When I am posed a question as to what is it that I do, my reply is unequivocally I solve business problems. In fact most craft’s ranging from watch making to ship-building are solving a business problem. I would define a business problem as one which upon being solved either increases profits or decreases expenses for your organization.

for example:
writing software that predicts inventory consumption rates for spacely sprockets.[increase profits]
writing software that helps reduce the number of  delivery trips that big retailer has to make. [reduce expenses]

Building software is a lot of fun as the business problems that are solved by software have the potential to be massively scalable. Lurking in your organization is a problem waiting to be solved, maybe a process that can be automated or a missing hook to an api that returns valuable data. In fact you are running a software company even if you aren’t.

It is easy to be caught up into a title of being an Software Engineer. In reality we are solving a business problem, writing software is just the tool we use to achieve it. So, my questions to you are:
1. what are the business problems that you are solving for your company?
2. what are the ones that exist but you haven’t solved yet?

Would love to hear back about both.