Late 2024 Update to this post: Before I get into this extensive and rather long article, I have to share this book with you. It’s called “No Bullsh*t Strategy: A Founder’s Guide to Gaining Competitive Advantage with a Strategy That Actually Works” by Alex M.H. Smith. Awesome. The whole book is shorter than my article and likely more valuable, though you still need to study at least some of the classics. (Including”On Competition” by Michael Porter, “Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The difference and why it matters” by Richard Rumelt, and “Blue Ocean Strategy” by Kim and Mauborgne.)

Anyway… to our story…

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Warning. This is about to be a long article. So instead, here’s the tl;dr (too long; didn’t read) version: Here is your vision/mission/strategy all in one sentence… There’s something you want to do in the world because you think it has value and you have a better way of doing it than anyone or better yet, a different way to satisfy some need.

Next, here’s your one sentence goals/objectives/tactics: You have some specific means to accomplish these things.

There. You’re done. You don’t have to go further.

So you really want the full version? OK then…

Why anyone would want to re-hash this topic is a fair question. It came out of a discussion I had with some relatively junior product managers who came to Product, as is often the case, from other specialties. So many management books and courses… So many definitions of the same things. So many years of struggle. And yet… we still have differing definitions, suggestions, and apparently confusion about what seem to be the basics for high level strategy and associated concepts. You can easily search for some of these key words and find other authors with completely opposite viewpoints of each other. But not always explanations as to why. I, perhaps foolishly, think I might understand where some of the confusion has come into play. And since I’ve got what I think might be a path through this, I’m going to give it a shot…

There’s a really long writeup coming, but here’s a summary…

[Read more…]

Several of my past articles have dealt with “When to Work with Software Development Companies” and “How to Work with Software Development Companies.” I’ve been asked to come up with some thoughts about When NOT to work with an outsourced software development company. In the interests of full disclosure, I’ve worked for a fairly large software development company in the past. I’m a big fan of using such services for all manner of reasons ranging from cost to flexibility, and so on. In other words, I’m biased towards the value of outsourced software development; at least for some purposes. Still, after some recent conversations and friendly debate with colleagues and others, it’s clear that I haven’t given proper consideration to the other side of that coin. There may be some situations where you may be better off creating or keeping development capabilities in house. So I’m going to go over some of these considerations here. At the same time, I’ll try to inject a few ideas for how to mitigate them where or if possible.

So. What might these issues be? [Read more…]

In Part 1 of How to Work with Software Development Companies, we covered the beginning of the engagement process though the proposal and negotiation phase. In Part 2, we’ll get more into estimates, SOWs and MSAs, and dealing with change orders followed by project delivery.

Project Estimate Efforts – Time & Money

One way or another, when your only real costs are personnel, the adage time is money certainly applies. As does the Theory of Constraints. There’s a number of variations on this theme, but basically it’s along these lines: For any project, you have time, money and features. (Some add quality.) You can pick any two. In other words, you can spend more to buy less time, (though not always), or you can cut features for time, etc. etc. There are some that claim in the Age of Agile or for other reasons that this isn’t as true as it once was. They’re wrong. Common Sense doesn’t always hold up under careful scrutiny, but in this case, it does.

So what’s the point? The point is when we’re done with all the back and forth discussion, an estimate will be based on anticipated time to do something and the costs. So you will likely face potentially wide ranges of estimates depending on how easy/hard it is to estimate the tasks at hand. And software development is notoriously challenging to estimate. Discussions as to why are out of scope of this article, but suffice it to say, it’s a challenge. You will most likely get an early rough estimate. But for any project with deep complexity, chances are good some form of deep discovery will be required to get rational estimates. [Read more…]

If you’ve been doing outsourcing for awhile, this article may not be for you. But if you’re new to it or feel like you may be missing something, maybe there’s some useful ideas in here for you. When working with any contract service, whether it’s a physical re-model of your corporate lobby or a multi-million dollar system that will change the world, many of the same considerations apply.

In this first part of How to Work with Software Development Companies, we’ll look at the beginning of the engagement process though the proposal and negotiation phase. In Part 2, we’ll get more into estimates, SOWs and MSAs, and dealing with change orders followed by project delivery. [Read more…]

Every single thing you do as a senior leader at your company is generally about delivering value. What this means will of course vary based on your firm and its many stakeholders. But one thing in our present state of affairs is clear enough: In just about any firm bigger than a corner lemonade stand, software is likely going to play a non-trivial role anywhere from being part of a strategically core competitive product, to playing a key role in business processes.

Depending on whose numbers you believe accurate, there’s about 20-23 million software developers in the world as of 2018. In the U.S., maybe 3.5-4.5 million. Discrepancies can easily be attributed to how you count. For example, are QA Engineers software developers? Is a mathematician who works on algorithms, but doesn’t commit code a software engineer? There’s some slop in the numbers. Whatever. Regardless of how you count talented software developers, right now there don’t seem to be enough. (Unless you happen to be pounding code yourself and enjoying having the hot career ticket!) Yes, thousands are in the midst of Python Boot Camps and “Yes, You Too Can Be a Data Scientist”  courses. Still, the bottom line for you as a senior manager is for your current emergency project or other ongoing needs, you don’t have the development resources on staff that you need. And depending on where you are, budget, and all the usual reasons, you may struggle to build internal teams in the currently challenging hiring environment for talent. If you’ve been doing outsourcing for awhile, this article may not be for you. But if you’re new to it or feel like you may be missing something, maybe there’s some useful ideas in here for you. [Read more…]

Oh no. Not another article on someone’s idea about how to do corporate innovation. Yes. Sorry. Here it comes.

TL;DR version: Form a group. Make sure they’re actually entrepreneurs or have true entrepreneur mindset. Give them their own P&L. And get them away from the mothership. Is this always the best way? No. Of course not. But it’s something to consider. And here’s the long winded version as to why…

[Read more…]

This – long – post is a reaction to more than a handful of recent conversations I’ve had with friends or networking friends who have had some sub-optimal experiences lately in various company’s recruitment practices. (Actually, these have been some piss-poor really @#$@#$ experiences. I’m just trying to clean things up a bit.)

What’s the Problem?

There’s some big, obvious reasons you could have trouble recruiting. Maybe your company/brand reputation is lousy. Maybe you’re not paying enough. Maybe you have some crappy managers and one or both online networks and the whisper network knows it. (After all, it’s become a cliche that people often don’t so much leave a job or a company so much as a manager. Not always true of course. But often enough the case.)

There could be a whole lot more reasons you’re having challenges getting the right people in the right seats. But here’s a new pair for you to consider. Horrible initial contact and really bad Application Tracking Systems and Candidate Evaluation Processes. As a hiring manager, you might have limited control over this sort of thing at a larger company where Human Resources is in control of such systems. But if you’re senior enough at your company, you may want to take a peek at these things because they may be hurting you. This blog post was motivated by a couple of my own experiences along with discussions with others who’ve had similar – or worse – experiences. It could be just a statistically random blip with a raft of recent issues of which I just happened to become aware. Or things could be getting worse in some cases. So I’ll just throw these thoughts out there into the world and you can take them as you will. [Read more…]