Momentum: Six Principles Product Leaders Follow to Engineer Good Products Faster

Copyright © 2022 Shiva Nadarajah and Suresh Kandula

All rights reserved.

momentum

six principles product leaders follow to engineer good products faster

ISBN 978-1-5445-2904-2 Hardcover

978-1-5445-2903-5 Paperback

978-1-5445-2902-8 Ebook

This book is dedicated to:

My wife, Sarah, and my sons, Jack and Grant —Shiva

My wife, Jayanthi,and my sons, Abhinav and Charan —Suresh

And to all those who inspired us over the decades.

Contents

Introduction

Principle 1

Principle 2

Principle 3

Principle 4

Principle 5

Principle 6

Conclusion

Further Reading

About the Authors

Introduction

Ideas are easy. It’s the execution that’s hard.

—Jeff Bezos

Imagine a product manager, an architect, and an engineering team lead—collectively, a product leadership team—have gathered informally to debrief and vent their frustrations about recent events and the direction in which their organization is heading. The product manager walks through feedback from the latest customer survey, which indicates dissatisfaction with a new product, and is dismayed to report that a recent news article has highlighted a competitor’s success with a similar product. The architect details the Herculean effort put forth by the production team to roll out a new feature—only to receive similarly disappointing results, certainly disproportionate to the additional strain on the team. The engineering team lead, who is new to the organization and who, therefore, has the benefit of relative objectivity, states that he finds it astonishing that there was such a delay and degree of difficulty in releasing a capability into production, given the extent of the enterprise’s considerable resources.

They argue in circles as to the cause—is it the legacy architecture, an ancient mainframe, outdated modes of delivery or an incorrect code delivery approach, lack of automation, a waterfall methodology instead of Agile, or simply having teams set up inefficiently? Whatever the cause (or causes), they can all agree on one conclusion: if this pace continues into future quarters, their organization is not going to survive in the marketplace. Startups are faster, and digital natives are able to innovate and deliver more quickly, but large enterprises are generally unable to keep pace. Customers have noticed that other more cutting-edge solutions exist elsewhere—and the internal teams have also noted that their organization is behind the innovation curve.

They know they need to find a better way to deliver a better customer experience. They know they need better architecture. They know they need more momentum, but coming to this solution only presents another problem—one which leaves the product leadership team paralyzed—and that is the problem of not knowing where to begin.

Momentum

No matter the specific role, any member of a product leadership team can recognize when their organization is not having the impact in the marketplace it should be having. The symptoms of that problem may include seeing competitors or new entrants in the market rolling out new capabilities and innovations faster than they are, being unable to meet customer expectations of types of products or flexibility within existing products, lack of growth compared to industry standards, and an exodus of both customers and internal team members. As satisfaction drops, there is a secondary impact in revenue, profit, and other metrics of the health of an organization. Talented employees are going to do what’s best for their careers and make the move to a company where innovation happens much faster, leading to problems with attrition.

This becomes a multidimensional engineering and organizational challenge, and a product leadership team is unlikely to know where to begin or how to structure their change initiative to balance the dichotomy of being comprehensive but also expedient.

Within financial services, as an example, this challenge of lack of momentum is quite visible. According to a McKinsey study, on average only 30 percent of an organization’s technology spend is directed toward new business capability-oriented development, whereas 70 percent is consumed by re-engineering, support activities, and infrastructure maintenance.¹ As a byproduct of this, smaller, nimbler competitors have flourished, with annual private equity funding growing 10X from roughly $4 billion in 2010 to $40 billion in 2020. Enterprises attempt to match this investment with their own spending; as an example, retail banking spent $20 billion on digital technology in 2017. Yet, dollar for dollar, large well-funded enterprises lag in getting new capabilities out to the market and are unable to match the momentum of their new digitally native competitors.

But what does momentum mean? Momentum is measured as the product of the mass and velocity of a moving body. In the context of business, momentum refers to the amount of impact an organization creates, along with the speed at which they create that impact. An organization is not going to focus solely on how fast they can create something; this is not about speed for speed’s sake because misdirected hustle or quickly rolling out the wrong features is counterproductive. Instead, momentum acknowledges the importance of speed, but it must be combined with impact—doing business the right way, holistically in terms of both the customer and the organization, with the right architecture, right operational metrics, and right principles. Momentum is a powerful force in any organization. When leaders direct it correctly, they can start to see positive feedback that drives their momentum even higher!

Figure 1: Six Principles

Our Momentum Methodology

Through our experiences and research, distilled from interviews with executives, product managers, analysts, and engineers, we have identified the six principles that most impact a product team’s momentum, aiding them on their transformation journey to evolve into agile, resilient, product-oriented organizations rooted in a customer-centric view. If the reader follows the principles outlined in this book, they will begin to make the step change necessary to get their teams on a path to be more customer-centric, make better engineering decisions about their business, modernize their architecture more efficiently, extract more value out of their data, and be able to better structure teams to drive more momentum in an agile way.

The reader will also learn:

How to infuse product management thinking throughout their teams (not just product owners)

How to build an effective enterprise architecture roadmap

How to extract the most value from their data

How to evaluate the organizational structure and its effectiveness, and select the right framework that can unlock human potential

How to build and manage a resilient technical delivery pipeline

How to avoid stall and set their teams up to constantly evolve and grow

These six principles are interconnected, and this book serves not only as information about the principles themselves, but also gives a method of how to approach them. This framework allows teams to see the broader picture and manage the interdependencies across the principles. Product leaders need framing in order to have holistic conversations with their teams; this framework provides a structured way to approach change discussions with the proper perspective.

