Kave Home: First the Product, then the Tech - 3 general recommendations

Kave Home is a super trendy Spanish furniture company with current revenue of +110 MEUR growing heavily, selling online in over 13 countries, 20 physical stores, and a physical presence by resellers in 70 countries more. I’m happy to welcome Kave Home to Rigor Guild, my personal consulting company.

Joan Colomo is Kave Home IT Director. He was one of the students in the Tech Management & Leadership Bootcamp that Geekshubs Academy organizes where I teach 15 hours of the holistic view of a CTO role. The content I share there it’s a super distilled version of what I deeply teach in my own online training for CTOs, cto.camp taught in Spanish by me and featuring tons of CTOs sharing their experiences.

I guess Joan was happy with my teachings because he approached me months ago for helping him with the hyper-growth challenges that Kave Home is facing. «Carlos, imagine that money is not an issue to scale the team – like doubling it, which kind of organization is needed, and how is it done?».

That’s a really nice challenge and I’m not going to share all the details of the workshop (obviously) but some general recommendations that may help others.

1. Product Management/Ownership is the most difficult part to run on the whole plan. Solving the tech is orders of magnitude easier than the stakeholder management and product focus.

Being a PM/PO is like being a football referee. If you do it well, nobody talks about you, but whatever you do is going to make unhappy one of the stakeholders. If you decide to satisfy all the stakeholders, the company will lose push and the customer will be the one suffering.

As a PO, if you are not able to put politics apart and if you are not able to be resilient to what has to be done… do something else. You will face stakeholders that shout the most, stakeholders driven by gut feelings and not by some KPI to improve and by how much (not needed to go crazy about data-driven in the first run), or even by CEOs acting as CPOs.

BTW! The tech team is as much responsible for the loss of focus as the stakeholders themselves and they are responsible for keeping such focus in the same way as the PO.

Part of your job as PM/PO is to do the pedagogic job to bring stakeholders closer to the Agile way of working (hypothesis, experiments, validations, goal vs. task, etc.), and believe me, at SEAT:CODE, we have really tough stakeholders. It’s also true, that it’s a great opportunity to grow professionally.

2. Hiring more developers is not going to solve the problem of a broken organization and broken demand management, most likely is going to make it worse.

If you lose 40% focus coming from stakeholders accessing directly the tech team, adding more developers is not going to change the situation substantially. The problem is structural.

BTW! The tech team is as much responsible for the loss of focus as the stakeholders themselves and they are responsible for keeping such focus in the same way as the PO.

3. The set of all the top-priority tasks of every team in your company does not represent the top priority of your company. Splitting teams may impact your general focus, especially if you split them by skill and not per business domain.

It’s easy to feel that a team of 10 people has longer stand-ups, retros, etc. You feel that it’s the moment to split. It may sense, but do this check: “Is task #1 in team B more important than task #2 in team A?”. If the answer is no, you have a problem. Multiply that for all your teams.

BTW! The tech team is as much responsible for being working in top company priority as the PO. They should be asking themselves daily if what they are doing is the most important thing for the company.

If you work around the north area of Catalonia, you love React, and/or Django and Python, take a look at all the Kave Home opening jobs or to the LinkedIn Kave Tech area. I’m helping them and we may have the chance to meet.

If you need help with your Tech and Product Organizational challenges, DevOps, Architecture, or Development Practices, drop me a message at carlos.buenosvinos@rigorguild.com.