FAQ

Why do I need your services?

Your role is one or more of CEO, founder, head of product, head of technology, head of design. Key people responsible for business growth and product development.

Your business is growing. You have product-market fit.

Would you like to accelerate your business growth?

Do you feel like technology could offer even more leverage to business growth?

You need to keep the cost of R&D relatively stable as the business grows. R&D expense as a % of revenue is too high, and needs to come down, while product innovation & development to fuel revenue growth must continue.

Do these situations resonate with you? Do you have similar situations? My services are focused on helping business and EPD (Engineering, Product, Design) leadership unpack these situations. What we discover leads us to critical changes, which in turn lead to technology and product accelerating and fueling the next wave of growth.

How do you create value for product & Technology organizations?

With a focus on the R&D investment envelope, I start with asking a few fundamental questions:

1. In what ways is your technology and product strategy aligned with where the business needs to be in 12-24-36 months?
2. How well does this represent the current state of operations in the business?

Answering these questions, and following through with the changes it surfaces, results in an optimization of the R&D investment to be significantly more aligned with where the business needs to be in the future. You can get more relevant work done with the same, or possibly reduced R&D investment.

For most fast-moving businesses, this changes frequently. Even if you have done this exercise, it is useful to repeat at a regular cadence.

This exercise is conducted with the leaders in product and technology, with involvement from business leaders. This exercise typically results in a number of artifacts, many of them become objects of deeper investigation and fine-tuning.

1. Business outcomes and their alignment with product and technology outcomes
2. Dashboard with business, product, and operational metrics that can be used to guide and evaluate every product and technology investment
3. Product strategy, technology strategy, technology catalog, product roadmap, technology roadmap
4. Team topology refinements aligning product and technology talent with initiatives most critical for the business.
5. Culture signals. How are the teams approaching their work? What is their mindset? What cultural tweaks could boost productivity, increase motivation?

why do I need a technology strategy?

In EPD (Engineering, Product, Design) organizations, product strategy documents and product roadmaps are familiar artifacts. Technology strategy is not as common. It is, however, critical to the success of the business. Without a clear technology strategy, you will likely not make the right technology investments, resulting in either a) growth friction b) poor unit economics, which gets even more painful as the business scales c) poor quality and customer satisfaction; almost no customer delight that comes from amazing the customer with something they didn’t think was possible.

Technology investments require time to bear fruit, to realize outcomes. The right time to make these investments is now, not 18 months from now when your business is straining to scale due to technology reasons.

I recently coached a large EPD organization, helping them create a technology strategy. The resulting technology strategy had the following components:

1. The strategic context. Business outcomes that must be accomplished.
2. Answers to questions such as:
   • What technology is providing, or not providing, leverage?
   • What are the areas of high complexity? of high cognitive load?
   • What are the guiding principles for technology investments?
3. Technology catalog. A catalog of all the components that power the product portfolio. Everything that produces value and can be considered a technology component is in the catalog. Items in the catalog are grouped using a variety of labels for ease of consumption. Each item is ranked based on things like a) criticality to the product b) frequency of change c) complexity d) age e) talent available to maintain and grow. Outcome: which components need to be replaced, refactored, end-of-life’d?
4. Technology investments. What’s missing in the catalog to support the future state of the business? Summarize all the investments that must be made, organized by the business outcomes they support. Size them and organize them into a roadmap.

The technology strategy is a living document that should be updated at some regular cadence. The technology catalog is finding multiple uses as this EPD organization evolves.

Should you need to refresh your product strategy, this can be done in conjunction with the work on the technology strategy.

what is your perspective on developer productivity?

Having been a developer myself, I relate well to developers. I have empathy for them. I understand the nature of the work they do. I care for their output and their well being. I get a ton of value from developer surveys like this State of DevOps report, from October 2023. I’ve successfully leveraged this in multiple EPD organizations. From the basic DORA metrics, to much deeper insights into what drives organizational performance.

There are always ways to boost developer productivity. Creating focus on work that is relevant to the business is the most impactful driver of productivity. This also results in greater developer happiness.

Understanding the type of culture (or team type, as in the State of DevOps report) and tweaking the culture can also have strong impact on productivity. I am a big fan of user-centric teams. They understand how to discover what creates value for users.

The developer landscape is changing rapidly with exponential improvements in the AI-powered Co-pilots available today (mid 2024). In my view developers must adopt the use of co-pilots for certain use-cases such as generation of test cases, generation of code documentation, porting / refactoring code, etc. Which use-cases they should adopt depends on the business context.

What results can I expect?

Here are but a few…

1. Improvement in developer productivity
2. Visibility into, and greatly improved utilization of R&D spend
3. Product & technology initiatives that are aligned with future business growth
4. Tune up of the EPD organization, including assistance with recruiting new leadership, should that become necessary

What will the engagement look like?

12-month engagement. First quarter requires significantly more effort from all stakeholders. Subsequent quarters focus on observability & measurement of outcomes, gathering feedback on change effectiveness, fine tuning the changes, setting up any additional support structures.

I do not assume any interim roles in your organization. I remain a product coach / SME / consultant, available to all stakeholders throughout the engagement.

Engagement starts with discovery. Discovery sessions with EPD leaders, top-level and select other folks from the EPD organization. Discovery sessions are looking to uncover:

1. The product offering
2. The underlying technology
3. How work is done: people, process, tools, mindset, culture
4. How decisions are made
5. R&D spend decomposed: growth vs keeping the lights on,
6. Organization structure decomposed: skills,
7. Areas of growth, areas of technology challenges

How should I think about your service offerings?

HLN’s services offerings can be customized to your situation. You may not need all of the items listed in Service Offerings. Discovery will help inform what you need.

Do you have experience with my situation?

As the founder of HLN, my experience spans multiple decades with a wide variety of product-focused technology businesses. Just recently in a conversation with a stakeholder I received a complement: “wow, you’ve really worked with a huge variety of domains and business problems.”

I have coached multiple startups that were below 150 employees total, including a significant number that were below 50 employees. In most of these, we were able to drive growth: in revenue, product, technology, organization.

At the other end of the spectrum, I have worked in large tech companies as well, ones with 10s of thousands, or even 100s of thousands of employees.

My journey has also led me into business that had more of a services-mindset. The challenge in those situations was to shift the mindset to products, to improve unit economics of solutions delivered to customers.

Remote working is something I’ve been deeply involved with since the start of this millennium. I have seen many flavors of what works. Tuning this can drive up productivity.