This is my attempt at answering the third question of the chapter on Clarity from the book “The Advantage”. This question is considered a simple one.
Now, while I answer this question I know that we do too many things, given our resources. It makes sense during an exploratory phase to provide more services, to better understand needs, technologies, evaluate market reactions, and jump on opportunities useful to guarantee the initial survival of the company. After a few years, as we get more established and we consider growing we need to start pruning the activities. We started by becoming more selective with accepting clients, we should now restrict our offer.
For a while I tried to come up with a smart, tricky answer, imagining some category in my mind that could be defined to include all the different things we do, something like “We provide Language Engineering services”. While this definition could have a meaning for specialists this is not a valid answer because from the point of view of the clients this is not an homogeneous category, so it is confusing.
The current answer to the question what do we do is:
We provide design, implement, and evolve parsers, transpilers, editors, intepreters, and DSL for companies all around the world