A Practical Guide to Getting Business and Development in Sync

Companies are losing millions for a simple reason: their development and business departments are speaking completely different languages. This leads to delayed releases and new features that nobody actually wants. So why does this happen, and how can you turn this classic departmental feud into a powerful partnership?

Hi! My name is Artem, and I'm the Product Owner for SimpleOne SDLC. In this article, I want to share my thoughts on why this conflict between business and development exists and how you can finally get them to be friends.

Why Business and Development Speak Different Languages

The problem goes a lot deeper than it might seem at first glance. Business and development teams often operate in what feel like parallel universes. They use different jargon, chase different goals, and have completely different ideas about what "risk" and "quality" even mean. Let's break down why this happens and the problems it creates.

Different Priorities and the Company Growth: What Breaks the Connection Between Departments?

The business world is built on solid, often legally binding, concepts: contracts, KPIs, deadlines, and financial penalties. People on the business side understand what's happening in the outside world because they're the ones talking to customers and partners every day. The development world, on the other hand, is focused on the tasks in their project tracker and on a "technical debt". Each department ends up living in its own bubble, with its own language and its own set of priorities.

Business Promises One Thing, Development Builds Another

When a business goal gets broken down into a simple list of features, the original "why" often gets lost in translation. The development team ends up building "just another button," with no real understanding of what customer problem that button is supposed to solve or what value it's supposed to create for the business.

The business team's goal is to sell the product; the development team's goal is to build it. You'd think the company has a common objective — to release a great, sellable product. But in reality, one group is making something, and another group is selling it, and these two activities aren't always in harmony.

Sometimes, a business representative will promise a customer a feature that doesn't even exist yet, assuring them it'll be ready in two weeks. Meanwhile, the developers are looking at the request and saying, "That's a year's worth of work." Suddenly, promises are broken, customer relationships are damaged, and the internal blame game begins.

Why Risks and Deadlines Mean Different Things to Business and Dev

There's a huge difference between what "risk" means to the business and what it means to development. The business team is terrified of not releasing the product on time, of breaking promises, and of losing a customer's trust. For them, risk is all about communication — it's about the agreements and promises they've made.

Developers, on the other hand, are dealing with technical risks: technical debt, servers crashing, and architectural issues. The business team often has no clue these risks even exist and doesn't understand how they can impact the product. At the same time, the development team doesn't always appreciate how critical the business's commitments are.

Deadlines are another point of friction. For a development team, a missed deadline is often seen as just part of the job. They're used to the idea that deadlines are a nice target but are rarely hit perfectly. Development isn't like a factory assembly line where you can calculate exactly how long it takes to make a widget. It's a creative process, and you can stumble into unexpected problems at any time. So, developers are generally more relaxed about deadlines than the business team, for whom a missed deadline can mean lost money and a damaged reputation.

Business Whims Lead to Growing Technical Debt

So, where does this "technical debt" thing come from? It comes from the business wanting to get the product out the door faster. When speed is the top priority, development is often forced to make compromises.

When the business pushes for speed and features are built "quick and dirty," technical debt is born. That "quick and dirty" approach comes with an unspoken agreement: we'll have to come back and fix or rebuild this properly later.

The problem is, when the development team brings up technical debt, the business team often hears "we don't want to work" or "they're just making excuses." But what the developers are really trying to say is: "Supporting this product is about to become incredibly expensive and painfully slow."

A Conflict in How Quality is Defined

For the business team, "quality" is simple: "it works, and people are buying it." For the development team, "quality" means clean code, scalability, and reliability. As long as these two definitions aren't on the same page, both the product and the sales are going to suffer.

This goes back to their different goals and KPIs. The business's goal is to sell, so as long as the product functions (even if it's held together with digital duct tape), that's good enough. For them, quality is measured by sales numbers and happy, returning customers. They're often okay with taking on more technical debt to get there.

For the development team, quality is the ability to maintain the product easily and quickly. Whether the product is selling well is, to them, a secondary concern.

