This document provides an overview of Pivotal Labs' approach to helping clients with product development and application modernization. It discusses: 1) Pivotal Labs uses agile, lean, and user-centered design practices like minimum viable products, experiments, and prototyping to reduce risk while enabling flexibility. 2) When modernizing applications, Pivotal assesses complex monolithic systems to identify architectural problems inhibiting speed and quality, and develops modernization strategies like migrating to microservices. 3) Pivotal's modernization approach involves setting objectives and metrics, modeling business domains and events, diagramming architecture candidates, and planning incremental changes to achieve goals.

1. © Copyright 2019 Pivotal Software, Inc. All rights Reserved.
Stephen Derksen - @stephenderksen
Chris Umbel - @chrisumbel
Our Secret Sauce
Kickstarting Predictable, Scalable Product Delivery & App Modernization

2. 1
Intro
> Pivotal Labs in two mins!
Greenfield/Innovation
> Guiding principles
> Build the right product
> Week in the Life
App Transformation
> Why?
> What We See
> Our Approach
2 3
‘Secret Sauce’ Talk Overview

3. Pivotal Labs in Two Minutes
1

4. “Pivotal’s cultural and strategic
contributions at Twitter have been quite
meaningful, and much of our software
development process at Square is
modeled on the Pivotal Labs way.”
Jack Dorsey
CEO of Twitter and Square
From Teaching How to Fish... 1

5. “Rather than give us a fish,
Pivotal taught us how to fish.
They taught us new ways of
doing things for ourselves
and making it our own. And
we’re passing that along to
new talent who want to come
innovate with us.”
- John Swieringa, COO
...to Teaching How to Become Fishing Instructors
“The impact of the partnership
is far greater than just
shortening the development
life cycle. They’ve helped us
foster a culture of
organizational product experts,
designers, and engineers
working together.”
- Antonio Melo, Director, Digital Experience Center
1
I Do
We Do
You Do

6. 1Empowered Teams Do Meaningful Work

7. Greenfield/Innovation
2

8. 2Common Soundbites (Sound Familiar?)
“We built something for our
customers but it doesn’t meet
their needs. Users aren’t
adopting our product.”
“We built a product that
works, but it takes a user 30
minutes to complete a task
when it could take 5
minutes.”
“It takes forever to release new
features. We see opportunities to
sell to new customers, but we
can’t respond to change fast
enough.”
"My teams move quickly at first, but we
quickly get bogged down as new
requirements come in. I often have to
rewrite systems after they're only a year
or two old."
“We handed off the
requirements to IT, but then 6
months later we got a product
that didn’t meet our
expectations.”

9. Confidential
Build Balanced Teams
Desirability and
Usability
Speed and
Feasibility
Viability and
Value
Successful
product
User-Centered
Design
“What pains exist today for the
user? How might we solve those
pains?”
“Are they able to use the system
effectively? Will they adopt this
product?”
Lean Product
Management
“By solving these specific user
problems with these specific
solutions, are we creating valuable
business outcomes?”
“How might we measure those
outcomes?”
Extreme
Programming
“What are the technical
complexities we need to overcome
to reach our product goals?”
“How can we build a system
responds well to change and
enables experiments?
2

10. Product Manager
Designer
Engineers
2

11. Agile + Lean
Reducing the risk of building the
wrong thing while comfortably
changing direction
■ Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
Definition and Prioritization
■ Lean Experiments
■ Identify & Test Assumptions
■ Data-Driven Decisions
User-Centered Design
Ensuring the product is desirable,
usable, and solves a real problem for
real users
■ User Interviews
■ Persona Definition
■ Journey Mapping
■ Ethnographic Studies
■ Prototype creation
Extreme Programming
Building a product at a rapid,
predictable speed and quality in the
face of changing requirements
■ Paired Programming
■ Test-Driven Development
■ Short Iterations
■ Continuous Integration /
Continuous Deployment
Engineering Design
Product
Management
PRACTICES PRACTICES PRACTICES
2Inject Best Practices