Absent this framework, it is all too common for teams to find themselves mired in myopic conversations, focused on a particular issue absent of the larger context of that product team’s momentum. For example, triggered by a vendor mandate to cease supporting a particular off-the-shelf product, a team may go down the rabbit hole of reacting to that urgent risk and pursuing a swap option in isolation. When perhaps, with the benefit of a framework, the team may either have had a proactive strategy in place or could route a path forward in the context of the product’s broader data strategy.

For large financial services organizations, change tends to be reactive—a result of new regulatory requirements, burning issues, end of life technology, scalability risks, or slow delivery infrastructure. The principles allow a constant evaluation of these risks and introduce a methodical way of dealing with risk and change. With this framework in place, the team will be able to place issues in the context of the factors that drive product momentum and discuss approaches in relation to all six principle areas, always keeping focus on the impact to the business.

The interconnected nature of complex product delivery issues cannot be solved in isolation. A product leadership team trying to retire a mainframe also has organizational challenges to consider. They will have ambitions to integrate new technologies beyond moving away from the mainframe to enrich customer experience. They must be mindful of the business capabilities they’re ultimately delivering, as well as what that trend line looks like. Finally, they need a sense of how reliable their new solution is going to be. Even the seemingly ring-fenced case of shutting off a mainframe shows how these principles are interconnected.

Leading with business needs acts as a forcing function to help cut through this web. Product leadership teams shouldn’t attempt to solve the technology problem, the data problem, or the people problem; they should instead solve the business problem. With a top-down view of what’s working and what’s not, they can explain to their management, in business terms, the root cause of the problem to be solved, as well as the magnitude of the issue from the perspective of cost, reputational risk, and customer voice, all tied back to the business case. This framework is not just a method to madness in terms of managing or a way of solving one single problem; it’s a way to have a discussion in order to determine the overall business problem that needs to be resolved.

This framework also enables the product leaders to assess their maturity across the principle areas. Maturity must be developed based on where the group is starting and what is relevant to the team’s specific business capabilities. By pushing them to take a particular principle to the next level of maturity, the team’s skillset improves and their mindset evolves, becoming broader and more strategic.

Product leadership and management should also be aware of the balance between business context and technology understanding so they can lead their team to success. Without a clear grasp of both sides, they run the risk of suboptimal product delivery velocity, which will inevitably create unrealistic expectations for engineers, as well as frustration from leadership who want something done on unrealistic timelines because too much time has elapsed since they received progress updates.

With this framework in place, however, the entire organization will be faster to market, more in touch with the voice of the customer, and better positioned to impact business performance and growth.

Why We Do What We Do

Over the past two decades of working together, we have had an opportunity to work with many large financial services firms. Being in consulting has allowed us to benefit from the fusion of business and technology perspectives. Leading consulting teams with interdisciplinary backgrounds allows us the opportunity to think strategically with our clients about our industry, but also to understand the impact technology can have to create new, innovative products.

We both have computer science and engineering back-grounds, have managed global product and engineering teams, and have worked with several large financial institutions. We have had the opportunity to work together with clients who manage portfolio product teams in a variety of circumstances. In our journey, we have often found that the challenges our clients face tend to anchor to one or more of these principles. We have been successful in helping our clients navigate the change, evolve their organizations, create better teams, and release better products—and that has been inspiring.

Financial services are the backbone of our society. We have a passion for this industry because of the opportunities it provides people to secure their future and help sustain future generations. This book is a small contribution to financial services product engineering teams who want to see their collective vision become a reality.

Why We Wrote This Book

We wrote this book because, as we’ve implemented the framework with our clients, many have said, I wish I’d known about this when I was first getting started. We’ve had unique insight into what’s worked for them—and what hasn’t—in our view of partnering with Fortune 500 clients over more than two decades. We wanted to write a book that leverages those experiences, mistakes, and successes. We intend for those learnings to be distilled into actionable principles and methodology that can be applied in a practical setting with confidence.

We’ve also noted over the years that certain key deliverables were instrumental in guiding effective conversations with teams. We’ve captured these artifacts throughout the principles, referring to them as on the wall. This is our way of giving a nod to the power of war rooms and physical artifacts. Their digital equivalents are necessary and can be as effective; however, when we’ve been in the trenches doing this work for product leadership teams, we have found war rooms and physical artifacts still reign supreme.

Now, more than ever, there is increased pressure on the product leadership team to demonstrate results faster. There is less patience for delay. At the same time, the competition for top force-multiplying talent has grown exponentially. Technology moves quickly, so organizations have to be able to react faster than they would have had the luxury of reacting in years past. Consumer expectations are always evolving, but organizations also internally expect more in terms of product behavior month over month rather than year over year. The internal focus of companies is moving from a technology, business, or operations focus to a more product-centric model, making it more efficient, agile, and nimble. With the Momentum principles, our goal is to empower product leaders so they not only keep pace with increasing demands, but proactively work to improve their organization’s processes for increased speed and measured responsiveness.

What This Book Is and Isn’t

This book is a guide that allows product leadership teams to apply a holistic mental model to solving issues that impede team momentum. On each of these subjects, there are reference books that go into significantly more detail, and we do not intend this book to be a substitute for domain-specific deep dives. Instead, it is a guidebook that shows a path through the six principles we’ve chosen to focus on.

We also want to be clear that our book does not comprehensively cover every domain product leadership teams have to focus on, such as business strategy, sales and marketing, branding, or