Build and Deliver Digital Products that Drive Business Results

As those in charge of delivering new digital products, software engineering leaders have to bridge the gap between pure functionality and ease of use. Unfortunately, many never connect the dots between what their team does and how that relates to the end user’s needs. This disconnect makes it a struggle to build compelling business cases for the technologies, staff and platforms required to build new digital products. If you’re unable to communicate the business value of software engineering (including ROI), you’re unlikely to get more than a lukewarm response from those who dole out the dollars.

Software engineering leaders who are unfamiliar with key business terms and concepts also fail to deliver on the product vision. Products may ultimately meet requirements but not expectations; at best they become stop-gap solutions that don’t match long-term product strategies. The onus is on the software engineering leader to develop business acumen for the good of the company (and their job security).

A software engineering leader who hasn’t partnered with product management is missing half the picture ─ the half that illustrates what the customer is looking for. Encourage your product managers to establish continuous user feedback and in-product analytics to provide a view into whether solutions and features are meeting business productivity goals. When engineers have access to user feedback, meeting customer requirements stops being a guessing game. Delivered features can be refactored or improved to boost customer satisfaction. For software engineering teams, product management is vital to ensuring alignment with roadmaps, including ongoing feature delivery.

Software engineering leaders should:

• Work with product management to ensure software delivery is aligned with business-oriented metrics.

• Have engineers work closely with product owners and product managers to refine the backlog, clearly defining and prioritizing work items to reduce distractions and improve delivery efficiencies.

• Invest in instrumenting: Instrument products to help teams understand how their products are performing in the field. They should monitor usage through web, product and digital experience analytics.

• Improve developer experience and keep teams focused on continuous improvement by implementing platform engineering.

Modernizing software delivery includes automating wherever possible (for example in testing and deployment). To deliver a high-quality product, software engineering teams require continuous feedback and a DevOps approach.

Software engineering leaders should:

• Improve delivery and reduce waste by automating the software delivery process and establishing a strategic process for identifying, building and using reusable services.

•  Work with other functional leaders (e.g., product management leaders, infrastructure and operations leaders) to change the culture by creating shared objectives and metrics linked to organizational strategy.

• Adopt agile methods and engineering practices that reduce waste by building in quality.

• Champion continuous learning and experimentation.

• Reject a “tools first” approach: Form a cross-functional team, define processes and practices, then procure to support those processes.

• Use a platform engineering approach to build self-service internal developer platforms for software delivery and product life cycle management.

• Identify critical gaps and prioritize investment in modernizing application architectures and technologies.

• Establish clear roles and responsibilities (e.g., product managers, architecture teams) to enable change.

• Provide teams with tracking dashboards to visualize technical debt and monitor progress.

• Build digital immunity by adopting the six practices that address negative customer impacts: observability, AI-augmented testing, chaos engineering, autoremediation, site reliability engineering and software supply chain security.

Digital products often end up doing poorly when it comes to user engagement or experience, ultimately undermining business results. The secret to compelling user experiences? Implement user-centered design practices by incorporating design systems and design thinking into software engineering processes. This is especially true for customer-facing applications. Encourage developers to up their design and UX skills, but also engage professional UX talent, including researchers, designers and writers who can deliver compelling UX design. Put designers on an equal footing with developers to ensure UX is an intrinsic part of development.

Software engineering leaders who are serious about delivering a positive UX should ensure that:

• UX is a core competency of digital product teams, driving vision, strategy, product-market fit, screen design and overall experience.

• User-centered design is implemented by professional UX staff using powerful UX tools and informed by user research.

• Software engineering teams are rewarded for improving business results by delivering positive UX to customers and employees.

• Each team member (including designers, developers and product managers) is responsible for UX and invested in the full design and development cycle.

• A mature design governance system brings consistency and productivity to software engineering teams.

Once software engineering and product management have found their common ground, it’s time to think about adopting a framework for shared services. Teams that have an ad hoc approach to tools and processes and lack shared components and application programming interfaces (APIs) are more apt to produce inconsistent and duplicative work. Sharing similar assets (like platforms and APIs) expands capacity, allowing teams to concentrate on the specialized aspects of their work. As APIs and shared data services are essential software architecture elements, they must be well-designed and built for security and performance. This requires specialized skills, including API design and API product management.

Leaders seeking to establish shared services should:

• Establish a team to oversee the framework to identify shared services candidates, secure funding and resources, commission the build, and make sure shared services are managed as products.

• Consider only a few candidates for shared services. Prioritize those with high reuse potential.

• Set a reusability threshold to justify the investment.

• Create a compelling business case to attract sponsorship by explaining the value of shared services.

• Establish ownership, governance and monitoring for minimum risk and maximum benefit.

• Promote API reuse and reward teams that reuse APIs.