CM15: Bring Modern Product Development Methods to Legacy IT Operations or Face Disruption w/ Samer Fallouh
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Welcome to episode #015 of Custom Made and today I’m joined by Samer Fallouh, Head of Engineering here at Dialexa.
Samer is a technologist with over fifteen years experience in building custom software and hardware products to successfully drive digital transformation at enterprise organizations, and partner with startups who have received funding and now need a technology team to bring their product to market so that it is scalable, secure and built for their user needs.
Samer joined Dialexa as employee number three and has been instrumental to the growth of the company. Starting as a Solutions Engineer, Samer quickly moved into an Engineering Project Lead role, and today, he serves as Vice President of Engineering at Dialexa over seeing both the Software and Hardware Engineering practices.
Samer has a track record of success leading various projects, managing teams and delivering on time. He has also architected, designed and constructed multiple platforms.
His projects at Dialexa include mobile applications, front-end, backend, DevOps, hardware products, and architecting scalable platforms. He is not afraid of exploring emerging technologies and helping companies and startups push their limits to create innovative products.
Samer also has extensive academic research experience including development of an intelligent route planning mobile application. He has a Master of Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Detroit Mercy and a Bachelor in Computer Sciences and Engineering from Damascus University where he had a concentration in Artificial Intelligence.
On this weeks episode Samer and I are discussing why it is essential for enterprise organizations to modernize their technology ecosystem and adapt their product development methods or they will face certain disruption.
Whilst there is no discounting the successes of enterprise organizations with multi-billion dollar annual revenues, they are typically existing today on legacy IT operations that put their future at risk.
These risks can come from inefficient business operations run on legacy technology, poor customer experiences that are built around the technology and not the user, and slow-to-market products that are not even connected at the data level.
Enterprises must take steps to adopt the modern methods that disruptors use to build successful products.
These modern methods will vary depending on the business needs, but there are a few ideas that every enterprise should adopt — these include design thinking, agile software development, rapid prototyping, big data and artificial intelligence, site reliability engineering, and exploring the right programming language for the business need instead of sticking to the languages you have always used.
But before enabling these methods to modernize their software engineering practices, there are certain organizational challenges standing in the way — from revamping development processes, preparing for management changes, and eliminating fear of failure.
And finally during this episode we will look what enterprise organizations need to be looking for from their partners to show them and teach them which specific modern methods enterprises should adopt to drive successful product development within a digital transformation.
Once you have listened to this episode you can read more about Samer’s advice on bringing modern methods to your organization in these two articles:
- Modern Methods for Building Successful Enterprise Products
- Bringing Modern Methods to Your Enterprise: The Organizational Challenges
You can catch Samer’s full Custom Made episode here:
Here are some of the memorable moments from Samer’s episode of Custom Made:
- The risk of not adopting modern methods
- Challenges when working with enterprises
- Team is Agile while leadership is reporting in old ways
- Learning curves are being looked at as failures
- The business need drives engineering
- Without designers, no one will want to use products
- How a partner can help you adopt these new methods
If you prefer to listen on the go, you can get all episodes of Custom Made on these platforms and many more. Do subscribe on your favorite platform to catch each episode as it is released, and let me know any feedback, questions, and recommendations on twitter @dougplatts.
