What Itera is and why I'm building it

I didn’t come to business analysis right away — before it, I had solid experience in banking, not in IT, on the business side. But that job meant constantly dealing with the IT department and other technical teams. And there was a gap there that never let me rest.

The gap is when someone gives you a delivery date, an estimate, the “only possible” option — and you have no way to check whether that’s true or whether you’re just being handed a convenient answer. They tell you “it’s not possible,” close off other paths, and sell you the one option that’s convenient for the team building it, not for you. Either you take it on faith, or you figure it out yourself.

I chose to figure it out. That’s where the interest in switching to IT came from — not as a career change for its own sake, but as a direct reaction to that gap. I went and learned frontend. Not to become a developer — I didn’t need that. But to finally understand where real complexity ends and where the convenient answer people sell you as the only one begins.

I never got closer to development. Instead, I found a profession whose entire job is to stand on the border between business and IT and speak both languages. Business Analyst.

The entry looks simple. It’s an illusion

From the outside, BA looks straightforward. There’s a book — BABOK. There’s a methodology. Just pick it up and learn it.

You open it — and everything falls apart. BABOK doesn’t tell a story. It lists techniques. Fifteen ways to elicit requirements crammed into one dry paragraph, with not a single example of what that looks like on a real call with a stakeholder who doesn’t know what they want either. You read it and don’t understand what it’s actually saying. Not because you’re not smart enough. Because the text wasn’t written to make you understand — it was written to record knowledge you’re already supposed to have.

And here’s the catch. Even if you memorize every technique, it doesn’t add up to a week of real work. Knowing the word “prioritization” is one thing. Knowing what to do on Monday morning, when the client wants everything at once and there’s no time to argue, is another.

The gap between the book and a BA’s actual workday isn’t a gap in knowledge. It’s a gap in experience that no book can physically close.

Who I’m writing this for

For two kinds of people.

For juniors — because you need an easier way in. Not just into practice. Into theory too — that first of all. Half of what’s written in the textbooks, you won’t need at all in your first year on the job.

And for career switchers — because I was standing exactly where you are. You’re not looking for a certificate. You’re looking for a clear stack of tasks instead of the uncertainty you’re living in right now.

What Itera does instead of a textbook

Theory says: “validate requirements with stakeholders.” Full stop, next technique.

A practitioner says: here are three questions to ask the client on that same call, so they don’t change their mind a week later. Here’s what a priorities argument actually looks like once the money and deadlines are already signed off. Here’s what happens when your BPMN diagram doesn’t match what the team is actually doing.

That’s the actual difference. Not the same methodology retold in other words — but a look at what happens on a real project, from someone who works in it, not someone who teaches about it.

Yes, some of the content right now is aimed at Middle level. If you’re a junior, don’t let that scare you off. The point of looking at Middle-level cases isn’t to pass an exam today — it’s to see the industry’s real bar early, instead of two years of disappointment from now.

Where we are right now — no polish

We’re not selling anything. Not yet, at least — that part’s certain 😉

We’re sharing a point of view, some experience, and one specific tool. The first thing we built was a free Telegram bot where you can practice answering real questions from actual interviews. Not made up, not “roughly like” — the ones that were genuinely asked in the room.

That’s not enough to master the whole profession. But it’s enough to know where to head next — which topic to read up on if you don’t know what STAR is or how MoSCoW differs from Kano. Right now, the bot isn’t a course. It’s a compass.

We’re building the course next — one of 11 modules is live so far. Not because we didn’t have time. Because we don’t want to fill the space with content for content’s sake before we’re ready to say something about a topic that actually holds up in practice.

Next, we’ll systematize the knowledge topic by topic, one at a time. And if it works out, the same principle might one day apply beyond BA — to any IT profession where the entry looks simple and, in reality, isn’t.

What’s next

Coming up on the blog, I’ll be breaking down specific questions and cases: which questions most often sink a Middle interview, how MoSCoW actually differs from Kano in practice, how to read a BPMN diagram in five minutes, what it really takes to grow from Junior to Middle. No generalities — just what you can use at work on Monday.