Great article, but what if you're a BA with a great idea and super low budget?
You can either:
a) Learn to develop applications on your own (potentially slowing your time to market and reducing product quality)
b) Develop the requirements and hire someone else to build it (cheaply and effectively if you've got a good team in India)
c) Take on a developer as a partner (diluting equity and who knows if he's the right guy for the job until you've learned more about the nature of the solution needed?)
My contention is that its not worth diluting equity with an additional partner until you've put out a product yourself that tests of all your original assumptions.
In that scenario, you're not a BA you're the customer because you want your idea developed. So hire a competent developer to make that idea come to life. The core problems with being a BA are the same, you'll skew the implementation with your own pre-conceived notions of how you think things should be done. Given you're not capable of doing the work, you really shouldn't have any input on that.
I don't tell my accountant how to do their job, despite having numerous opinions on how things should be structured. She takes my input on board, and tells me what I should actually be doing.
How you decide to remunerate them is an entirely different problem.
You can either: a) Learn to develop applications on your own (potentially slowing your time to market and reducing product quality)
b) Develop the requirements and hire someone else to build it (cheaply and effectively if you've got a good team in India)
c) Take on a developer as a partner (diluting equity and who knows if he's the right guy for the job until you've learned more about the nature of the solution needed?)
My contention is that its not worth diluting equity with an additional partner until you've put out a product yourself that tests of all your original assumptions.