Business Analyst / Systems Analyst
Works out what the software actually has to do — the process as it is, the process as it should be, and the requirements a team can build from.
Who to hire
The shape of person who does this job well — and whether you should be hiring it at all yet.
A staple of enterprise and contracted work, and nearly absent from product startups where the product manager does it. Where the client has a process nobody has written down, this is the person who writes it down, and the quality of that document decides whether the build succeeds.
Education
Business, information systems or a domain background. The hard skill is interviewing people who cannot describe their own process.
Experience
3+ years eliciting requirements in your kind of environment. Ask for a requirements document they wrote; it is the most readable evidence in this field.
Vertical / domain experience
Entirely domain in enterprise work: insurance claims, hospital scheduling, payroll and logistics each have their own vocabulary, and learning one takes months.
What it pays, roughly
$95,992 median, Canada — for Computer and information systems professionals, the closest occupation Statistics Canada actually measures, measured from $85,010 to $103,002 over 202,605 people. That occupation is broader than this role, so read it as an anchor, not a salary band — and note that a startup usually pays below it in cash and above it in equity.
Credentials and certifications
What exists, who issues it, and whether it means anything for this seat. A credential is evidence of a floor, never of judgment — and in a few of these roles it is a legal requirement rather than a nice-to-have.
| Credential | Issued by | When it matters | Skiploma |
|---|---|---|---|
| CBAP / ECBA | International Institute of Business Analysis | The recognised business-analysis credentials, and common requirements on enterprise and government bids. | Study |
| PMI-PBA | Project Management Institute | The PMI equivalent, often preferred where delivery is already PMI-aligned. | Study |
What this role does at each stage
The same title means three different jobs depending on how much money is in the bank. Read the stage you are at, then read the next one — that is what you are hiring toward.
The founder, by talking to customers and writing it down.
The product manager or the founder. A separate analyst at this stage usually produces documents nobody reads.
A seat in agency, enterprise and public-sector delivery; in product companies, the product manager keeps it.
Can one person hold this and something else?
The whole point of the many-hats problem: which of these jobs merge safely into one person, and which merges quietly cost you money or control.
Merges well with
- Product Manager (Product & design)
- Technical Project Manager / Delivery Manager
- Solutions Architect / Technical Architect
Business analyst and product manager are the same person in a product company. Business analyst and delivery manager merge in a small agency.
Keep separate from
No conflict, but the person writing the requirements should not also be the person estimating them.
Reading a candidate
What good looks like in an hour, and what should stop the process.
Good signals
- Interviews the people who do the work, not just their manager
- Writes a document an engineer can build from
- Separates what is required from what is habit
Red flags
- Requirements that restate the current screen
- No process map
- Never says a request is out of scope
The same role in three kinds of company
This job changes shape depending on who is paying for it. An agency sells the hours, a contract shop delivers into someone else's estate, and a product company is building something it keeps — and the same title means something different in each.
In an agency
In an agency the analyst is often what the client is really buying: their own process, finally written down.
On a client contract
On contract, the requirements document is the thing a dispute is argued from. Get it signed, and keep the version history.
In a product company
In a product company, beware requirements written without a customer in the room — that is how a roadmap of features nobody asked for is produced.
What this role runs on
The software categories this job lives in. Each links to our buying brief and to the research behind it.
| Category | Who the default is | What leaving costs | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Project Management Software | Microsoft, Atlassian, Asana, Monday | The weakest in this research | The research → |
| DMS — Document Management Systems | Microsoft SharePoint (bundled in Microsoft 365), with OpenText and Hyland in enterprise ECM | The repository itself: years of documents with their version history, permissions, metadata, retention schedules and legal holds | The research → |
| Knowledge Management & Enterprise Search | Glean and Notion | — | The research → |