Valuing innovation within your Technical Platform
How to continue to innovate with budget constraints in 2023?
This article explores the evolution of the platform engineer role and how it has evolved to become a critical factor in driving innovation. It discusses the importance of understanding user needs, the challenge of balancing technology and business objectives, and how to take advantage of the power of a matrix structure to maximize value. Finally, it provides a few key takeaways for platform engineers to consider when striving to deliver the best possible experience.
Introduction
The future of a technology is not as unpredictable as one might think. Even if I have fun in this article to say it…
Innovation does not follow a fixed path! In reality, technology generally progresses along several dimensions at the same time. Developing one dimension or another has specific costs and benefits, and each dimension has a quantifiable and variable utility. For example as Platform Engineer, trace the technological evolution of your platform back to today, going as far back as possible. See the need initially met, then for each major change in form or function ask yourself what fundamental elements have been affected.
Which dimensions to choose?
As I listed in the article above to build a platform we are facing many challenges, like scalability, security, easy integration between systems, maintenance, collaboration, flexibility. Knowing this, what are the dimensions of our product which we want to evolve for the happiness of our users? For the case of technical platforms or internal development platforms, we have to agree on 3 or 5 dimensions, no more. It is important to limit the dimensions on which you will work. I suggest the following:
- usability
- reliability
- costs
- velocity / performance
- safety / security
Other dimensions like the ones below can be added.
- energy efficiency / sustainability
- robustness
- …
Choosing which dimensions to study is not an exact science; it depends largely on your knowledge of your industry. It is important to choose dimensions of optimal size — neither too narrow, to keep the big picture in mind, nor too broad, to keep a detailed view of what you want to innovate on.
Do the exercise with your team to define these high-level dimensions. Once the list of dimensions has been identified by the participants, generally this exercise, with rare exception, will put the costs among the dimensions. But it will also sometimes suggest dimensions that should be explored in the future.
Well, forget about the costs… for a few minutes ;)
When I do that exercise, I ask the team in general to forget about the cost issue and other types of constraints and imagine what the users would like if they could all have! One might think that this would generate a lot of creative, but unrealizable ideas. In reality, it is often very revealing, because most of the time the exercise underlines that the users want new improvements in dimensions already identified. It happens, however, that it allows the discovery of dimensions that had never been identified before.
If this is the case, then don’t hesitate to add it to the list of dimensions to study.
I advise you if your platform is already well established, and already on the cloud to refer to the following AWS Framework. It can seriously help you to find your dimensions and give you some serious improvement tracks. This framework is composed of six pillars that can allow to think about your infrastructure https://www.wellarchitectedlabs.com.
Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization and Sustainability.
I would like you to suggest me, more important dimensions for the engineering of platforms that I have not listed here, if you find others!
Try to situate yourself
For each dimension, determine the shape of the utility curve, i.e. the value that the user gets from this dimension — And establish where on this curve the platform you are operating is currently located. This allows you to discover where the best opportunities for progress lie.
Let’s take the example of the car, nowadays cars go up to 190 km/h, and many reach 240 km/h. It is rare, however, that drivers exceed 140 km per hour. For the most part, the speed utility curve flattens out from this point. Improvements in other dimensions such as fuel efficiency, safety, reliability, are of greater use to the majority of users.
The speed utility curve reveals that the point at which improvements in one dimension lose their value changes with the environment and the underlying technology. To explain, at the beginning of the 20th century cars were doing 25 km/h, then as the roads improved and highways appeared, the maximum speed desired by the users increased. If this is the case for any of the platform dimensions you have chosen, the utility curve could go up again.
Set priorities
Once you know the dimensions along which your company’s platform can be improved and your position on the utility curves of these dimensions, it is easy to identify the area most conducive to progress. However, it is not enough to know that a certain performance in a certain dimension can be improved: you must also decide which of the identified dimensions are the most important for the users of your platform. Then evaluate the cost and difficulty of improving each one.
To estimate which of your investments is likely to be the most profitable you can use a matrix of this type.
It is possible to adjust the coefficient of the scores in this matrix, to fit your situation. For example, if you are a young startup and have a small budget to manage your platform, you may want to prioritize the more easily perfectible and promising dimensions, over the more complex ones to manage. For that clone this google sheet and put weighs.
End the inertia
The proposed exercises can only help you broaden your vision of the platform and potentially change your perspective from:
“This is what we do” to…
“This is the direction we are taking or should take”
They also help to overcome the bias and inertia that makes a group generally stuck on technological dimensions that are less important today but may have been in the past.
The new ideas produced by these exercises are not the only benefits — or even the most important. What is most useful is the global vision they provide, as well as the new light on the opportunities that are offered to you. And thus show the way to follow to the other engineers or C-level.
Struggling to keep your tech platform stable and safe? Hear my story of how I built and animated a team of tech experts at ManoMano!
Are you looking to foster innovation in your platform engineering team? Have you heard of the 5⁵ methodology?
If you found this article about valuing innovation helpful or interesting, please consider sharing it with your friends or colleagues, or contacting the author to learn more. I would love to hear from you! — Clement Hussenot
