Technical Debt: Startups Silent Killer

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There’s a condition that silently but relentlessly stalks startups and is one of their leading killers: technical debt.

Here are few of its symptoms:

  • General discomfort from the feeling that systems and processes were created quickly without considering the long-term objective or strategy of the business.
  • Agitation due to sloppily written code to appease a stakeholder or client.
  • Bloating from running 500 processing cores of SQL Server, when you should be able to do it on 50, or even less.
  • Sluggishness, disorientation and lack of agility due to frequent strategic pivots (primarily due to overuse of Agile development) in the attempt to be first to market with a new product or service.
  • Founder/CEO sleeplessness due to worry about scaling, downtime and slow-to-onboard programmers and the repeated doubt: “Did I build it right?”

Technical debt is just like financial debt: it must be paid off or it will suffocate to the point of bankruptcy.  In the tech world, this means a ground up re-write — or worse — hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in hardware and software licenses.

We have seen organizations crippled with technical debt.  If you are a founder or leadership executive and you are plagued with questions that keep you up at night regarding stability, scalability, and reliability and you are continually looking to your CTO or CIO and wondering why things are the way they are, then your CTO or CIO is failing you. If you are familiar with the metaphor Technical Debt, and you have been made aware of its dangers by your CTO or CIO, then you may have a blind spot in failing to recognize that this “debt” will most certainly be repaid.

Technical Debt can easily result from a lack of planning or clear long-term vision, and pulling yourself out of a mountain of debt takes time and focus.  A strong leader armed with a clear understanding of the product needs can guide the software team and company back on the right path and deliver a useful product to fulfill the needs of the clients.

How does an organization begin to tackle a mountain or even a small hill of technical debt?  Here are four steps.

  1. Admit the problem – The first step is for management to admit that the company has a technical debt problem and explain to the organization why it is important to resolve it.
  2. Estimate, Prioritize, Commit – After evaluating the requirements and work effort estimates, management must prioritize the remediation of the technical debt specifics and commit the resources to resolve it.  It is a tricky situation to manage technical debt while balancing client needs and new product enhancements.  Having an experienced leader with a fresh perspective to officiate competing priorities is critical to a favorable outcome.
  3. Break features into chunks – It’s easy – and not always fair — to punch holes in the Agile method as lacking adequate strategic planning.  The key consideration is to break out product and service features into chunks and shippable pieces and each part of the software should be well thought out and fitting with the long-term goals of the product. In order to have a successful implementation of Agile one must properly manage the backlog.
  4. Just simply stop writing bad code – This is probably one of the easiest ways to combat technical debt. Seems simple, right? Well, it’s not. There is a velocity cost in the short term, but a good leader will recognize that this is a cost that is worth taking. Just like financial debt, the longer any debt is ignored the harder it is to settle that debt and move on.

There is much more to be discussed regarding this topic, but it is safe to say that you know your debt is gone or extremely low when you can continually maintain high productivity within your R&D team in the face of changes, including goals and team members.

There are lots of ways to address this problem, and organizations that are crippled the most with it are the ones that are in their growth stages. They have built a product, found an addressable market, sold the product and just kept building.

If you are struggling with these questions, and wondering how you can get higher productivity out of your teams, then schedule a call with us here at TechCXO and we can assist you in a technical payment plan that will set your business up for success.

Product Success – Post-Launch Checklist

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The (Other) Only Thing That Matters for a Startup

Marc Andressen once famously wrote that in the great debate about what is most important for a startup: the team, the product or the market, that the only thing that matters for a new startup is the market. He crystalized his thinking by quoting Andy Rachleff, formerly of Benchmark Capital, by stating:

Rachleff’s Law of Startup Success: The #1 company-killer is lack of market.
• When a great team meets a lousy market, market wins.
• When a lousy team meets a great market, market wins.
• When a great team meets a great market, something special happens.

As Marc noted, you can obviously screw up a great market — and that has been done, more than once. So there is little debate that a great product-market fit will tend to equal success and a poor product-market fit will tend to equal failure. Product-market fit matters most. But building and launching a break-through product (or startup), is more than just getting the market right.

