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Business Development Proposals role definition

A close collaboration of the product teams with the Business Development team is essential for Vizzuality to pursue high impact new opportunities, to develop compelling proposals and to improve business retention through new phases of projects, partnerships and referrals.

This role is the point of contact between the Backend and Business Development functional areas when collaborating on opportunities and proposals.

Liaising with the Business Development team in terms of projected capacity needs for proposals awaiting evaluation/decision by potential clients is not part of this role.

Current responsible: Andrea Rota

Responsibilities

  • Review Copper notifications

  • Proactively interface with the BD team to assess if active involvement is needed for:
    • evaluating new leads
    • researching and crafting together each new proposal the team decides to develop

  • Ensure a backend engineer will collaborate on each proposal (either actively participating in researching/crafting it for larger, strategic proposals, or at least cross-checking a late draft for smaller/routine proposals)

  • Ensure (either directly or by seeking help from a fellow BE engineer) that each proposal includes adequate budget for baseline advisory/support backend work if substantive backend work is not part of a proposal

  • Ensure that the backend group is collaborating actively and efficiently in business development process (see “Bernat’s Dekalog” document)

  • Ensure that the business development team is up to date on the backend strategy so that they can pursue leads that match capabilities and ongoing direction of the team

  • Review the BD financial dashboard

    This may be more relevant to the Capacity role, in terms of promised capacity

  • Ask BD for clarification on anything related to leads/proposals that may not be clear

  • Attend fortnightly BD meetings

    These meetings are useful both in terms of discussing proposal work and projected capacity, so either the BD proposals role holder or the capacity role holder should attend and relay any questions/notes from the person who is not attending - we should discuss this

  • Relay to fellow backend engineers relevant information on new/upcoming proposals that need or may need advice from a backend engineer

  • Attend BD/engineering retrospectives every six months

  • Collaborate on the upkeep of the the internal “backend solutions document” (the main owner of this task should be a different role: the BD proposals role should mostly ensure that this task leads to better understanding by the BD team of what the BE team can provide).

    This document should be a knowledge base for proposals and show the:

    • Features (Needs)
    • Solutions that we may employ
    • Associated level of efforts relative to scope
    • Risks

Impact

  • Improve the proposals workflow
  • Decrease the impact of unexpected requests for backend work (avoiding proposals which should include at least some backend support but don’t)
  • Increase awareness of the backend team’s needs and commitments related to business development

Decision making

  • In collaboration with the capacity owner, ensure adequate resources are allocated to each proposal’s workflow and directly allocate people if needed