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Twilio has published new research revealing that nearly all (90%) CTOs and senior IT decision makers at UK businesses view the role of software developers as important to compete in their industry during the pandemic. The research marks the UK launch of a new book by Twilio CEO and co-founder Jeff Lawson, Ask Your Developer: How to harness the power of software developers and win in the 21st century.
At the start of the pandemic customers stayed at home, leaving companies to lean on their software developers to facilitate business-as-usual operations online. Ask Your Developer is written as a toolkit for business leaders, helping them to survive the pandemic and future proof their businesses by solving customers’ problems with software.
The research, which surveyed CTOs and IT decision makers at large UK companies, found that businesses are waking up to this notion. Almost all (93%) respondents stated that technology is important to compete in their industry during the pandemic. Of the 90% who view software developers as important to compete, 47% stated it was ‘very important’.
Despite this, the results highlight a persistent misconception that developers are merely technical workers. Prior to the pandemic, respondents viewed the developer’s role overwhelmingly as ‘technical’ (70%), with fewer perceiving them as problem solvers (53%), strategic (31%) creative (30%) or involved in customer experience (14%). Since the pandemic, these figures remain relatively unchanged - technical (69%), problem solving (53%), strategic (33%), creative (27%) and customer experience (18%).
In Ask Your Developer, Jeff Lawson outlines how this misconception is holding back companies from unlocking the true value of developers. The book reveals why developers are in fact the creative workforce in an organisation who can solve major business problems and create valuable solutions for customers. He explains why developers should be customer facing and not considered back-office staff. By bringing in developers at the problem solving stage, they are able to use their expertise, for both their firm and its customers, to find technological solutions to the most pressing issues in front of them.
Jeff Lawson, author of Ask Your Developer and CEO & founder of Twilio: “At its core, Ask Your Developer is about empowerment. People in any field rise to the expectations set for them. Ask Your Developer is about setting high expectations for developers - not how much code they can grind out, but how well can they use their ingenuity and creativity to solve the world’s biggest problems. They do this only if they’re empowered and given a wide enough berth. The most important thing is to give developers problems, not solutions.”