In fact if the goal is about finding a break-through product it is critical to think about the post-launch issues in the early days of the product design. Many teams tend to relax after launch but in my experience significant risk exists well beyond the initial launch. In fact, many of the elements that define a sustainable, scalable, break-through product are wrapped up in the product focus that happens after launch. You might be a bit skeptical on this but I want to focus on 3 primary areas that successful product teams focus on after launch that generate Break-Through Product Success: Go-Live, Retention, Grow!

Go-Live is the initial moment the customer or client Go-Live with the product. Retention is focused on minimizing customer churn and understanding if the solution is solving a real need or a perceived need. Grow! Is all about adding new customers, achieving scale, and maximizing value.

The common theme that all three of these product areas have in common is each provides an indication of how the market is receiving and understanding your product. How well your organization is equipped to receive, process and respond to what the market is telling you is the key driver for that Post-Launch success we are all looking for. This BLOG will focus on the Go-Live moment and in future BLOGs I will address these other categories of achieving post-launch success.

Go-Live:
So let’s start with the Go-Live moment, which I define as that first moment the customer or client comes into contact with the product. This is not Go-Live from you, the company, but rather Go-Live from the Client perspective. This is not a one-time moment, but an on-going moment your company must capture. This is the implementation or provisioning moment that as buyers we have all held our breath wondering if the experience will match expectation. Will the product be intuitive to use? Will the solution solve my problem? And how long will the implementation take?
Obviously we have made the purchase, so we have some expectation that our life is about to get better – but how much better? That moment of truth is here – whether a Consumer or an Enterprise Client; whether a SaaS solution or a Hardware solution – every time the product is launched by the end-user, at least one person is experiencing that “Go Live” moment. So the question for you and your organization, is how well prepared are you to capture this moment? How will the client communicate this experience back to you and your team? What product metrics have been designed to capture the experience and to measure the performance?

The core of a successful Go Live moment ties directly back to a product that is easy to provision. Hardware companies spend many hours worrying about the ease of making the device plug-n-play. This attribute becomes mission critical in the ever expanding world of IOT where devices proliferate throughout the edge of the network. In the connected-car world (think On-Star) the system is activated by pressing a button, usually on the visor or overhead. The product teams spent significant hours figuring out how to get the subscriber over the “Fear-of-the-Button” and to start the activation process by simply pressing a button. On one hand it sounds so simple, on the other never under-estimate the subscriber’s fear of looking foolish. To some extent, we have all experienced this uncertainty the first time we buy a new phone, worrying about how it will start-up and if our songs, pictures, and contact info will seamlessly load.

As you think through this experience you quickly understand how this process is even more critical for Mobile or Web Applications and for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) based companies. Software based solutions have to make that early stage configuration intuitive, while minimizing clicks and launching seamlessly in your existing Operating System. How many of us have bought an App, and not have it integrate into an existing feature we already used (think Calendars), or have purchased software that takes too long to configure, or has a GUI (General User Interface) or CX (Customer Experience) that is not intuitive.

During the Product Design process the Provisioning / On-boarding / Implementation should be rigorously understand during the product validation stage, heavily vetted during the MVP stage, and constantly validated during the launch stage. All of the classic tools should be leveraged for capturing feedback on this moment. Some of those tools are:
• Product metrics built into the design that provide insights to the Go Live moment measuring such things as launch timing, sequence, experience. Time of day, & frequency of use can provide valuable knowledge to how the product is being used. Without getting user specific info, location data can also be insightful (indoors or outdoors, on the go or still, etc)
• Analytics should be used to process trend analysis for how this experience progresses over time.
• The call center or service center should by sensitized to questions actively searching out customers or clients in that Go Live moment. Product teams should sit with and monitor calls for major themes and insights into this “Go Live” experience.
• Social Media should be mined frequently for people who are capturing that Go Live experience.

From each of these areas, the positive experiences, measurements and trends will provide the product teams with the guard-rails of what to highlight and focus on during future releases. The negative experiences will provide a path forward on how to differentiate, invest, and improve.

