5 tips for how a non-technical founder can work with technical people

As a business grows, at some point it has to look at technology to improve how its processes work: a website, a web app, a CRM system. The trouble starts when the executives are business people first and not very interested in the technical requirements that decide whether the project delivers what they expect.

These five tips are for non-technical founders, executives and entrepreneurs who are planning a project with technical people or teams and want it to serve their business goals.

1. Know what you're good at and focus on that.

Whether you are building a startup or running a company that has been around for a while, every part of the business wants your attention: sales and marketing, HR, design and development, and the list goes on. You cannot do all of it at once, so as a founder you need to know what you specialise in.

Once you know your strength, you know where most of your time and energy should go. The other parts of the business, the technical side for example, you leave to your team, as long as your team has the right skills to run them well.

You should still be involved in the other functions. The point is that the areas that are not your strength should not eat all of your effort.

2. Trust the technical team.

Following on from the first tip, you need a technical team you can trust. They are building something that could make or break your company, so find people whose opinions and expertise you are comfortable believing.

Trust is earned, but you can get a strong sense of it in your first conversations and meetings. Call clients they have worked with, ask people you know for references, or look them up online and read about the work they have done for others.

That tells you the strengths and weaknesses of the person or team who might work for you, and whether they are the right fit.

3. Try to have a basic understanding of technology.

You do not need to know why your developers want PostgreSQL as the database and ReactJS as the frontend framework. You won't be able to help with those decisions, most founders don't know what those terms mean, and they don't have to.

What helps is learning the context most technical people think in, since you are the one working with the team. Look up the basics, like how to code or programming for beginners, watch videos, or take an online course. Find a few hours, or even a few minutes over lunch, to sit down and read, watch and try to understand.

Even a little technical knowledge will help you see how your team thinks, approaches problems and structures solutions.

4. Share business perspective with the technical team.

Left to choose what to work on first, developers, and technical people in general, tend to pick what they think needs attention right now or what interests them. A developer will often go back and tidy code they wrote in a hurry because they know it is sloppy, even though that is not a priority for the business.

That work may matter later, but not now. So your technical people put their time into things that are important to them and do not help the business today.

You avoid this conflict, or at least sort it out, when you tell the team clearly why you need the product built, how the project ties to your business goals, and why some features come before others.

Give the team something they can see, like a metric that matters, so they can experiment against it, measure the impact of what they changed, and decide where to go from there.

If you are a startup founder, you are going to need a technical co-founder for the startup to succeed. That partner leads the technical team toward the company's goals. We will publish more tips on finding the right technical co-founder on our blog soon.

5. Understand the rapid shifts in technology.

Technology moves fast. A new innovation can come out within months, if not weeks, and sometimes nobody sees it coming.

Keep that in mind when you work with a technical team. If you ask different technical people what they think of your project and how your team is handling it, you will get varying and sometimes conflicting opinions. Those opinions come from limited information, and you only hold a small piece of the puzzle yourself.

If you build one thing and later find something you think would have been better, that does not mean everything the team built is wrong and you need to start over.

The technology itself, old or new, is not the focus. Product/market fit is. As long as what your team builds fits your product, your users and the way they will use it, there is nothing to get frustrated about.

If you look back and see that you could have used a different technology or built something else, that will probably always be true, because this industry moves so quickly. It is hard to see new technology before it goes mainstream, and no one could have predicted some of the changes of the last 20 years of technology use.

You and your technical team need to share that mindset when you make these decisions. Technology should not intimidate you. It is an asset to your business, and there are ways to make the most of it.

Working with a technical team, like any working setup, is not always as easy as it looks, but it gets easier and works better when the founder and the team understand each other and work together.

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