Product thinking for cloud native engineers

Slides

How & Why

  • IT was a cost center for a long time - not it’s critical but still treated as a cost center
  • Why is it important: To much focus in the technical aspects instead of value delivery
  • Importance: Show the value of your work (which means your work has to provide value)
  • Operations and coordination work is not easily visible, but very important

Principles

  • Focus on user value: User problems > Solutions
  • Outcome (Value) > Output (Tickets closed)
  • Products (lifecycle and ownership) before projects (just setting stuff up)

User value

  • “Who is the user”: Builders, Enablers, Regulatory, “Viewers”
  • “What is the value”: Make the organization more efficient while avoiding risks

How to start?

Product compass illustration Product compass illustration

Exploring the Problem Space

Goals:

  • Identify top pains
  • Build empathy and understanding
  • Investigate key business aims

Techinques:

  • Customer and stakeholder interviews: Talk to people, they will probably tell you about their pain
  • Data/Process analysis: Where are out bottlenecks
  • Shadowing: Really see how the day to day works
  • Ask “Why”
  • Read business updates (current goals)
  • Build dashboards that show progress and value

Defining the problem space

Goals:

  • Identify opportunities
  • Prioritise
  • Gather insignts and data

Techniques:

  • Value stream mapping
  • RICE, Value vs Effort or ather cost benefit analysis
  • Analyse your exploration process

Did we reach our goal?

Product metrics

  • Someone will measure your work, hope they do it right or rather do it yourself to show how you provide value
  • Product metrics should measure outcome not output (or performance metrics)
  • Baseline: You need to know the desired outcome

Frameworks

  • DevEx: Triangle of flow state (build&test speed), feedback loops () and cognitive load (code complexity, docs clarity)
  • DORA
  • SPACE
  • DX Core 4