Ask HN: How to learn business being a software engineer? Hi, everyone! I'm a recent-transitioned CTO, and I feel I lack a lot of business background when discussing with others C-Level. Is there a way (books, courses or even College material) to help improving this gap?
Thanks! |
Financials are important, but not as important as having a bias for customers and revenue.
Then get a basis in accounting.
I’m curious just how much this fast tracks someone into leadership
Is it certain topics or business lingo?
Unfortunately I don't have a specific resource to recommend.
But I can share from my experience.
I have advised some tech people on this specifically and it usually boils down to: explain everything you want to do in $ figures. $s is the language the CFO and the CEO speak. So you need to translate anything into their realm.
Most tech folks talk team, tech, servers. CFOs/CEOs don't bother and don't understand. So try to calculate some basic business cases for most of your requests and for their questions to you. Nothing basic, but have some rudimentary logic ready.
It should not have the potential of losing a lot of money, because you don't want to worry about it and you have a full-time job already. So that rules out big capital investments, machinery, etc. You will need to sacrifice margin (so you'll learn what that means for sure). You will need to choose your market carefully and learn a lot about it.
You don't need to make a big profit, huge revenues; you're in it for the experience. Go low overhead: work out of your home, store things in your garage, don't mess with business stationary until you need to, etc. After a year, you'll be learning about financial statements (but you should still study those of other companies as others here have said.
Make sure to keep the business finances separate, too.
Jim Collins — Good to great
Next I would say, reading up on basic marketing/consumer psychology will help develop/acquire product and sell it.
Since you mentioned being CTO, I am assume you have development/programming background. This series [1] is good read targetted to developers who want learn a bit of accounting and finance.
[1] https://www.moderntreasury.com/journal/accounting-for-develo...
Accounting for one is recording what has already happened in a business - its merely reporting, nothing more. Its a reporting function of business.
There is far too much focus I feel on accounting and finance in MBA courses. Its not business. An MBA degree these days is sort of an entry price or piece of paper into the C-suite. I don't see that MBA degrees actually teach a lot of business.
Business is finding people and having them pay for value - a product or service. If you have an accounting department or knowledge of accounting/finance, you don't have a business, you have reporting. That's all you have.
Business is far more about sales, marketing, pricing, psychology, product/market fit. Then there is the delivery of that value - the actual product or service.
I'd also say a big part of business is learning about and being about to solve problems in a certain market.
Accounting/finance in a discussion of "learn business" should come way down the list IMO - its nothing more than reporting.
(A lot of the resources here focusing on accounting or finance are great resources - if you want to learn accounting / finance or if you want to get an MBA but they don't necessarily equate to learning "business". Also there is no better way learn business than doing rather than reading about it. I heard someone once say that you'd learn more about business running a lemonade stand than doing an MBA - I tend to agree).
Put another way, I don't care how great you are at product - if you don't understand what costs and margins are required to actually turn a profit you'll still fail anyway.
I learned basic accounting at a community college-- Financial Accounting (3 hr course) & Managerial Accounting (3 hr course). I later took Intermediate Accounting 1 which was also super insightful.
But those first two... Wow. They really opened up the "black box" of internal financial operations within a business, to me. Prior to those first two courses, I had no idea what happens when I pay a cashier a dollar, and how that dollar flows through a company to pay their vendors & employees (as well as taxes).
Intermediate Accounting 1 & 2 (dropped out of 2) taught me more about how accounting statements relate to the stock market & financiers.
If you'd like a free intro, you can check out this free online college-level textbook on accounting: https://www.principlesofaccounting.com/ [1]
Accounting knowledge + Digital Marketing experience has been invaluable to me as a Software Engineering consultant (in the digital marketing & small + medium sized business space)-- I understand the language of business and can predict what a customer needs much better than I could before.
[1] About the author: Larry M. Walther is Professor Emeritus from Utah State University. He previously served as the EY Professor, Head of the School of Accountancy, and Senior Associate Dean of the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business. Dr. Walther has authored numerous accounting textbooks and articles, and has served as director and/or consultant to a number of public and nonpublic companies. Dr. Walther earned his Ph.D. in accounting from Oklahoma State University and has public accounting experience with the audit firm of Ernst & Young.
