Professional Business Analysts / Afterwards

What the job is called next

The title moves. The work is stable.

The role has been renamed repeatedly: systems analyst, business analyst, product owner, product manager, service designer, and whatever follows. Each renaming brings a genuine shift in emphasis and a much larger shift in fashion, and practitioners spend real effort worrying about which category they belong to.

Underneath, the durable work is remarkably consistent. Find out what is actually happening. Work out what would be better. Make it specific enough to be argued with. Get the argument out of people's heads and into a form where a decision can be made. Carry the decision through to something that exists. Those five activities describe the job under every one of its names.

The practical implication is to invest in the activities rather than the certification. Frameworks and bodies of knowledge are useful for shared vocabulary and for entry into the profession, and they are a poor guide to what makes somebody effective after the first few years.

The things that do make somebody effective are unfashionable to list: writing clearly, asking a question that does not lead, being able to sit with a disagreement without rushing to close it, and being trusted enough that people tell you what is really going on.

The last thing worth saying about titles is that they determine what you are invited to. A person called an analyst is invited to requirements discussions; one called a product manager is invited to the discussion about whether to build anything at all. The work may be the same and the position in the sequence is not, and for anybody who keeps finding themselves brought in after the decisions are made, that is usually the explanation rather than any deficiency in how they do the job.