"So What Do You Actually Want?" and Other Questions I Ask For a Living

Hi, I'm Sam. I'm a junior business analyst here at Future Analytics, and I've been in the role for almost five months now, which is long enough to stop panicking when a meeting invite lands and still short enough that I get a little thrill when my name is on it.

I should be honest about where I started. I graduated from Mapua and this is my first job. So when I say I've learned a lot in five months, I mean it in the most literal way possible. I did not arrive with a five-year plan and a clipboard. I arrived with a notebook and a slightly worrying amount of matcha.

What I actually do all day

The short version is that I ask people questions until we all understand the problem.

The slightly longer version: clients almost never show up with a neat list of requirements. They show up with a process they've been living with for so long that they've stopped noticing how painful it is. Someone is copying numbers between two spreadsheets every Friday. Someone is emailing the same PDF to a hundred people one at a time. And when you ask what they want, the answer is usually a feature, not a problem. "We want a button here." "Can we have a dropdown?"

So my job is to keep asking, gently and repeatedly, until we get to the bit underneath. What are you trying to achieve? What breaks today? What happens if we do nothing? I have been described as someone who asks a lot of questions and I have decided to take that as a compliment.

The other half of my job is mock-ups. I make them so clients can see the thing instead of imagining it, because a picture of a screen is worth about forty paragraphs of documentation. Nobody reads forty paragraphs. I write them anyway, but I don't blame anyone for the mock-ups getting more attention.

My first ever client call

It was with Cool Clean, and Alex, our founder and my boss, introduced me on the call.

I was awkward. I'd like to tell you I wasn't, but I was. New job, real clients, my voice going up half an octave. What saved me was two things. The Cool Clean team were genuinely lovely, they acknowledged me properly instead of talking past the new person on the call, and they treated me with a kindness I did not expect from strangers on a video call. And Alex had prepped me well enough that when it was my turn to speak, I actually had something to say.

I walked away from that call thinking, oh. This is going to be fine.

The unserious bits, which are also the best bits

Cool Clean have a company dog called Otter. They introduced him to us on a call and it was, no exaggeration, one of the highlights of my professional life so far. I have never been happier to be on a video call.

Also, one of Cool Clean's employees change their background every single call. Every one. It got to the point where the whole team quietly anticipated it, like a small recurring event on the agenda. Requirements review, action items, and the background reveal.

These are the things nobody tells you about client work. You expect the meetings and the documentation. You don't expect to become invested in a dog you will never meet.

The part that was genuinely hard

Going from student to working was a bigger jump than I was ready for, and the hard part wasn't the work. It was the pressure.

At university, a mistake is your own. Here, a mistake lands on the client and it lands on Future Analytics' reputation. That realisation sat on my chest for a while. I wanted to get everything right, first time, always, which is not a reasonable thing to ask of a person, let alone a person five months into her first job.

What's funny is that nobody put that pressure on me. Alex isn't the type to get annoyed over small mistakes. My colleagues have never once been hard on me. It was all me. I'm harsh on myself and I dwell on things longer than I should, and that's honestly the thing I'm working on most right now. Not my documentation. Not my process flows. Just being kinder to myself when something needs a second attempt.

The moments that made it all click

Two of them stand out.

The first was with a UK company. I'd made mock-ups for them and they loved them. Not "this is good, but", just genuinely loved them, nothing to change. One of them called me a wiz. I'm not going to pretend I've recovered from that. What got me most was watching them look at something they'd only ever described out loud and seeing it exist. Their idea, on a screen, real.

The second was the build sheet for Cool Clean, and I'll be upfront, it was the hardest thing I've done since I joined. We'd been trying to get that feature right for a while and it kept not quite hitting what they needed. I was distraught at one point. Properly demotivated, questioning whether I was the right person for it.

Then we landed it. And their comments afterwards genuinely warmed my heart. They said I'd done an amazing job, and more than that, they said this was the first step towards something bigger for them. That's the part that stuck. Not that I'd finished a hard task, but that a thing I built gave a client hope for where their company is going.

I did not expect this job to feel like that.

The person who taught me the most

Alex, easily.

He's a consultant himself, so he taught me the basics of being a BA properly, the fundamentals that I now use every single day without thinking about them. But the bigger thing was the motivation. Whenever I got stuck in my own head about a mistake, he pulled me back out. He kept telling me I was capable and that I'd do far more if I trusted what I already knew.

I'm still working on the confidence part. But I'm going to carry that with me wherever I end up.

Five months in

I'm still junior. I still ask too many questions. I still have a running list of things I don't know yet.

But I've sat with real clients and helped them work out what they actually needed, which is not a thing I could do back in March. I've built things that people were excited to see. I've been told my work is the beginning of something bigger for someone else's business.

If you're reading this because you're thinking about working with us, or working here, all I can really tell you is what it's been like from where I'm standing. Which is: much harder than I expected, much warmer than I expected, and a lot more fun than the words "requirements gathering" would ever suggest.

Also there's a dog. His name is Otter. That's arguably the most important thing in this entire post.