Finance on the other hand is a bunch of mathematical formulas that are usually dumbed down. With OP being technical they should be able to learn the finance stuff on their own.
I'd venture to say with a solid understand of financial accounting they can probably learn financial statement analysis on their own too. I really like this book: https://www.amazon.com/Financial-Statement-Analysis-Practiti...
The world of business is large. I'd probably read up on the particular domain your focusing on (real estate? sales? telephony? etc). Find subject matter experts at your company and take them to coffee and ask what they read or recommend.
A CTO can also bring opportunities to the C-suite - it is possible you know about exciting innovative tech possibilities that could materially impact the business that non-technical leaders don’t know much (or anything) about.
Sure, you can learn generic finance stuff. But the real gold is understanding your company and your vertical very deeply indeed.
So you just read the entire book for a wide-but-shallow understanding, and then drill in to topics that interest you most.
Getting into the business domain is firstly an issue of awareness. Once you have an awareness of the landscape you build your knowledge bit by bit.
For me it was obvious that sales was my weakest area, so I focussed on that with further reading and practice. (Turned out I was quite good at it in the end - a total shock to me as I am the nerdy techie type personality).
Here is the all-time top of the Business category: https://hacker-recommended-books.vercel.app/category/7/all-t...
Disclaimer that this site hasn't been updated since Sept 2021. So the book list is not the latest. I do want to give it a spin some time later using the latest language models and make auto updates.
Finance and accounting is literally child's play for anyone with a strong math background. The harder part is understanding business models, human psychology, and developing a useful network.
Since completing a tech focused business program, I've done very well financially and found myself sitting on grant panels focused on commercializing academic research. It's astounding how naive hugely successful researchers are when they try to write business plans. Sometimes my scientific idols submit grants with kindergarten level understanding of business. It's shocking.
The opportunity that exists for a talented technical person with a holistic understanding of the art and practice of business is astounding. They literally throw money at you. More importantly you can leverage your knowledge to actually do what you want with your life.
As others have indicated an MBA would give you the language and credibility most orgs require to get into "business" positions. I do not feel the actual coursework is needed to understand the concepts and theories that have meaning for any given org. Businesses largely want growth, diversity, innovation, cost cutting, and future profitability. But I swear you could shortcut all that for just making the primary business stakeholders happy. Whatever they care about, what they perceive, what their goals are, that is what makes or breaks your position.
Being able to present ideas is key. I got a lot out of some of the MIT open course material [1]. I am certain some exploration on that channel for the business topics will yield more excellent content. Soft skills often separate talented and business minded engineers from the business side of the org. I cannot stress how little being "right" actually matters once you get into business. I have to constantly make forecasts as a product manager and often have frighteningly little to work with in terms of data. Capture assumptions, build out strategy, believe your story. You will be wrong sometimes. Being able to check your own ego, guide an org towards what you believe is right, and dealing with a bunch of different people who all think their view is the right view all play into it. I love the challenge and enjoy seeing my contribution play out. Would highly suggest it for those who enjoy those sorts of challenges.
Coming from a technical background where you've likely had to understand and work on complex structures, I think you're well positioned to understand the structures in your organization.
https://www.amazon.com/Personal-MBA-10th-Anniversary-ebook/d...
Great resource to go from zero to some basic understanding of a lot of stuff.
I feel that it gives solid foundations to start learning and build upon. I've read it and recommended it to a lot of people
Agree with others here that working with someone else at the C-level to help you come up with your own small curriculum would be great, even if they don't need to teach you themselves.
- Financial : DCFs, multiples, statements, esp what drives value of firms (Resource: Aswath Damodaran)
- Strategy: how firms create value (Resources: YC Startup School lectures esp Peter Theil’ lec on YouTube)
- Ops: YC lecture on metrics investors want (CAC, LTV, diff biz models like aaS, etc)
- most important would be to check out your co’s pitch decks, SEC filings (if public) to understand the core strategy, value prop, financial performance and most critical hypotheses
Books: -The Personal MBA by Kaufman is a great start -Financial Statements: A Step-by-Step Guide to Understanding and Creating Financial Reports
Next advice is to learn investing. I’ve learned a ton by studying public companies, listening to earning calls, reading 10Ks, etc..
