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Post Product Market Fit - Open Engineering Strategy
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Post Product Market Fit - Open Engineering Strategy

When Product Stage Evolves but Engineering doesn't

Aleix Morgadas's avatar
Miguel Angel Fernandez's avatar
Aleix Morgadas
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Miguel Angel Fernandez
Jun 21, 2022
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Post Product Market Fit - Open Engineering Strategy
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This post is special for me, it’s the first post about #OpenEngineeringStrategy that I do in collaboration! I love seeing people joining this Open Engineering Strategy movement 😊🥳

Today’s post is made in collaboration with Miguel Ángel Fernández, a Product Engineer at Qatium.

Miguel Ángel and I have been in touch after I published several posts on Engineering Strategy and wondered if someone would like to attend a Workshop about it.

Aleix's Learnings
Designing Engineering Strategy Workshop
Why At beginning of this year, when I was Designing the Engineering Strategy for the Tribe at Creditas, where I work, I realized that the approach I learned during trial and error could be helpful for others. That’s why I collected my learnings as a post series here 👇…
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3 years ago · 3 comments · Aleix Morgadas

We chatted so l could understand better his workshop expectations. We were able to exchange some ideas and thoughts about our experiences in Engineering Strategy. I loved that conversation! We both faced similar situations and we were lost as everyone else in this field :D

Last week, we chatted about the current situation he is facing at Qatium, and how to drive an Engineering Strategy from there.

Miguel Ángel came with a deep analysis of the current situation, the company pains, the developer pains, where the product is, and how engineering is facing some challenges to adapt to the new product reality. I can tell that a meaningful reflection was made before the call, I played a rubber duck/facilitator role in that conversation.

What's Qatium?

Qatium is a water management platform that allows water utilities to improve their water network performance. Clearly speaking, we help water companies to reduce the water and energy that is lost on the way from the supply to the tap. If you are curious you can find more information at qatium.com

See Video

Which is the High-Stake Problem?

The product/business found the market fit and started moving to a prepare for scale phase while the engineering stayed approaching solutions with the market-fit mindset.

We identified the need to adapt the dev team mindset to the new 

Engineering Strategy

We decided to go for a classical strategy analysis as explained in the book good strategy/bad strategy, where the first step y stop and listen to what is happening in the organization, collect facts, and refine into insights

Analysis

After a few weeks of collecting facts, these are a few samples of what we saw. Nothing special or different from other organizations as you see.

  • Integration tests are too slow

  • An increasing number of bugs

  • Increasing cognitive load

  • A pile of architectural debt accumulated

  • Large lead time in features without uncertainty

  • Performance problems in different areas

Thinking about the whole range of facts is what led us to discover the high stake problem. The high stake is no more than a scientific hypothesis, so let’s go and test it

Direction

Our hypothesis was that the code was working for seeking a market fit, which means that the code is prepared for accepting features not related to each other and with a high degree of uncertainty. Once we started developing cohesive features and receiving more load is when we started with the problems. Inspired by the techniques described in Strategic Monolith and microservices we decided to plan a Context Remapping. That was new for us because seeking product-market fit leaves little space to actually sit down and think which are the best next features, the fact is you don’t know.

Now with a clear direction for the product we could actually anticipate and plan the system for specific extensions, anticipate performance problems, and even reduce the cognitive load by applying the Inverse Conway Manoeuvre.

This was one of the diagrams we used to remap the context. There is no secret to showing how to structure the code, that should match our roadmap, that by the way is open: https://qatium.com/roadmap/

Coherent Actions

With a direction present, it is time for describing actions. Through small daily efforts, we should be able to test if our hypothesis was correct or not in a short period of time.

Reflections

Twitter avatar for @aleixmorgadas
Aleix Morgadas @aleixmorgadas
"The Software that brought you all those learnings isn’t the same as the one that will help you scale the business" Between verifying a Product Market Fit and Scaling, there's a sweet stage for the whole business (including software) to be prepared for scaling 1/
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11:41 AM ∙ May 27, 2022
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Can I participate in the Open Engineering Strategies?

Yes! I started a section about this at github.com/aleixmorgadas/awesome-engineering-strategy#open-engineering-strategies 🥳

If you want me to help you and co-author a post here, let me know at:

  • twitter.com/aleixmorgadas, DMs are open or

  • hello@aleixmorgadas.dev

github.com/aleixmorgadas/awesome-engineering-strategy#open-engineering-strategies

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A guest post by
Miguel Angel Fernandez
product engineer

Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Designing an Engineering Strategy
I divided the topic into four posts/emails. Part I. What the is Strategy? [This post] Part II. Understanding the high-stake problem. Part III. Giving…
Jan 19, 2022 • 
Aleix Morgadas
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Engineering Strategy
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Designing an Engineering Strategy
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You need to understand the business to design a good engineering strategy
Engineering Strategy driven by Business
May 1, 2024 • 
Aleix Morgadas
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You need to understand the business to design a good engineering strategy
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The outcome of the strategy becomes culture
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. I also found the sentence as “Execution eats strategy for breakfast”. It is interesting the amount of…
Jan 14, 2024 • 
Aleix Morgadas
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The outcome of the strategy becomes culture
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