24 October 2023

Engineering time is always a scarce resource. Finding the right combination of development, design, and operations people and bringing those people up to speed takes a lot of time. There are rarely enough of the people with the right skills to go around, and funding for them is usually limited.

When a business lacks alignment on balancing the competing demands for engineering time, fingers are pointed, blame is laid, and ultimately the health of the products and the happiness of the customers suffer. I’ve observed that while a product roadmap of sorts can often be found (or at least cobbled together with brain-dumps from key people), it’s rare to find an equivalent roadmap for the underlying technology platform. Every organisation building with technology has a platform of some kind, even if most of that platform is built and run by other parties. Even when it is outsourced, the combination of technologies still needs to be planned for, nurtured, and managed to ensure it keeps pace with the needs of the business and its customers.

Product vision, strategy, roadmap

A well organised product leadership usually has a product vision, strategy, and roadmap in place:

• The vision paints a picture of the future of the products and how they will be used
• The strategy lays out the decisions made and concrete steps that will be taken towards that vision
• The roadmap outlines the timing for the outcomes expected to be realised as the strategy is executed

The horizon for the vision is the long-term: for a young business this might be three years, for a more established business it might be ten. The strategy is most easily used on a horizon of the current year and the year beyond. A roadmap is most useful when it is broken down into sections no shorter than a month (I prefer quarters) for the year ahead, and bigger chunks beyond that.

A really well organised product leadership can also show how the product vision and strategy aligns with the broader vision and strategy of the business.

I argue that like product and technology leaders in a tech business need strong partnerships to succeed, the product vision, strategy and roadmap also need a partner: a technology vision, strategy, and roadmap! The way these link together can be visualised like this:

Technology vision

In the same way a product vision paints the future to inspire customers, prospects, and the business, a technology vision shows an ideal target state. The product and/or business vision are inputs, but other goals can be considered too:

• Perhaps the platform will need to cope with massively volatile loads?
• Maybe data pipelines and machine learning will play such a significant role that a top tier development experience for testing and productionising new models needs to exist?
• Maybe a problematic monolith will be replaced with a set of small, dynamic, and discoverable services mapped to a crisp domain model?

Technology strategy

There is plenty of excellent material written on what a strategy is and how to articulate it. Andrew Tokely’s slides from the 2023 Product Aotearoa conference offer a practical guide through the lens of a product leader. The classic foundational business strategy paper is Michael Porter’s “What is Strategy?”. I like to think of strategy as a bullet point list of decisions that are expected to achieve specific objectives. It is important that the link between these objectives and the vision is clear.

To illustrate, let’s imagine:

• There is a business objective in the next financial year to fill a $1m revenue hole by increasing market share in a geographic market by 5%.
• The business vision is to eventually lead that market.
• The product strategy includes adding a new onboarding feature that is optimised for the target customers in that market.

But… let’s also imagine that the number of users that will be added will put strain on our underlying platform. Our technology strategy might then include a decision to re-architect a set of application services so that they can be scaled out horizontally.

Technology roadmap

The final piece of the puzzle is the roadmap, laying out the concrete deliverables to achieve the strategic outcomes. Following our example, we could create roadmap items over the next few quarters to:

• “Peel away” a bottleneck application service from a monolith
• Decide on technology for - and design a way to - containerize services
• Make the service available in a horizontally scalable way

Here’s a way to visualise that:

Wrapping up and next steps

Putting a technology vision, strategy, and roadmap lens over a short, medium, and long term plan gives engineering teams a way to make a strong connection between their daily activities and the overall goals of the business. In my experience, that connection is the most important factor in helping those teams stay engaged and committed to the organisation.

A technology roadmap also provides a way that non-technical leaders in the business can understand and get behind the important technology priorities and achieve that all important cross-functional alignment.

Once a tech vision, strategy, and roadmap is in place, the next challenge is creating a mechanism for making decisions on sharing that scarce engineering time between competing demands. I’ll discuss that in an upcoming post!

If you want to get a head start on your technology vision, strategy, and roadmap: I can help! Read more at cronin.nz or drop me a line at gareth@cronin.nz.