Audible books are great for consuming biz books on marketing, mgmt, teamwork, etc..
Founders podcast for just learning entrepreneurship and it being awesome.
Business is easy. As long as you are cash-flow positive you are in business.
You improve your business by continually removing bottlenecks stopping you from improving your cash flow (see: Theory of Constraints).
Bottlenecks can be anything from marketing/sales to product development and tech. So you learn as you go directed by the bottlenecks.
That’s pretty much it. It’s easy but hard work.
Learning business strategy as a corporate executive is really the kind of skill best paralleled in certain forms of gaming - tabletop games with a lot of trade/barter mechanics, MMO guilds, and such: it's some combination of people knowledge, planning, negotiation, and internal controls and mechanism design.
What you're designing from the top of a large organization is a "machinery of people", and if you formulate all of the quantifiable stuff into a spreadsheet, it won't be a crystal ball, and it can bias you towards nonsensical "works in theory" decisions, but it will give you a sense of how to manage events proactively and leverage specific strengths instead of just reacting to crises. The spreadsheet's answers ultimately reflect the philosophy you bring to it, so a general study of philosophy(best done in a classroom dialogue) can pay off as well.
A last thing to check out would be Wardley mapping. This is a good brainstorming mechanism for getting a sense of the terrain and the dependencies in your industry.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/175914/food-chain-magnat...
Also, understanding where money comes from, where it goes to, and how budgets were allocated allows you to learn A LOT about how different industries work.
Also, which country?
For more detailed info, here you go: https://github.com/kuchin/awesome-cto
On a side note, your company/HR should have an executive education plan. They should be able to recommend the materials or courses to help you learn what they want you to. If not, they probably should start something like that.
Go to any business school site and just look at the MBA curriculum:
https://www.hbs.edu/mba/academic-experience/curriculum/Pages...
I would then focus on the introductory courses (typically Accounting, Valuation, Marketing, Org theory etc).
Find the syllabus for those courses or the text book and just browse it.
That won’t teach it all but it will sort of give you a map of the territory so you can look it up when you need to. About the level of memory most MBA grads have 5 years after graduation.
Create an anon account, follow investors & business people, ask questions, and over time start engaging in conversations.
A couple good follows to start: 1. @patrick_oshag (also listen to his pod) 2. @trengriffin 3. @secretCFO - read newsletter as well 4. @onlyCFO - read their newsletter as well 5. 10k diver (read his threads on his website)
From there, look at who they follow and engage with. Twitter is a one-stop shop for all your business learning.
P.S. we write a daily tech & markets newsletter @ themarketbyte.com. Having a daily email outlining top business information is useful to stay on top of news and develop a pulse for the market. Cheers to your jorney!
Trying to map your companies products first on a "value proposition canvas" and then whole business on a "business model canvas" is a great way to better understand on a high level whats going on in your organization.
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[1] https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Excellence-Organizing-Manageme...
The Personal MBA: master the art of business, by Josh Kaufman (and personalmba.com has more info, maybe). Seems to want to be the practical guide.
MBA in a Nutshell, by Milo Sobel. Seems slightly more academic than the one just above.
Start Your Own Business: the only startup book you'll ever need, from Entrepreneur
At least the first two come with lists of recommended further reading, by topic, including on finance, marketing, etc etc.
Happy to chat offline.
Things I wish I knew:
The first law of learning business is tech folks can learn business far easier than business folks can learn tech. You have this.
Second law is no one should represent your voice. They should help present it.
The leadership team should be facilitating introductions to learn more about the business how they see fit. If it’s not proactively happening.. keep reading.
Learning business is as much about understanding what the business needs and how it can get there as accounting and finance.
Understand the type of cto you are there to be, there are many kind. I have a book somewhere that broke it down well but effectively it can vary.
