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Module 11 · Non-technical skills

Lesson 51 — Understanding the business

Before writing code, understand which problem pays.

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In this lesson
  1. Exercise 1 — The money map
  2. Exercise 2 — The 5 whys
  3. Exercise 3 — The business translation
  4. Exercise 4 — The backlog with value
  5. Exercise 5 — The bidirectional translation (the final essay)
  6. Submit

The bidirectional translation on TicketFlow. No solutions.md before submitting.

Exercise 1 — The money map

  1. Write YOUR TicketFlow's business model: who pays (organizer/buyer/both), for which value, and which are the 3 revenue/risk lines? Maximum 10 lines — the document the onboarding (48) carries on day 1.
  2. The piece→line table (§1): complete for YOUR repo the 5 pieces + 2 of yours. Which piece found no line? Is it over-engineering or boring infrastructure? Decide and document.
  3. The ledger's money: review your 08 schema: can you compute the month's invoiced commission with ONE query? If not: what does the model lack to answer the business's question (the "how much did we invoice?" nobody asked)?

Exercise 2 — The 5 whys

  1. Take 3 real/hypothetical requirements and run the 5 whys: "push notifications", "Excel export of the listing", "seats held for 30 min" — for each: the real problem and the cheapest solution solving it.
  2. The simulated conversation: write the 5-whys dialogue with the stakeholder (5 turns): which questions do you ask and in which does the real problem appear? Which solution do you propose and how does it differ from the original requirement?
  3. The misunderstood requirement: search YOUR history for a feature that built what was asked, not the problem (or invent the candidate): which question would have saved it?

Exercise 3 — The business translation

  1. Translate to business language: (a) "checkout p95 1.2 s"; (b) "the outbox has 800 pending events"; (c) "the UNKNOWN saga expires in 1 h"; (d) "the error budget is at 80%". Each translation: the phrase the business owner understands and what they decide with it.
  2. The simulated product decision: "the inventory does not admit 10k simultaneous on the same event" — write the 3 options (shifts/partitioning/reject) with cost in euros and conversion risk, and RECOMMEND one. Does the technical recommendation decide or inform? (49's answer).
  3. The business's error budget: the business asks for "zero errors + 3 features this week". Write the budget's explanation with numbers (46) and the proposal that fits (2 features and the budget intact? 3 features and the budget gambled?).

Exercise 4 — The backlog with value

  1. List 8 items of YOUR backlog (technical and product) and score each: value/effort/risk (§4's matrix). Which are TIC in disguise (the K8s migration without trigger?)
  2. The effort ROI: order the backlog by value/effort: does the first one surprise (47's runbook vs the mobile app?)? Write the top 3's justification, one line each.
  3. The "no" with alternative: the business asks for "the real-time sales report in the admin". Write the no-with-alternative (31's batch + 38's cache? 30's stream for whoever truly needs it?): the complete answer to the stakeholder.

Exercise 5 — The bidirectional translation (the final essay)

  1. TicketFlow's elevator pitch: explain it to your grandmother/aunt in 5 sentences WITHOUT technobabble (which problem does it solve and for whom?). If you use "backend", "API" or "cache": rewrite.
  2. The inverse pitch: explain to the tech team what the business sells in 5 sentences WITHOUT vague business figures (which exact metric is "it's going well"?).
  3. The module's close: 57's question brought forward — "why is the system this way?" in 10 sentences for the business owner (the lock, the outbox, the saga, the SLOs: each in its business sentence). Keep this essay: 57 asks for it.

Submit

Paste the money map, the 3 five-whys, the business translations and the two pitches. Next: Lesson 52 — Clean/Hexagonal and DDD applied (module 12, the finale).

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