Product and Engineering Growth Areas

Mostly when someone sees the "T" in CTO/Chief Technology Officer they think of a magician coding in the basement to make their product vision appear in a couple of weeks. Although I did spend a significant amount of my career writing full-stack applications, much of the experience that I have gained and value that I bring is around the orchestration of the Strategy and then the Tactical ability to Amp It Up in order to create Traction in order to Execute the Strategic plans.

Before diving into the "Technology" of an Organization, it is important to understand the 5 key Product and Engineering Growth Areas to ensure the Organization is aligned and prepared for Growth. 

5 key Product and Engineering Growth Areas

• Mission, Vision and Strategy of the Organization
• Product
• People (Humans)
• Technology
• Process

Mission, Vision and Strategy 

• Before jumping into technology, what is the Mission of the Organization?
  • What is driving the organization to solve this problem in their part of the universe?
  • The mission is tied to passion of the organization. Of the leaders that desired to solve this problem. We each should be doing something that we have passion for. That we love.
  • I created Sherpa CTO as a fractional CTO service because I wanted to help non-technical founders navigate Product and Engineering Growth. To provide confidence in the Product and Engineering Orgs. I've been lucky enough to be given the opportunity to gain these experiences and I want to give it back. I do this because of love The Art of it.
• What is the Vision?
  • What do we want it look like at some future date? Who do we want to be when we grow up?
  • In 5/10 years? Who knows?!!? but let's paint the picture so that we know what the summit looks like.
  • In 3 years? In 1 year? Now the Vision is a little closer. We can see that basecamp way before we see the summit.
• What is the Strategy?
  • What is the plan? How do we measure progress?
  • How does that FY Vision turn into Goals? Or Objectives? Or OKRs?
  • How can we get more focused? What are the OKRs for this Quarter?
  • How can we show more frequent accomplishments to Tactically gain Traction and meet the Goals within our Strategy?
  • How does our Product Strategy relate to the Organization's Strategy?
  • How does our Technology Strategy relate to our Product Strategy?
• Having a documented Mission, Vision and Strategy will help align the business toward a North Star. More to come in future posts...

Product

• It is important that the Product Strategy is aligned with the Business Strategy
• Product Strategy will lead to a Product Roadmap
  • The Product Roadmap is a Strategy Asset, not an Execution Asset
• The Product Strategy/Roadmap will inform the different Product Workstreams
  • Examples: Application(s), Platform, Integration, Analytics, Security
• More around the Product Growth Area in future posts...

People (Humans)

• "How do we know what to hire?", "How do I know how much investment I need?"
• Team Design
  • Based on the different Product Workstreams, we can then create the Team/Seat Design which is Strategic vs "just adding another developer"
    • Once we know the workstreams, what does our seating structure look like to ensure each workstream has the necessary skills/disciplines to autonomously execute the mission autonomously, without dependencies blocking and reduced cognitive load?
  • Existing humans are then assigned to seats within the seat design
  • The proper seat design should match the Mission, Vision, Strategy of the business based on where the business is "today"
    • We should continue to look at team design as the business changes. There will be changes!
  • Team Design can be influenced by Iron Triangle Math
    • Iron Triangle
      • Scope (is scope known?)
      • Timeline (what is our expected delivery date?)
      • Investment (what is our investment in team to reduce timeline?)
    • Pulling on any Iron Triangle level requires other edges to be pulled in/out
      • Scope increase/decrease will impact timeline or investment to increase/decrease
      • If timeline is desired to be shorter (hint: it always is), either more investment or reduced scope is needed
      • If we desire to reduce Investment, we will need to reduce scope or extend timeline

• Humans
  • Humans will be where the majority of the investment is made within an Organization building a Software Product.
  • While reading The Art of Leadership by Michael Lopp, he described "resources", "people" as humans.
    • I love this articulation of what has historically been called "resources"
    • There are humans with real lives, families behind that investment in "resources" that is made
  • It is important to focus on that investment to ensure engagement as well as performance
  • The humans must fit with the Core Values, Culture and Passion that the Organization has for the mission
    • It never should be "just a job"
• Many more posts around humans in the future (hiring, partnering, enabling, supporting)

Technology

• It is important that the Technology Strategy is aligned with the Product Strategy
• We don't want to be building something in a vacuum as it tends to lead to a solution looking for a problem and most likely this strategy will fail. We should always start with the problem that we are solving for.
• A few of the concepts within Technology that I'll post on later (High Quality, Smaller/Validated Units of Work, Fast Tempo/Feedback, Separation of Concerns in stack, Scalability, Monitoring/Observability).

Process

• The glue that holds it all together. Processes allow alignment Processes help us become more efficient, help us communicate better.
• Any process added should have a purpose. Why are we adding this process? What in-efficiency are we solving?
• We should have processes to deliver High Quality software at a Fast Tempo to ensure fast feedback.
• We should have a documented SDLC (Software Development Lifecycle) to ensure smaller focused incremental delivery of software in order to get fast feedback.
• We should have an Operating Rhythm to allow proper planning of future items to reduce cognitive load on the Engineering Teams
• We should review/update our OKRs quarterly to ensure we are responding to the business needs/changes appropriately
• Many more processes to explore in future blog posts.

These are the 5 key Product and Engineering Growth Areas. These are deep areas of focus. I will continue to drill in and post on concepts within each. Subscribe to the Sherpa CTO Playbook to continue to receive updates.

Schedule some time to discussion more about your Product and Engineering Growth journey at Sherpa CTO Contact..