After having worked as Java developer for almost 3 years in the same company that I currently work at, I moved to a new position associated with the development of the same application. I’m in this new position for more than 1 year now. My official job title is Systems Designer, but I’m not sure this is a title that expresses well what I do. So my question here is what would be the most appropriate job title for me? I see this question as important for my career development. After all, I should be able to explain in one word what I do. And it’s no longer “Java Developer”. Well, in more than one word, this is what I do:

The business analysts gather requirements / business problems to be solved with the clients and then discuss these requirements with me. Given the requirements, I design the high level solutions to be implemented in our system (e.g. a new screen on the client application, modifications to existing reports, extension to the XML export format of some objects, etc). I base my decision on the current capabilities of the system, the overall impact that the solutions would have on the system and the estimated effort to implement them (as I was a developer of this same application for almost 3 years before I moved to this position, I’m confident in my estimates). The solutions are discussed iteratively with the business analysts until we agree that they are good. The outcome of this analysis is what we call the “requirements design” document, which is written by me, shared with clients for approval and then also with the team that is going to implement the solutions and test them. Note that there are a few problems that I need to find a solution for that are non-functional. If the users are unhappy with the performance of a certain tool, I will investigate what can be done to speed it up. I will do some research – often based in the Java code itself - to identify possibilities of optimizations. But in this new position I no longer code, the main outcome of my work is really the “requirements design”.

Is “Systems Designer” really the most appropriate job title?