Discovery Session: Separate Business and Technical Stakeholders
To understand business process
We're a community of Salesforce SA, BA, Devs and admins! If you enjoy this post, forward to a friend of yours, so they can join us.
I learned it the hard way.
In one of the discovery sessions, I invited both business and technical stakeholders to discuss a business process.
Here is how the meeting went:
Me: Can you explain, when a customer does step A, what happens in step B?
Business Stakeholder: This is what happens in Step B, which then leads to Step C.
Technical Stakeholder: But, what about sub-steps B.1, B.2? and exceptions to Step A? How do we handle that?
As I was trying to nail down the end-to-end process, tech stakeholder derailed the conversation with side steps and process exceptions.
I felt like I was in a process maze, I was confused.
The lesson I learned was: to get clarity of a high-level process first speak with business stakeholders and then include technical stakeholders afterwards.
Ok Sai, but who are these business stakeholders?
They are Sales Manager, Warranty lead, Service reps, Marketing managers, Account Execs - who are day in, day out with operating the business with the customer. They look at the big picture and understand the customer journey end-to-end.
On the other hand, technical stakeholders are System Analysts, Tech Subject Matter Experts (SME), Tech Admins - who support business with their day-to-day operations. They look at processes in detailed level and understand exceptions to the process, restrictions, additional validations.
Clearly they have 2 different goals. Mixing them in one session blends high-level goals with granular technicalities, causing confusion.
When doing a discovery session, first meet with business stakeholder. Get down to this:
Then talk to tech stakeholder, so you can understand sub-steps, exceptions and constraints. Get down to this:
To take this concept one step further, when stakeholders wander around exceptions and workarounds, you can do two things:
Make a note of side topics for later review.
Then request your stakeholders (or ask questions) to bring the focus on end-to-end process.
Only after mapping the full customer journey, address sub-decisions and exceptions. This is how you bring structured clarity to the process maze!