Control - Fast-paced tight-deadline projects with moonshot ROI potential

Control is targeted towards helping enterprises on fast-paced tight-deadline projects with a moonshot RoI

We get involved at a critical stage in the product journey and help ensure that the product is delivered on time, with the security, scalability and performance that an enterprise product needs.

At this critical stage, it is extremely important to provide immediate relief. This requires solid analytics skills to understand the nuances of the business, product, and digital strategy, to identify bottlenecks, to create short-term and long-term plans, and to execute them immediately and conclusively.

These engagements will go through 3 phases:

Sprint 0: Sprint 0 helps you understand the problem's context and cause. Context is crucial; each problem is unique, and each situation requires understanding the different variables involved to be able to do more harm than good.

Roadmap Creation: The "Sprint 0" output is a tech roadmap. The short-term items need to be low-effort, high-impact changes that can bring about immediate relief. The long-term roadmap must align with the state of utopia the product should be in.

Execution: Flawed planning can still be overcome by immaculate execution. But not the other way. Never the other way. Battle-tested processes, constant innovation and rapid adoption create a truly agile recipe for success, unlocking high-velocity teams that deliver.

Customers acquired through Control usually move to Amplify once the extreme deadlines are met and product development is processified and seamless.

Sprint 0

Product Discovery

Product Discovery

In this activity you need to understand the product and the codebase. Take stock of all data & user flows and understand the challenges preventing completion or causing friction.

Product and code immersion provides a fresh perspective and the context needed to understand the cause of problems and formulate a plan of action to better it after knowing the full picture. This reduces the probability of fixing something in one place while breaking 15 other things

As part of Product Discovery we will create the following artefacts or conduct the following ceremonies

Sales-Delivery Sync: Talk to the relevant sales team and understand the context, pain-point, and solutioning that's been done, and what kind of roadmap we've spoken about with them so far.

Project Kickoff: Prior to the first meeting the sales team will provide context of the business vertical, objective, product, it's state and any public facing information - if it hasn't been given, please ask. Go through all of this information to have questions prepared for the Kickoff call.

• Introductions: The first call should be a 2 way introduction. Introduction involve getting to know folks, processes, & preferences.

• Presentation: Reach out to Mac for the Project Kickoff Template. It contains information about the way we work (Sprints, ceremonies, artefacts), terminologies, and accesses that are needed (boths ways - Slack Direct Connect, PM tools, codebase, AWS, etc). Add on specific requests, or information that is needed.

• Open Questions: Use this to validate initial questions, & thought-process for long-term, short-term goals, and execution strategy.

• Blockers: Share a GSheet of active blockers. This could be access, understanding, getting in touch with the right personnel, product understanding, documentation, etc. Make sure it's created and share it with them.

• Schedule recurring meetings: Sprint 0 is high contact and requires frequent meetings. Set those, make sure all required members are in. Record the meetings, and add it to a GDrive folder with the project name. Provide access to all personnel.

Product Walkthrough: These meetings are an avenue for the customer to walk us through their business objective, productive thesis, the good & ugly parts of the product, and the state of utopia that they envisage the product to be in. These are recurring meetings that we must come prepared to. Plan how you would like to break down the product; feature, portal, business-vertical are all valid and battle tested ways to break it down. Each part of the product team - Engineering, Design and Product Strategy need to come together to discect the product and procure the needed information.

System Architecture and Entity Relationship Diagram: Create the system architecture and ERD. The ERD should be automatable use tools like DBeaver.

User Flow Diagrams: Document all the user personas, and the operations possible by each of them. Create the KUFI (Key User Flow Identification) report.

Data Flow Diagrams: Document the flow of data in the system. We will map the journey from the point of origination to storage for applicable and important data points.

Test Coverage Report: Merge the reports from all the different automation test strategies used and create an exhaustive and conclusive report of the codebase and product test coverage.

Control Audit

Control Audit

In order to provide immediate relief through quick action, this audit is focused on the problem areas. We quickly need to get down at the grass roots level and perform a Root Cause Analysis (RCA), reach out to Shounak for template for this. During this part of the engagement we need to identify the problem fast, and create a plan of action to validate the thought process and then implement it. During a Control audit you will perform the following activity for each incident type in terms of impact priority

Incidents Description: This will include a brief description about the incident from a tech perspective.

Impact Analysis: A review of the incidents repercussions, users that were impacted, operations that were disrupted and overall business impact.

Immediate Actions taken: This records the initial response to the situation, who all were involved, what actions they took, and what was the impact of it. This will highlight strategies currently used in post-incident fixes. This could serve as a starting point for an automated fix, as an insight on dependencies and contingencies in place.