12. Product Development Can Be Scary 2

13. Frequent Feedback Removes Risk 2

14. 2Start Right

15. IPM
■ The product manager
leads the team through
the backlog for that
week
■ The team clarifies and
ensures consistency
■ Stories are estimated
Daily Standup Iteration
■ One-minute meeting to
discuss daily activities
■ Team discuss what they
did yesterday, current
blockers, and what
they’ll do today
■ Product backlog and
user stories are written
and prioritised daily by
the product manager
■ The team sit together,
self-organise, and are
highly collaborative
■ Prototypes are built,
tested, and refined by
the designer
■ User research eliminates
unnecessary features
■ The team meets to
decompress, identify
issues, and discuss
areas for improvement
■ Actions are captured for
and reviewed weekly
■ Retros allow teams to
continuously improve
and iterate the agile
process
Retrospective
A Week-in-the-Life 2

16. App Transformation
3

17. Contents
■ Definitions
■ Why?
■ What We See
■ Our Approach
3

18. App Transformation
Modifying an application’s architecture, its runtime, or infrastructure in
order to achieve business objectives.
i.e.
● Rehosting
● Replatforming
● Modernization (monolith-decomposition)
3

19. App Modernization
Re-architecting applications to take advantage of modern systems and
practices.
In:
● microservices/monolith-decomposition
Out:
● lift-and-shift
● move-and-improve
3

20. Monolith
Large software system requiring a full deployment even when
modifications to one domain don’t affect another domain.
3

21. Why Modernize?
● Velocity
○ Make users happy
○ Make developers happy
○ Security
● Quality
● Isolation
● Organization
3

22. What We See
• Complex monolithic systems built over many
years as a web of interdependent parts
• Poor developer experience and productivity
• Slow feature delivery and more bugs
• Tactical treatment of symptoms (ex. latency)
and not core problems (ex. design)
3

23. The Swift Method
Let’s Drill Into These Layers
+ %
- $
MISSION AND
INITIAL OKRs
EVENT STORM
BORIS
SNAP
TACTICAL
PATTERNS
NOTIONAL
ARCHITECTURE
3

24. Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)
Ambitious
Where to?
Objectives
Key Results
+
-increase
decrease%
#
Are we going
the right
way?
AppTx
70 - 80%
3

25. OKR Example
O1: Improve eCommerce revenue in Q3
KR1: Decrease error rate on checkout page from 2.0% to 0.001%
KR2: ...
O2: Improve eCommerce user experience in Q3
KR1: Decrease average page response time from 1100ms to 400ms
3

26. 3

27. Event Storming
Bounded Context
Seats
Payment
Aggregate
Aggregate
Aggregate
Domain
Event
Domain
Event
Domain
Event
Domain
Event
Domain
Event
Domain
Event
Domain
Event
Domain
Event
Domain
Event
!
Domain
Event
Relevant Business Event
“Policy Requested”, “Rating
Determined” Aggregate
Brains
Accepts Actions / Generates “Events”
Domain
EventDomain
Event
Domain
Event
Domain
Event
Domain
Event
Domain
Event
Domain
Event
Domain
Event
Slice candidate
Command
Command
?
3

28. Why
Event Storm
Making Sense of a
Huge Mess
Reveal Bounded
Contexts
Explore Domains
Identify Potential
“Slices”
Expose Core
Domains
Identify Potential
Trouble Spots
Enable Cross
Perspective
Conversation
Identify Potential
Starting Points
3

29. Boris Diagramming
Service
Service based on Context
“Policy Service”
Queue
Message Queue
“...Decisioned”
UI External
Link to External
System
Service
Service
Service
Service
Service
Ext
Ext
Q
Q
Q
UI
UI
Service
3

30. SNAPe
API Data Source /
Storage
UI Risks
Stories
Rabbit
MQ
REST /
JSON
CICS
GW
Other
Purchase
History
AdminUI
Dependent
On...
GET
/purchasesGET
/purchasesGET
/purchases
3

31. 3

32. Questions?