Product Strategy & Architecture
I gave a talk at the Product Professionals Event in Bangalore on Nov 12, 2011. Bangalore being home to many well-known high-tech companies with large engineering organizations, I decided to talk about what connects product strategy and architecture. These terms, product strategy and architecture, are dear at heart to every product manager and his or her engineering team.
Ideally, a highly collaborative relationship between these functions is critical to influence each other and drive both forward. However, no one said real life is always ideal. It throws up some interesting situations. Engineering organizations have “architecture requirements” or “platform work” that is necessary for the product, but has a longer horizon. Product management has “market requirements” and “customer requirements” that, comparatively, have a shorter horizon. And of course, Sales has the “deal of the quarter” requirements, if only our product could do this or that yesterday. So we end up spending a lot of time churning on requirements, and one important aspect gets missed, that of value. We exist to create value for our customers.
Therefore if we are to do a good job of analyzing the value our products provide, the questions to ask are: 1) What value do our customers expect us to deliver? How does that change based on the context of deployment? 2) What makes it difficult to fulfill these value expectations? 3) What forces could accelerate time-to-value?
This becomes a very useful analysis for product management and engineering teams to jointly engage in, as this can provide much better insight for a longer-term strategy and architecture to emerge, as compared to the focus on requirements alone. I also talked about how we can define the value of core technology components that are typically “unseen” by the customer. This formed a very important part of my most recent experience as VP of Product Management at McAfee having responsibility for a portfolio of core technologies that were used across many product lines.
It was an engaging discussion with the audience and I am thankful to Pinkesh Shah, CEO of Adaptive Marketing, for inviting me. My presentation is here.
PRODUCT LEADERSHIP 
Nice read. Wish I was present during the actual presentation to listen in. Much of what I am and will be doing in my curre role generally deals with these types of questions. As Enterprise Architect, in an organization such as mine we are normally facilitating these types of conversations, the need for platforms/reusable services and the competing needs of products/sales organizations. Both saucers are spinning at different speeds 🙂
LikeLike
Tony Fernandes
Jan 5, 2012 at 10:31 pm
Thanks Tony. I’d be very interested to know more about how you facilitate these discussions, specifically, if you are using any formal tools or document templates to capture outcomes and create a common language across different teams. By the time you have a requirements document, its already too late to surface these issues.
LikeLike
Rahul Abhyankar
Jan 7, 2012 at 4:37 pm
I agree with all the points mention in the article. Nice read. We have published a similar article on product strategy.
LikeLike
Rapidops
Mar 30, 2021 at 6:51 am