The challenge for the product team in achieving that sustainable and scalable break-through product, is to make sure they have designed a method or approach or process or metrics around that initial customer Go Live moment. As we will see in future BLOGs this is critical step in hearing how the market is receiving your solution and if you are achieving that elusive product-market fit.

Pain in the Art of Shipping

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Pain in the Art of Shipping

Steve Jobs is credited to have said, “Real artists ship”, meaning that those who create — be it technology, music or a sculpture — make their art available (in galleries or store shelves) for people to consume, critique, enjoy or reject.

Anyone who creates makes themselves vulnerable to the pain of evaluation only when they cross the point of no return — the shipped item.

Hi-Tech Procrastination

The fear of putting out a product that will not be broadly loved and adopted paralyzes many leaders — particularly engineers — to continually tinker and “improve” it, fearing that they only have one shot at success. VC Fred Wilson has written about his admiration for founders and CEOs who insist their organizations meet ship dates, even if sacrifices are made, including pulling features.

Here are three things to keep in mind to focus your team on being fanatical about hard ship date deadlines.

The Last 10% is the Hardest

“The last 10% is so much harder than the first 90% of any project. That is true whether it is software, an event, a construction project, or really anything that requires a lot of planning and then a lot of execution,” writes Fred Wilson. That has absolutely been my experience in at least two dozen product launches. And for early stage companies, not only is perfection the enemy of the ship date, it could be the enemy of the company surviving be it in the form of revenue/cash flow or attracting additional funding from investors.

If you understand how hard the last 10% is, you can deepen your commitment to the ship date when you approach that milestone.  My colleague, John Murray, has launched some of the biggest products in technology for companies like Verizon. His pre-launch planning and feedback mechanisms are so comprehensive, you realize that your launch is not an end but a beginning.  He has an extensive post-launch checklist to automate feedback starting with your Go-Live moment.  Knowing that there is much work to be done post-launch will help free you from the casino, all-or-nothing mentality of your product launch.

Start with Some Friendlies

The reality is that no matter how much of an expert you think you are on the industry or on what the product needs, you won’t really know until you get the product into the hands of customers.

Find some early adopters or “friendlies” and get them using the product as soon as it passes the “it won’t embarrass us” milestone.  Chances are, many of the things you thought you absolutely had to have, are not really needed.

If your product fixes a broken business process where there are real, measurable consequences to inaction… is driven by a mandate associated with governance or regulatory control… serves and under-served problem that includes burning pain for your customer, they are more than willing to overlook some warts to get their hands on it.

Furthermore, assuming you are responsive about fixing the bugs and filling in the missing gaps identified, you will be viewed as a responsive partner and they will quickly forget about the shortcomings they had to deal with when they first got their hands on it.

Launch is Not All-or-Nothing Proposition for Product Success

“Most entrepreneurs are so passionately focused on their product and the features they have developed and delivered, they often ignore the cost and difficulty users may have to effectively use their solution. Research suggests that with less than a 10x gain/pain promise, clients will likely default to a no decision rather than buying an early stage product without market credibility,” writes Ken Goins in How to Create a Compelling Value Proposition.

What this means is that:

(a) Your product may work well once the user has overcome an initial learning curve but you may have intimidated a large audience who are intimidated by initial complexity or sophistication. John Murray talks about how product teams need to spend significant hours figuring out how to get the subscriber over the “Fear-of-the-Button” and to start the activation process, for example.

(b) Your product is fine but your messaging value proposition messaging and marketing is not compelling enough to move users.  The below chart from Ken Goins illustrates the Pain/Gain Ratio concept.

Net/Net: you don’t know where your product will need improvements to attract, retain, scale and grow.  Make the best product you can for your explicit launch date. Focus on product-market fit and a compelling value proposition to drive decisions. Plan for relentless and ongoing product feedback. Respond with speed and over-communication.  The pain in the art of shipping will be lessened.

 

Greg Smith is TechCXO’s Managing Partner for the Product & Technology Practice. See his full bio here. Or, learn more about interim CTOs and CiSO-as-a-Service.