Speaking the language

It is an IT cliché to say that ‘you should speak the customer’s language’, which is like simply declaring that you should speak French to French people. Actually learning to speak French requires continued effort over a long period. Spending some time in France is a good idea as well.

Like speaking French, using the language of our customer’s business domain is easier said than done. Despite working remotely, years of daily interaction and frequent `exchange visits' in both directions have allowed us to think about and discuss supply chains and logistics process the same way our customer does.

This is one of several ways that actually doing domain-driven design turns out to be significantly harder in practice than you might first expect. Our diligence in gaining supply chain experience during the last eighteen years has taught us to speak the language in more than one way.

In this case our customer actually is in France, North of Paris. We even speak French to them sometimes.