How to Align Software Engineering with Business Goals

Anushree Chatterjee

Business drives development and vice versa, and if its synchronization with engineering is compromised, it leads to a host of problems.

A notable real-life example of misalignment between engineering and business goals occurred with the launch of the healthcare.gov website in October 2013. This website, central to implementing the Affordable Care Act in the United States, was meant to provide a platform where Americans could purchase health insurance. However, the launch was plagued with significant issues that exemplify the consequences of misalignment between software engineering practices and overarching business objectives.

Many lessons were learned from this episode about how poor coordination, inadequate testing, and unrealistic expectations and deadlines can have serious business ramifications.

As a leader in the IT industry, you might face similar challenges when it comes to uniting your engineering and business fronts. This post will help you find ways to achieve this to ensure better turnovers.

Why should you align software engineering with business goals?

In this day and age, websites and apps are the faces of your business and the first contact customers have with the business. In fact, studies show that the average time a person spends on a page is a little less than a minute. You can understand the pressure of making a quick, good first impression on your customers through these websites and apps.

If your organization is a well-oiled machine, then your teams understand the bigger picture and consider it at all times before taking action. Here are the benefits of aligning software engineering with business goals.

• Focus and efficiency: When software development teams understand the business objectives, they can prioritize features and functionalities directly contributing to achieving those goals. This eliminates wasted effort on irrelevant features and ensures that resources are used effectively.
• Reduced risk: By understanding business needs, engineers can design software that solves actual problems and avoids building solutions that don’t address core challenges. This reduces the risk of project failure and ensures the software delivers real value.
• Improved decision-making: Alignment fosters communication between business and engineering teams. This allows for better decision-making throughout the development process, as engineers can weigh technical feasibility against business impact.
• Increased motivation: When engineers see how their work contributes to the bigger picture and overall business success, it can boost morale and motivation. This can lead to a more engaged and productive development team.
• Measurable success: By aligning with business goals, the success of a software project can be measured by its impact on those goals. This provides clear metrics for tracking progress and demonstrating the value of software development to the organization.

What causes misalignment between software engineering and the business?

When you are operating in a leadership position, it could be difficult for you to pinpoint the exact cause of misalignment between engineering and business. You will definitely see the impact of this misalignment, though, in the form of differences in expectation versus reality of the product, negative feedback from customers, or even a drop in business.

Here are some of the reasons that tend to cause this misalignment.

• Communication silos: When business and engineering teams operate in isolation, there’s a lack of shared understanding. Business stakeholders might not effectively communicate their goals and priorities, while engineers might struggle to explain technical limitations or the impact of certain features.
• Unclear or shifting objectives: If business goals are poorly defined or change frequently, it confuses the engineering team. They might build features that become irrelevant due to shifting priorities, leading to wasted effort.
• Miscommunication of needs: Technical jargon and a lack of understanding of each other’s domains can lead to misunderstandings. Business stakeholders might request features with unrealistic timelines, while engineers might underestimate the complexity of a seemingly simple request.
• Inadequate stakeholder involvement: If key stakeholders aren’t involved throughout the development process, they might feel out of the loop and less invested in the final product. This can lead to resistance and pushback when the software is finally delivered.
• Metrics mismatch: Businesses might prioritize metrics like short-term ROI, while engineers might focus on technical quality and long-term maintainability. This misalignment can lead to software that meets business goals initially but becomes difficult and expensive to sustain in the long run.
• Cultural differences: Differences in work culture between business units and engineering teams can also cause misalignment. For example, a culture that values innovation and risk-taking in one department might clash with a more conservative and reliability-focused culture in another.
• Technical debt: Sometimes, the need to address urgent business requirements might lead to quick fixes or compromises in the software development process, accumulating technical debt. Over time, this can become a barrier to new developments that would align better with business goals.
• Resource constraints: Even with the best intentions, limitations in budget, time, or expertise can force compromises that result in projects not fully supporting business goals.

How to align software engineering and business goals?

Now, addressing the elephant in the room – how should you align your business goals with software engineering?

Let’s take a look.

Foster open communication

Open communication is paramount to achieving harmony between engineering and business. You can achieve this through:

• Regular meetings: Establish regular meetings between business stakeholders and engineering teams. Discuss project progress, challenges, and upcoming priorities.
• Shared language: Encourage clear and concise communication, avoiding technical jargon when explaining business needs to engineers and vice versa.
• Transparency: Promote transparency by sharing business goals, roadmaps, and market insights with the engineering team. This helps them understand the bigger picture and how their work contributes to overall success.

Define goals

Teams need to know what to do, and for that, you need to set goals.

• SMART goal setting: To effectively align software engineering and business goals, you’ll want to set SMART goals that are:
  • Specific: Clearly define what you want to achieve.
  • Measurable: Establish metrics to track progress towards the goal.
  • Attainable: Set realistic goals that consider available resources and timeframes.
  • Relevant: Ensure the goals directly contribute to achieving business objectives.
  • Time-bound: Set a clear deadline for achieving the goal.
• Collaborative goal setting: Involve both business and engineering teams in setting goals. This ensures goals are realistic, measurable, and aligned with both technical capabilities and business objectives.
• Focus on outcomes: Set goals that focus on the desired outcomes (like improving customer retention) rather than specific features. This allows engineering teams the flexibility to choose the most effective technical approach.
• Setting OKRs: OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) can be a powerful tool to align software engineering with business goals by providing a structured framework for setting goals, tracking progress, and ensuring everyone is working towards the same objectives.