Because of these different goals and a lack of good communication, the departments are looking at the same thing from completely different angles. This is what causes so many problems in big companies. You either get a ton of features that work so poorly that customers run away, or the opposite happens: development spends too much time perfecting every little detail, the business can't plan its release dates, deadlines are blown, and a competitor who releases faster (even with a worse product) steals the market.

These conflicts might seem impossible to solve. But let's look at what you can actually do to get these teams in sync.

Turn Monologues into a Dialogue

There are real, concrete ways to bridge this gap and build a powerful partnership. The problem usually isn't that people aren't talking; it's that they're talking past each other.

Build a Bridge, Don't Just Hire a Translator

You have two options here: a short-term fix and a long-term solution.

The short-term fix is to hire a "delivery manager" to act as a translator between these two worlds. 

But you have to remember that a mediator is just a temporary patch. It creates a single point of failure. If that person leaves, the whole communication structure collapses. A mediator treats the symptoms, but they don't cure the disease, which is the lack of direct communication. You need to fix the underlying structure, not just cover up the problem with another job title.

The right long-term solution is to build an organization where business and development work together as one team, with a clear understanding of what the other does. It's not enough to just tell them to "play nice." You have to give them the environment and the tools to actually work together.

Treat Technical Debt Like a Real Business Risk

Tackling technical debt shouldn't just be a developer's problem; it needs to be part of the whole company's culture.

Developers need to be more respectful of the business risks tied to deadlines. At the same time, the business needs to understand what technical debt is and why it's just as big a risk to them as it is to the developers. The business should also work to make its goals and risks shared and equally important for everyone.

Create a System of End-to-End Metrics

To set the right goals, you need numbers to measure them. And those numbers need to be shared across the company. You should have common metrics for sales, and the development team needs to see exactly how their work is affecting those sales numbers.

It's crucial not to hide problems, but to talk about them openly so each side can see how they can help. When you share metrics, that help can come in many forms. The dev team can't go out and make sales calls, but they can release a critical feature faster and help the sales team bring in more money.

Assign Clear Zones of Responsibility for Every Development Question

In development, different methods are used, and Agile provides a few good practices for organizing work. The first is shared planning. Business and development must have common touchpoints and shared goals. The second is that the development team has to know exactly who on the business side to go to with a question. Sometimes, there are 20 different people who represent "the business." That's great, but the dev team needs to know who the point person is for any given issue.

It’s important to remember that development and business are two engines that drive the company's revenue in different ways. Your job is to keep them both running smoothly and in balance.

Building a company that works well isn't rocket science — you just need to understand what you're doing, who you're doing it for, and how you're going to do it. This is the part that often gets skipped at the beginning. Teams rarely write down a full business model with all the processes; everything is based on a verbal agreement. And when that happens, you get miscommunication.

How We Fixed This Problem at SimpleOne

A year ago, within the team responsible for our SimpleOne SDLC product, the development and business units had completely different goals. The developers' goal was to push out a new release every month. The business units' goal was to sell more licenses and grow the product's revenue. As you can imagine, this led to some friction.

Over the past year, we've managed to get everything lined up. We've built a shared understanding of what we're selling and who we're selling it to. We've created clear product descriptions and segmented our customers. We've established proper communication between the departments by holding shared planning sessions. We've added quarterly and annual planning meetings, which has been a great way to gather feedback from different business stakeholders and get it to the development team. We've also made the connection between the product owner and the developers much stronger.

And we've seen some real success from these changes. Specifically:

• We've cut our time-to-market by 40%;
• We've reduced employee turnover by 20%;
• We've built much stronger relationships within the team. Now, there's a real sense that we all know what we're doing and why;
• The speed of decision-making has gone up by 50% because every team member feels empowered to make decisions on their own without getting stuck in endless approval loops.

Summary

Getting your business and development teams in sync starts with accepting one simple truth: you don't have two departments; you have one team. As long as your sales team is celebrating signed contracts while your development team is celebrating closed tickets, your company is going to be leaving money on the table and losing customers.

My main piece of advice is this: create shared goals, shared metrics, and shared responsibility. Give your teams a chance to work together directly, not through go-betweens. Make technical debt visible to the business, and make business risks understandable to development.

Turn the conflict into a real dialogue. Your product and your customers will thank you for it.