Technical Strategy Flashcards
4 Levels of Technical Strategy
- The technical strategy portfolio
- Company and technical strategy calibration
- Generating new ideas and making trade-offs
- Strategic execution
The technical strategy portfolio
Every work can potentially be put into one of the buckets below
Product, Scale and Risk
Generating new ideas and making trade-offs
Our goals should be right on the edge of wildly ambitious but technically feasible
Scale work
- Maintenance
- Developer Efficiency
- Technical Improvements, resolving performance or availability issues.
- Velocity Enablement, creating speed in future efforts
Risk work
- Ops Improvements, improve infrastructure and product reliability
- Security Improvements
- Regulatory compliance
Metrics that matter
- Financial metrics
2. Customer metrics
Supporting metrics
Metrics that improve the north star metrics
Obstacles to creating a balanced portfolio
Root Causes Solutions
Wrong frame of reference Categorize engineering work in a portfolio
No outcomes Identify the right outcomes
No definition of good Set thresholds to assess outcomes
When to best do scale work
Early-stage - hurt product to market
At the growing stage
Mature - Open a window for competitors to catch up
Use case map
Problem: The problem the product solves in the words of the user or customer
Persona: Who faces the problem
Value Proposition: Why a user or customer chooses your product to solve their problem instead of the alternatives
Alternatives: Alternatives they consider to solve the problem
Competitive Landscape
- Direct competitors
- Indirect alternatives
- Adjacent markets
Where to set the threshold?
- What do our customers care about? Identify specific tech capabilities that can deliver it
- What experience issues do we manually fix?
- User psych explains where friction is tolerable and where it isn’t
What should the threshold be?
- Product data
1.1 Evaluate outlying 5%
1.2 Evaluate performance across persona dimensions
2 Customer data
2.1 Explore data to see where customers are having problems
2.2 Analyze problems by reviewing segments of the target persona
3 Competitor data
Risk work type
- Operational risk, Issues that impact performance or availability
- Security risk
- Regulatory risk
Risk work outcomes
Type of risk -> outcome -> impact
Operational Sliding Scale Acquisition
Security Retention
Regulatory Binary Other costs
Risk = likelihood * impact Likelihood = timeframe + probability
Risk work thresholds
Customer constraints/tolerant
Financial constraints/tolerant
Resource constraints
The strategy stack
Mission: The change your company wants to bring to the world
Company Strategy: The plan you have to bring your company’s mission into being
Function Strategy: Plan for how a specific function will drive its part of the company strategy
Functional Roadmap: The sequence of features that implement the product strategy
Functional Goals: Outcomes of the roadmap that measure product strategy progress.
Technical Strategy in the strategy stack
Mission Company Strategy Function Strategy = Technical Strategy Functional Roadmap Functional Goals
Technical Strategy Calibration Horizontally
Marketing Strategy and Product Strategy
Key to calibrating strategy
Speak the same language. Like travelling
Acquisition
Get more new users
Acquisition - Marketing Funnel
Awareness
Consideration
Conversion
Loyalty
Acquisition - Acquisition Loops
Viral: Fuel/Constraint Users
Content: Fuel/Constraint Content & Timeline
Paid: Fuel/Constraint The amount of capital available to reinvest
Acquisition - Alleviating Acquisition Constraints
Remove friction in an existing strategy
Improve the quality of users in an existing strategy
Enable new acquisition sources with a new technology
Retention & Engagement
How do we retain and engage new customers or users to the product?
Retention & Engagement
High acquisition and low retention is like a leaking bucket
Inputs into Retention
Activation
Engagement
Resurrection
Organic Habit Loop
Organic trigger (can add triggers here to enforce the habit by users, company or environment)
Action
Reward
Strategies to increase engagement
- More use cases
- More feature usage
- Increase frequency of use
- Increase intensity of use
Finance Strategies
How does your company make money?
Finance Strategies - Monetization models
Transaction models: Constraints - User volume, products per user and transaction profitability
Subscription models: Constraints - User volume, Subscription length and subscription profitability
Advertise models: Constraints - User volume, Ad views per users and Ad profitability
Marketplace models: Constraints - Marketplace Liquidity, transaction volume and transaction profitability
Finance Strategies - Finance models attributes
Growth Expectations
Exist Goals
Timeline
Finance Strategies - Finance models
Bootstrapped Debt Public Shareholders Private Equity (PE) Venture Capital (VC)
Finance Strategies - Finance decision rubric
Cost management
Finance Strategies - Finance decision rubric - Cost management
Use the money to buy time Evaluating cost 1. Opportunity Cost 2. Marginal Return The focus is on initiatives where the marginal return is larger than the opportunity cost of your next-best option
Use time to save money
Unit Economics
1. Build a baseline
2. Forecasting expenses
Finance Strategies - Finance decision rubric - Resource Availability
Flexible vs Fix
Finance Strategies - Finance decision rubric - Risk Appetite
Low vs High
Solution Development Toolkit
Divergent thinking - generate ideas
Convergent thinking - make trade-offs
Convergent thinking - Making trade-offs
- Guiding principles
- Build or buy
- Scope, time and resources
Convergent thinking - Making trade-offs - Guiding principles
- Customer principles
2. Development principles
Convergent thinking - Making trade-offs - weak code ownership
Pros 1. Independent teams 2. Faster no dependencies Cons 1. Small inefficiencies 2. Stringent processes 3. Duplicate waste
Convergent thinking - Making trade-offs - When to Break Guiding principles
Break principle
1. when principle doesn’t serve its purpose
2. Responsible maintenance
3. Conflicting principle
Change principle
When the product, market or company changes
Convergent thinking - Making trade-offs - Build or Buy
- Strategic Value
- Available resources (also consider maintenance)
- Cost
- Vendor reliability
Convergent thinking - Making trade-offs - Scope, time and resources - Don’t add more resources
- When working across shared surfaces
- When writing code in the same files
- When work is customer experience integration, mostly depending on a central team/code
- When it’s late in the project
- When the work is highly specialized
- When an exploratory, nimble team is needed
Strategic Execution - Execution Approach
- Designing execution systems
2. Delivering continuous customer value
Strategic Execution - Execution Approach - Designing execution systems
Design system to increase speed
- Run one-week sprints
- Commit to less each sprint
- Reduce distractions
Strategic Execution - Execution Approach - System health
Evaluation metrics
- Availability metrics
- 1 Network uptime
- 2 Functional uptime
- 3 Number of major incidents
- Delivery metrics
- 1 Deployment frequency
- 2 Lead time, amount of time between product request and when it is merged
- 3 Change fail percentage, rollback%
- 4 Mean time to restore (MTTR)
- 5 Sprint pass rate (sprint 100% done)
