Technical Strategy

Question 1

4 Levels of Technical Strategy

Answer 1

1. The technical strategy portfolio
2. Company and technical strategy calibration
3. Generating new ideas and making trade-offs
4. Strategic execution

Question 2

The technical strategy portfolio

Answer 2

Every work can potentially be put into one of the buckets below
Product, Scale and Risk

Question 3

Generating new ideas and making trade-offs

Answer 3

Our goals should be right on the edge of wildly ambitious but technically feasible

Question 4

Scale work

Answer 4

1. Maintenance
2. Developer Efficiency
3. Technical Improvements, resolving performance or availability issues.
4. Velocity Enablement, creating speed in future efforts

Question 5

Risk work

Answer 5

1. Ops Improvements, improve infrastructure and product reliability
2. Security Improvements
3. Regulatory compliance

Question 6

Metrics that matter

Answer 6

1. Financial metrics

2. Customer metrics

Question 7

Supporting metrics

Answer 7

Metrics that improve the north star metrics

Question 8

Obstacles to creating a balanced portfolio

Answer 8

Root Causes Solutions
Wrong frame of reference Categorize engineering work in a portfolio
No outcomes Identify the right outcomes
No definition of good Set thresholds to assess outcomes

Question 9

When to best do scale work

Answer 9

Early-stage - hurt product to market
At the growing stage
Mature - Open a window for competitors to catch up

Question 10

Use case map

Answer 10

Problem: The problem the product solves in the words of the user or customer
Persona: Who faces the problem
Value Proposition: Why a user or customer chooses your product to solve their problem instead of the alternatives
Alternatives: Alternatives they consider to solve the problem

Question 11

Competitive Landscape

Answer 11

1. Direct competitors
2. Indirect alternatives
3. Adjacent markets

Question 12

Where to set the threshold?

Answer 12

1. What do our customers care about? Identify specific tech capabilities that can deliver it
2. What experience issues do we manually fix?
3. User psych explains where friction is tolerable and where it isn’t

Question 13

What should the threshold be?

Answer 13

1. Product data
   1.1 Evaluate outlying 5%
   1.2 Evaluate performance across persona dimensions
   2 Customer data
   2.1 Explore data to see where customers are having problems
   2.2 Analyze problems by reviewing segments of the target persona
   3 Competitor data

Question 14

Risk work type

Answer 14

1. Operational risk, Issues that impact performance or availability
2. Security risk
3. Regulatory risk

Question 15

Risk work outcomes

Answer 15

Type of risk -> outcome -> impact
Operational Sliding Scale Acquisition
Security Retention
Regulatory Binary Other costs

Risk = likelihood * impact
Likelihood = timeframe + probability

Question 16

Risk work thresholds

Answer 16

Customer constraints/tolerant
Financial constraints/tolerant
Resource constraints

Question 17

The strategy stack

Answer 17

Mission: The change your company wants to bring to the world
Company Strategy: The plan you have to bring your company’s mission into being
Function Strategy: Plan for how a specific function will drive its part of the company strategy
Functional Roadmap: The sequence of features that implement the product strategy
Functional Goals: Outcomes of the roadmap that measure product strategy progress.

Question 18

Technical Strategy in the strategy stack

Answer 18

Mission
Company Strategy
Function Strategy = Technical Strategy
Functional Roadmap
Functional Goals

Question 19

Technical Strategy Calibration Horizontally

Answer 19

Marketing Strategy and Product Strategy

Question 20

Key to calibrating strategy

Answer 20

Speak the same language. Like travelling

Question 21

Acquisition

Answer 21

Get more new users

Question 22

Acquisition - Marketing Funnel

Answer 22

Awareness
Consideration
Conversion
Loyalty

Question 23

Acquisition - Acquisition Loops

Answer 23

Viral: Fuel/Constraint Users
Content: Fuel/Constraint Content & Timeline
Paid: Fuel/Constraint The amount of capital available to reinvest

Question 24

Acquisition - Alleviating Acquisition Constraints

Answer 24

Remove friction in an existing strategy
Improve the quality of users in an existing strategy
Enable new acquisition sources with a new technology

Question 25

Retention & Engagement

Answer 25

How do we retain and engage new customers or users to the product?

Question 26

Retention & Engagement

Answer 26

High acquisition and low retention is like a leaking bucket

Question 27

Inputs into Retention

Answer 27

Activation Engagement Resurrection

Question 28

Organic Habit Loop

Answer 28

Organic trigger (can add triggers here to enforce the habit by users, company or environment) Action Reward

Question 29

Strategies to increase engagement

Answer 29

1. More use cases 2. More feature usage 3. Increase frequency of use 4. Increase intensity of use

Question 30

Finance Strategies

Answer 30

How does your company make money?

Question 31

Finance Strategies - