Guiding a Product Roadmap in a Chaotic World

Guiding a Market-
Driven Roadmap in a
Chaotic World
June 2020
This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA

Today’s Speakers
6/2020 © 2020 Harbor Products Group, LLC. All rights reserved. 2
Eric de Jager
Harbor Products Group
Rob Juncker,
CTO, Code42
Rich Belanger
EVP Product Development,
Applied Systems

WHAT Feels DIFFERENT?
● Customer priorities may be changing and continuing to rapidly
evolve.
● The definition of “success” shifted in Q2 towards retention,
renewal, and convenient adoption. Where is it shifting next?
● Quality improvements and reducing tech debt took on greater
priority for many this quarter.
● Higher scrutiny on ROI
Product & Engineering teams need tightly-coupled “listening posts”
and must be able to change with their customers

STRUCTURING PRODUCT AND CUSTOMER SUCCESS
“LISTENING POSTS”
ASSIGN A CS
PRODUCT “LEAD”
CONDUIT BETWEEN PRODUCT
AND CS
(TWO-WAY)
STRUCTURED DISCUSSIONS WITH
A DEFINED CADENCE
● Experts in product usage
and customer
requirements
● Monitors Customer and
Product Health
Scorecards
● Product and adoption
feedback
● Key role in training
customer-facing teams
● Support triage
● Customer segment
feedback

SEGMENT : Know your target customer
1.
FOCUS : Know the problems you’re solving right now 2.
CREATE VALUE : Set goals for a successful outcome3.
ALIGN : Invest by themes aligned to a strategy
4.
BE HUMAN : Plan for the entire customer journey
5.
Roadmap Guiding Principles

The Code42 Journey & Transformation
6/2020 7
Backup / Recovery Insider Threat
IT Security
Director of IT CISO
On-Premises Cloud
Monolith Microservices / API-First
Product Focus:
Sector:
Buyer:
Deployment:
Architecture:
© 2020 Harbor Products Group, LLC. All rights reserved.

Best Practice: Weaponizing Agility
Code42 took the
"Factory line"
problem apart
and took a
Monolith with
slow feedback
loops to high-
speed
manufacturing
6/2020 8© 2020 Harbor Products Group, LLC. All rights reserved.

Best Practice: Create programs to try things early

Best Practice: Productize the Lifecycle
• Creating and
designing a customer
lifecycle is the
foundation of a
product.
• In the “Cloud Era”
this lifecycle has to
be instrumented to
be fast and cyclical.

Best Practice: SPARK Innovation

6/2020 12
Applied Transformation Journey
• We are taking bold steps across the Development organization to transform our products,
our culture, and our tools
• Delivering a series of product improvements that will address critical customer gaps that
impede our ability to grow and scale. We are creating a next-generation product platform
for Applied.
• Transforming our culture to be nimbler, to leverage modern development tools and to
constantly improve our Agile processes to deliver high-quality software on time and on
budget. Moving from annual releases to a CI/CD model and building a DevOps culture.
• Embracing open API’s to allow seamless integration between Applied and our customers
and partners.
• Adopting a hybrid cloud approach that will tightly integrate our existing data centers with a
modern public cloud platform for new products.
• Taken together, these steps will allow us to build more products, faster, at lower cost – and
have a lot more fun doing it!!

Key Themes
User Experience Openness
Increase product development velocity,
release more often to meet demand,
expand suite.
• Ability to respond quickly and adjust
to market demands, sales gaps, and
changing customer needs
• Increase productivity to rapidly
deliver more product, features, and
value through development practices
like automated testing and use of
modern technologies
Benefits
Improve ease of use & look and feel. Set foundation
for industry leading UX through Epic Browser
Access + screen migrations.
• Modern browser-based user
experience within Epic and across
products in our portfolio
• Embrace a multi-platform, multi-
device world with apps that work well
regardless of device size, browser, or
operating system
Benefits
Build modern software, easily accessed technically for
us & our customers.
Benefits
• Faster integrations and extended
capabilities across our portfolio with
shared, open APIs
• Increase opportunities with an open
platform that allows customers and
partners to securely integrate with Applied
solutions
Velocity
6/2020 13

Modern Epic Architecture
Transform the user experience and the business layer
Key Architecture Steps To Drive Transformation
1
A
B
Applied views this as a strategic initiative across a 5-year time horizon. We have ramped up a dedicated transformation team and initiative
(architecture, development, product management, quality assurance, user experience, etc).
The Epic Browser Access approach allows us and our customers the ability to benefit from the architecture investment during the process,
minimizing risk. Feature & function development can continue, working in both current and future Epic.
Transition UI to Common Technologies
HTML, CSS, React
Enables refined UI, new functionality, and replaces the RIC with a
browser-native solution
Back with Microservices & APIs
.NET Core, node
Rebuild Epic middle-tier to a flexible, modern services platform
Integrated Analytics & Data
Enabling access to data from all Applied services
Open API Platform
For internal products and external partners to build on.
Public Cloud Services
Improve scalability and velocity, start with document service
2
3
4
6/2020 14

Cultural Transformation
• Agile Development
• Adopt standard Agile process and leverage skilled external resources to implement a proven, workable, efficient approach
• Appoint senior development leader to own and continuously improve process
• Huge potential upside – at least 25% improvement in throughput, and likely more.
• Bi-Weekly releases and CI/CD
• A full CI/CD based development environment allows us to deploy high quality software as often as we need
• CI/CD enables bi-weekly releases of improvements, fixes and new functionality so customers see value as soon as work is
completed
• Smaller releases reduces the risk of upgrade for our clients
• Smaller change sets improves our overall quality of delivery
• Cloud First
• Adopting a preferred cloud provider allows us to build knowledge and skill more efficiently
• By concentrating our spending, we also become eligible for better discounts and programs, i.e. Google Swarm Team working on
Analytics platform
• Reduces overhead and cost of supporting cloud platforms
• Quality
• Full automation support of CI/CD enabling smaller, more frequent updates
• Eliminate need for 6-week regression cycle
• Quick defect discovery/resolution reduces quality costs.
• Reduction in production defect escape rate
6/2020 15

Discussion panel

Summary – three things to do now
Be Human
• Look at your roadmap as purposeful changes you want to make in customer experiences
and engagement, not features.
Listen
• Evaluate / establish customer and market “listening posts” and discuss them internally.
Be Agile
• Drive agility into your processes, relentlessly. The more agile you are, the more you can
adapt as the world changes around you. Make this an internal discussion with all
departments.
Communicate!

Thank you

Guiding a Product Roadmap in a Chaotic World

More Related Content

What's hot

Similar to Guiding a Product Roadmap in a Chaotic World

Recently uploaded

Guiding a Product Roadmap in a Chaotic World