Read into CIO roles and responsibilities as well as traditionally they made the decisions about tech
If your position is net new you are extra capacity. Be mindful of absorbing work from other areas that upholds the past vs change for the future.
Find a framework you like for your first 30-60-90 days.
First, tech should never ever roll into Finance, only CEO. You are now the leader of possibility and capability in the organization. It may ruffle feathers. Find all the reports from McKinsey, etc making this clear why. This will mean you’ll need to be a better communicator and self manager out of the gate.
Get an executive coach or mentor immediately. Once a week at minimum if not twice a week for the first few weeks. You will know when to ease off.
Setup your own way to communicate regularly with the entire company. Find all the meeting you May want a slot on.
Learn the phrase innovation accounting- how to measure what can’t be counted by dollars and cents. Your world can be undermined by folks who want to measure what suits them.
Digital transformation - take a few classes or certain immediately. Quicker than books. Be clear in whether the business is building the future, or catching up to the present.
Change management - take a cert immediately for it, it’s fine to read but only a 2-3 day thing. It will keep mbas with no track record at bay.
Togaf/Cobit - having something like this doesn’t hurt. At least read about it.
Agile/scrum - make sure you can talk the talk and walk the walk. Those words belong to you now. I’d probably lean towards agile.
Six sigma - this overlaps with others a over however a bit better known in the business world. Consider it.
If you want to become a better speaker look into a course like Roger Love’s speaking courses, you will discover how simply your voice is just an instrument like keyword and you can use it as well as the best.
Learn how to read and summarize simply when needed. It helps tremendously to present complex ideas simply to folks who just need to know to put the car in drive.
Also check out the rest of his posts. I find them clearly written and useful.
Business is about numbers, yes - at all sizes of companies.
But what actually drives those numbers?
Its 1) value and 2) sales/and marketing. Its not the accounting department. That's my point.
Understanding costs and margins is crucial, yes. But its very much secondary to having a valuable product that people want and that you can market/sell effectively - that's business, not accounting/finance.
A developer asking questions about the value a product creates and the problems it solves or doesn't solve will do far better than learning accounting/finance as far as "learning business" goes or getting an MBA!
I'm not a Musk fanboy, but he has created multiple valuable companies (spolier alert, he didn't do that by focusing on an MBA but rather on creating valuable products) - here is what he has to say about MBAs in large companies:
"Spend less time on finance and power points and more time on making your product as amazing as possible". Bingo. That's business.
interesting choice of words! "Established in 1972, the Financial Accounting Foundation (FAF) is the independent, private-sector, not-for-profit organization responsible for the oversight, administration, financing, and appointment of the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB)"
in the US, FASB is everything when it comes to setting the rules of accounting.
I had a skillset of:
A. Promoting products at events as a Brand Ambassador
B. html, css, and basic frontend javascript self-taught skills (from ebooks, youtube, udemy).
With skills A & B, I successfully justified that I should be hired into an entry level digital marketing role, where I used Marketo to email-spam B2B and set up web landing pages.
Once I had that initial job using Marketo software at a B2B software company, it was much easier to lang other digital marketing roles.
Its defined by people buying a product or service they find of value - that is core to business (just like the definition of an artist is someone that actually produces art). If you don't have that you don't have a business (no matter how many accountants or MBAs you have).
Any skill can be taught.
A business without knowing accounting/finance, exist can. (An accountant, hire, one can).
For accounting/finance to be useful at all, a business exist, must first.
Without doing business and creating value, there is no accounting, or finance. Often Accounting and Finance exist to keep risk manageable and if you let it too long, avoid it entirely.
Creating Value is almost certainly working through some amount of risk.
In a business, Accounting and Finance on it's own may not always create value, unless it's an accounting/finance business.
Conversely, creating value without accounting and finance will make it harder to retain the value created.
Accounting and finance functions are mostly about retaining what is working and making it more efficient.
Innovation Accounting, is another thing that is not always measured on the P&L.
When I took it, it was still $250. The course was free and you paid to take a cert test at a testing center. The following year they made the whole thing online and free.