Subject Areas of Interest for Entrepreneurs, Engineers, and Managers
Let’s take a closer look at the three subject areas of interest and discuss the interests of the three main roles: entrepreneur, engineer, and manager. These are so-called activity-based roles, which are widely recognized in our culture (there are textbooks written about them, and they are relatively easy to identify) and can be used to explain other roles (they serve as a meta-model for other roles).
For example, you might be well-versed in medicine and know many roles within the “doctors” category. An adult typically has a decent activity-based perspective on medicine. However, if you want to create successful systems and/or aim for career growth, you also need to understand the roles and work artifacts of the entrepreneur, engineer, and manager. At the same time, the activity-based role of a doctor can also be explained through these three main roles. For instance, the role of a dentist is an engineering role in the project of dental treatment, while the chief physician is a position where a person is very likely, among other things, to perform the role of a manager.
The three subject areas of interest for these roles represent the minimum professional (activity-based) perspective for a modern person. No matter your position or the roles you perform, you need to have a general understanding of the subjects of interest for the entrepreneur, engineer, and manager within a specific project or enterprise.
This perspective is important for everyone, because all of us, in one way or another, perform the roles of entrepreneur, engineer, and manager—at least in our personal projects. Where to study or invest your time, how to develop yourself or your child into a constructor, how to manage resources—everyone regularly answers these questions.
Let’s once again turn our attention to the 3x3 Table and examine it through the lens of the three main roles. Note that, for example, a chef in the project of cooking soup acts as an activity-based role—an engineer—but their subject area is not limited to the soup system, since they may also be interested in serving the dish to the diner, the kitchen workspace, ingredients, utensils, and so on. In other words, the engineer is interested not only in the system of interest, but also in others. Based on this, we can identify general descriptions of subjects of interest, roles, and work artifacts for each cell of the table.
The entrepreneur is interested in how to earn money by addressing someone’s dissatisfaction, and doing so consistently (now and in the future). The “entrepreneurs” category has its own interests and corresponding roles:
- Promoter (including educator, marketer, salesperson) — an entrepreneur who is interested in the external environment (the market, opportunities) or the supersystem, including the client base and its dissatisfactions;
- Visionary (strategist) — an entrepreneur who is interested in the demand (profitability of sales) for a specific system of interest, both now and in the future;
- Businessperson (founder) — an entrepreneur who is interested in the attractiveness of the enterprise that produces the system of interest.
The engineer is interested in the system of interest, which should make the world a better place. The “engineers” category has its own interests and corresponding roles:
- Product owner — an engineer who is interested in modeling and documenting use cases for the system of interest as part of the supersystem;
- Engineer of the system of interest — an engineer who is interested in creating a successful system of interest (as a single instance), that is, taking into account all stakeholders. Roles within the “engineers” category may include architects and developers;
- Development organizer (DevOps, development platform technologist, method manager) — an engineer who is interested in the functional capability of the enterprise (creation systems) to produce the system of interest, including in the required quantity.
The manager is interested in the creation systems, which must produce the systems of interest—and in the required quantity (not just one):
- Manager for external relations (PR, GR, and others) — a manager who is interested in accounting for external stakeholders in relation to the enterprise, including the enterprise’s image, managing communications with various stakeholders such as investors and the public;
- Operations manager — a manager or supervisor who is interested in creating and delivering the system of interest on time and within budget. This person organizes existing staff to perform the appropriate roles within a pre-designed enterprise;
- Administrator — a manager who is interested in the operability and readiness of all enterprise systems, including qualified staff, necessary resources (working capital), and reliable tools (technologies).
The logic of how the team operates can be explained as follows:
- First, the entrepreneur identifies a group of potential clients and their problems (the target group). Then, they determine how these problems can be solved and outline a possible system of interest. They also find resources to organize business activities;
- Next, the systems engineer[1] joins in, identifying the needs of project roles and designing the structure of the system of interest, which should solve the problems identified by the entrepreneur for the target group of consumers;
- After that, the manager creates and manages the enterprise, which must produce the required number of systems of interest to solve the problems of the target group of consumers, and also informs all external project roles about how their interests are being addressed.
No matter what your role or position, it is advisable to understand the areas of interest of systems and the subject areas of the three main roles. You need to be able to think about all of this together and, when necessary, separately—managing your attention accordingly.
In the roles of developer, architect, etc. ↩︎