Investigation and Root Cause Identification: We will get information from the stakeholder about what has been tried, what has worked and what didn't; note those down here. Additionally add details of your investigation, learnings and evidence that you've used to come to identify the Root Cause.

Implementation Plan: Create a short-term implementation plan that will get you out of the current problem and bring back stability, scale, economic-control or whatever other problem this incident was causing.

Proposed Long Term Solution: If in the interest of time and urgency the short term solution was just a stop-gap arrangement, carve out the long term solution to the incident in terms of a Technical Requirement Document (TRD)

Hygiene

Hygiene

This is a quick way to get a lay of the land. Run the codebase, product, infra & config under automated tools to understand areas that require attention.

Conventions and Configurations: Check what conventions are being followed. Understand if there is enough material to understand the conventions, and check if there are automated mechanisms to ensure that conventions are being followed.

Code Quality: Run the codebase through automation tools to check for code smells, security vulnerabilities, cyclomatic and cognitive complexity, test coverage etc.

Security: Look for practices that may lead to security vulnerabilities. Check how secrets are stored, how the code is deployed, run the product through security and vulnerability tooling.

Project Management Processes: Identify bottlenecks in grooming, planning, and implementation. Look at the project management board to identify gaps and recommend an approach better suiting their needs

Reporting Processes: Identify blackboxes in reporting data, mechanisms and cycles. Ensure that there are provisions for real-time indicators, weekly reporting, and quarterly reviews.

Roadmap Creation

Short Term Roadmap

Short Term

These are low-effort, high-impact items that can bring immediate relief. You will focus on ensuring no breakages, missed packets, API timeouts, or process omissions. The motive needs first to be business continuity. Features or products may require drastic changes; however, those would go in the long-term roadmap. In the short term, we must focus on showcasing meaningful results with minimal changes.

With a live product and customers who are upset, we don’t have the luxury of time on our side. The need of the hour is business continuity. All our energies should be focused on ensuring we don’t lose a single customer and a single customer doesn’t lose value from our product or faith in our product.

Basis the findings of the Control Audit and the Hygiene steps we need to identify items that will cause maximum short term impact, and make sense to add in unison. Use this to create the short term roadmap. This should not exceed more than 3 months.

Long Term Roadmap

Long Term Roadmap

Your long-term product roadmap consists of optimisations that will increase your digital product's efficiency, stability, visibility and resilience. This is done via refactoring, restructuring, introducing new infrastructure or software components, or removing components that are no longer useful, amongst a slew of other tactics.

Market share highly depends on providing what the market seeks. Legacy, opaque, unreliable & unpredictable systems limit your ability to adapt to changing market dynamics and hence cause your digital product to lose its competitive edge.

In the internet world, the rate of innovation makes even staying abreast a challenge, let alone adoption. If you’re not actively working on providing more valuable features, products and experiences to the customer matching rate of tech innovation, your users will flock to competitors that can.

Execution

Increased Stability

Increased Stability

Increasing stability will include proactive error reporting, monitoring and alerting. It comprises of a comprehensive automation test strategy. It'll include running chaos tests on Key User Flows ensuring that it always holds.

It involves release automation to ensure seamless and friction-free movement and adoption in multiple environments.

Increased Visbility

Increased Visibility

Increasing visibility involves getting insights into how the system is performing at any point in time and historically.

It should depict resource utilisation, consumption, lag & performance, amongst other parameters.

It will also involve traffic-pricing benchmarks, and gaining visibility into the cost impact and optimisations that are possible.

An increased visibility into the system's performance and functioning allows for preventive action and proactive measures to prevent outages and degraded performance. It prevents situations where end customers are the first ones to raise issues and the problem of not having enough data to be able debug and solve issues. It allows you to be aware of everything that is happening during the functioning of your digital product and, hence, always be at the forefront of providing an elevated customer experience.

Scale

Scale

Scale doesn’t only refer to users, & activity on the digital product. It additionally refers to ease of adding more developers, more features, making changes to the existing product, and codebase as well.

Activities need to be performed to ensure that the digital product is ready to be extended and modified with ease, making sure that we can adapt to changing market conditions efficiently and elegantly.

Additional activities need to be performed to ensure that the team can be extended, and scaled efficiently when the need arrives.

The goal of any business is to do more - it could mean selling to more customers or selling more to existing customers. However, when you’re product gains traction or acceptance, tech shouldn't be the limiting factor for growth. It must scale as the business grows.