Why Non-Tech Execs Should Learn to Code.

Smart phone apps are fast becoming the lingua franca of the tech world. They offer much higher user engagement rates than traditional websites, and are supporting thousands of highly successful start-up business models.

The use of apps will increase exponentially later this year when Google evolves its search engine algorithms to allow for mobile “deep linking” or a way for their search engines to go inside apps and link to a specific location rather than just launch the app.

As a marketing executive with a long history of helping create websites, digital and content marketing programs I always felt at a distinct disadvantage when it came to talking to web and app developers. I just didn’t “speak their language” nor fully understand the development process.

I decided to take the plunge earlier this year enrolling in a part-time Swift development course at a NYC Flatiron district coding school – TurnToTech. Swift is the relatively new iOS app development language from Apple.

In class we learned about the basic process of designing and building apps starting with downloading Apple’s Xcode 6. We became familiar with strings and characters, control flows, functions and closures. We learned about classes and structures, properties and methods. As I said, learning a whole new language.

Lots of Swift code is “open-source” and available online in places like github, so you don’t need to “cook from scratch” every time you start the development process.

My co-workers asked the obvious question: “What’s it like?” and “Is it really hard?” My answer was simple “It is like being in France and jumping on the TVG bullet train. They’re speaking a foreign language, and it’s moving really fast.”

I learned how to do business effectively with people in the EU by getting on a plane and spending time on the ground in the UK, France and Italy. I needed to learn both the culture and process of how they get things done, which in many cases was different from the way I learned to do business in the US.

The same applies to learning code and working with developers. They have their own culture and process for getting things done, one that needs to be understood and respected by non-tech executives.

I now have a much better idea of how apps are developed, that there is usually more than one way to accomplish a task, how long development should take and a better idea of how much it might cost. I also know how to look at “source code” and have an idea of what it is trying to accomplish.

This kind of knowledge would be helpful to all sorts of non-tech business people, from senior marketing executives to operations people. I’m sure the business people in many start-ups would also benefit from having a better understanding of how websites and apps are created, tested and optimized without having to learn-on-the-job.

I don’t have plans to become an app developer anytime soon, but I will be much more effective working with developers moving forward, and I owe a debt of gratitude to the instructors and my classmates at TurnToTech in NYC – who where patient and helpful as I ran hard to catch up with the technology that is redefining the way business is done in so many ways.