Role of Business Analyst in Product Engineering

Role of Business Analyst in Product Engineering

What is the role of a business analyst in product engineering? Well, a business analyst bridges the gap between stakeholders and the development team, interpreting business requirements into understandable development tasks or user stories to match a final product with the expected business value.

Business Analyst is not just a person who analyzes the business and presents their reports, they undertake and carry out the operations of the product in a timely manner. It involves a thorough assessment of target market, factors based on customer/market intelligence, remodeling of the product to be aligned with the latest problems and demand.

Business Analyst’s responsibilities

At different stages of development, a business analyst should have different levels of engagement and different scopes of responsibilities.

Always stay active – in meetings, in proposing smart ideas and contributing to the discussions.

  • Key elements in a step by step process – DISCUSS, DESIGN, ATTENTION, ACTIVE PLANS & ADVANCED PLANS

Discussions on product will allow many experts in the organization to collaborate through JAD meeting sessions. Business Analyst should facilitate similar discussions and present the content by explaining the product vision, business needs of customer, roadmaps and execution.

Designing will make the clear understanding of the product requirement. BA should  be able to convey to product development team with the user requirements and how the solution will improve their organization business. Business Analyst should have required knowledge on technical domain to make an effective communication between the customer and the product development team. Business Analyst should stay updated with the latest trends in technologies. Should be proactive in contributing ideas to design the outcome.

To get into requirements sessions, Business Analyst should ensure to have a proper presentation content to maintain the focus on agenda. A handy appendix with the requirements and confirmation made in the previous meetings will help to track the flow. Steer the discussions back to the subject if it is turning out into a different topic.

As a Business Analyst, the initial phase of the process is to understand about the customer’s organization and what the product implies to customer business.

When it’s time to focus the audience, while speaking have good body language, timely hand movements and also when explaining to audience point to the presentation, if required. Make a note of key points on a board/side of the presentation while continuing with the speech. After presenting have a discussion and conclude by just summarizing with all the key points made in the meeting.

Concentrate mainly when talking to the audience in a meeting/discussion, speak with confidence. Also, you can improve your speaking when you have good practice sessions. Interact with other Business Analysts in your organization and practice on different topics and gather bundle of key points.

If you don’t maintain proper attention you might lose the audience grip.

Active plans design a complete plan based on requirements and present it to the product development team in kick-off meetings, so that the team get all the clarifications required and understand the expectations out of it. The plan should include confined responsibilities of every individual which clears unnecessary confusions in later stages. It should set the boundaries to the all team members to understand the responsibility for building up and completing the requirements in-terms of technology and functional aspects.

It is important to use agile/Kanban boards like Azure DevOps, JIRA or even Trello for planning. Using Kanban boards on a centralized location keeps entire team on the same page in terms of the overall status of the engagement and items in backlog. Kanban boards also help visualizing work, progress and issues.

Advanced plans mean that the efforts spent which will be affected when requirements get changes in middle of the development phase according to customer’s request. An advanced plan, Business Analyst should have and immediately pivot to new ideas on customer requirements and how the changes influence on product lifecycle.

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