speakers, and the networking, we have observed a disappointing tendency:

Although the Dev Trends Stage conference hall was packed up to the ceiling with developers, software engineers, and other geeks hungry for the latest tech know-how, the other essential and attractive stages: Growth and Inspire gathered much, much smaller audiences.

It’s not a good sing, because those two stages with top-class speakers were all about inspiration and finding new ways of achieving business goals.

How we do it in GMI Group

We are super happy to have a dev team that represents an open-minded and business-oriented approach. Our developers are eager to discover knowledge from different fields. They explore the business, sales, and marketing aspects, and there are no right or wrong questions here, as long as it leads to skyrocketing collaboration with a client.

The bottom line:

Nobody is forcing them to take courses and training sessions; they care about it by their selves.

So, are you ready to elevate your project to another level and start a design process with a top-notch dev team?

Let us know today!

Source: https://www.gmihub.com/blog/what-really-makes-software-house-a-good-business-partner/

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Miko Lehman
gmi-group

I help startups and investors to design and build successful software products — (https://www.gmihub.com)