Only doing product-led work can lead to an unmaintainable system with lots of downtime. Unfortunately, getting time to work on the things that would prevent that can be challenging. Engineering roadmaps balance many competing demands, and the people making the decisions aren’t always the closest to the code. There is a need to learn how to speak their language.
Over the years, Honeycomb has experienced growth, steadily attracting more customers and facing the challenges of scaling. As the company navigated through these growing pains, it managed each new hurdle, learning and adapting. This growth journey brought about various side effects, each pushing the company’s systems to their limits in unique and unpredictable ways. Despite these challenges, the organization’s infrastructure has remained robust, albeit showing signs of strain as it encounters new boundaries.
During my presentation at QCon San Francisco 2023, I recounted the story of how we navigated the challenge of doubling our business.
Initially, it was imperative to determine how to develop a persuasive business case to ensure technical projects were prioritized in the schedule.Understanding Priorities
There’s always a surplus of work compared to the capacity to execute it. Engineers focusing on product roadmap items – new features or enhancements – often face the challenge of how to prioritize necessary work to maintain existing operations.
Scheduled work from product managers might not align with the immediate needs to sustain infrastructure. From a product manager’s viewpoint, prioritizing technical needs over roadmap tasks may seem to question the engineering team’s focus. For example, in a startup environment, cost-saving measures like reducing hosting expenses by 20% might be overlooked in favor of projects perceived as providing more value to end users or potential customers.The Prioritization Process
Sophisticated tools assist product managers in consolidating numerous ideas and inputs into proposals for engineering evaluation. These inputs, ranging from customer feedback to continuous ideas and specific business appreciations, must be synthesized into representations of the business’s services, solutions, or problems addressed. By reframing each piece of feedback or idea as a problem the business solves, a comprehensive dataset is formed. This in turn highlights the various challenges the business faces, their impact on customers, and opportunities for growth or improvement, all curated by the product organization.
After understanding these ideas, you can categorize them into three groups: the clear benefits, the not-so-beneficial, and the ambiguous middle. During a workshop led by Jeff Patton, I was introduced to a graph called Constable’s Truth Curve, which was presented at QCon San Francisco 2013.
There’s a necessity to leverage tools for the majority of ideas that fall into the blue middle area, aiming to clarify and direct them toward more concrete decisions. There are effective frameworks such as the opportunity canvas and learning canvas that help in structuring the problem understanding, identifying who benefits or doesn’t, assessing costs, and facilitating discussions around these aspects.
The primary aim here is to clarify the return on investment for any project by evaluating its impact on users, how significantly they value the change, and whether it enhances features they frequently use. This process is central to product management, focusing on thoroughly answering these crucial questions.Software Costs More
Addressing technical debt is costly, emphasizing the need to view engineering efforts beyond the individual contributor level. Companies often use the revenue per employee metric as a gauge of the value each employee contributes towards the company’s success. Quick calculations suggest that engineers, who typically constitute about 30-35% of a company’s workforce, are expected to generate approximately one million dollars in revenue each through their efforts.