Here is a depiction of the type of goals you should consider.

Emphasize user focus

The best way to broaden the engineering team’s gaze is by involving them in the research done for the target audience.

• User research: Involve engineers in user research activities to understand user needs and pain points. This fosters empathy and ensures the software solves real problems for the target audience.
• Customer feedback integration: Develop a system to gather and integrate customer feedback into the development process. This allows engineers to prioritize features and functionalities that directly address user needs.

Embrace Agile methodologies

Agile methodologies facilitate rapid response to change, which is critical for staying aligned with dynamic business goals.

• Rapid prototyping: Utilize agile methodologies that promote rapid prototyping and iterative development. This allows for early feedback and course correction, ensuring the software remains aligned with evolving needs.
• Continuous delivery: Implement continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) practices. This allows for faster and more frequent updates, enabling quicker adaptation to changing needs and priorities. Read: Continuous Integration and Testing: Best Practices.
• Use Technology Roadmaps: Develop a technology roadmap that aligns with the strategic milestones of the business. This roadmap should be revisited and updated regularly to reflect changes in both technology and business strategies.
• Improve QA practices: One cannot ignore the impact QA has on a business’s profits. QA not only safeguards the company from gaining a bad reputation due to a glitchy or shoddy product but also acts as a seal of approval that what was expected by the business is developed. A great way to ensure good QA practices is by using modern test automation tools to do the heavy lifting for you.

Tools like testRigor are a great choice since they use generative AI to make test case writing, executing, and maintaining easy. If test case creation is simple, then your team needs not waste time on the technicalities of the tool; instead, they need to focus on test coverage. With testRigor, you can generate tests in plain English using the SDD (specification-driven development) way of testing, making the job much easier.

Read: Test Automation Tool For Manual Testers.

Invest in team alignment

• Cross-functional teams: Create cross-functional teams with members from both business and engineering backgrounds. This fosters collaboration and a shared understanding of goals across disciplines.
• Metrics that matter: Establish metrics that track progress towards both business goals and technical objectives. This provides a holistic view of the project’s effectiveness and ensures all efforts contribute to the desired outcomes. Here are the QA Metrics to Improve Your Software Testing.
• Training and development: Train software engineers in business processes and vice versa to foster mutual understanding and collaboration. Understanding each other’s domains enhances teamwork and goal alignment.
• Regular review and adaptation: Regularly review the alignment between software projects and business goals. Be prepared to make adjustments as market conditions, technology landscapes, and business objectives evolve.
• Leverage data and analytics: Use data and analytics to make informed decisions about how software projects can better support business objectives. This can help identify areas of improvement and predict future trends.

Summing it up

Aligning software engineering with business goals is not just about enhancing the efficiency of technology projects; it’s about ensuring that every technological effort pushes the organization closer to its strategic objectives, securing a stronger position in the market and a better foundation for future growth. Using intelligent and modern tools for CI/CD, test management, code management, ticketing, and test automation helps ease this whole process and achieve engineering goals faster, effortlessly, and efficiently.

Additional Resources

• Director of Engineering Cheat Sheet
• Top-25 VP of Engineering Interview Questions
• What Exactly Do QA Directors Do? Job Description & Responsibilities Overview
• Earning the Title: The Road to Chief Technology Officer and the Salary Reward
• The Modern CTO: Is There a Necessity of Technical Expertise?
• How to do End-to-end Testing with testRigor

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Leadership plays a crucial role by setting a clear vision and creating an environment where collaborative goal-setting between business and technology leaders is encouraged. Leaders should also ensure that there are direct reporting lines or communication channels between these groups and foster a culture where business and engineering collaboration is the norm.

You can start by clearly communicating these objectives to your technology leaders. Involve them in strategic meetings and decision-making processes. Use a structured framework like OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) to set specific and measurable goals that link software projects to business outcomes. Regularly review these goals with them to ensure they remain aligned with the business’s evolving needs.

You can be effective by hosting regular joint meetings between business and engineering teams, using collaborative tools to share updates, and creating documentation that outlines business goals and their relevance to ongoing projects. Encourage open forums and Q&A sessions where engineers can ask questions directly to business leaders to gain deeper insights into the business strategy.

Do the review at least quarterly to coincide with business and technology planning cycles. However, in fast-paced industries, more frequent reviews may be necessary. Use these reviews to assess if the software engineering efforts are still in sync with business goals and make adjustments as market conditions or corporate strategies evolve.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) might include development cycle time, software deployment frequency, system downtime, user satisfaction scores, and the business impact of deployed software solutions, such as increased sales, reduced costs, or improved customer retention. Choose KPIs directly influenced by business objectives and software development activities.

Address resistance by openly discussing the benefits of alignment and providing clear examples of successes from aligned efforts. It’s also important to listen to concerns from both sides, as these can provide insights into underlying issues that need to be addressed. Offering training and cross-departmental workshops can also help in building mutual understanding and appreciation of each other’s challenges and contributions.

“We spent so much time on maintenance when using Selenium, and we spend nearly zero time with maintenance using testRigor.”

Keith Powe VP Of Engineering - IDT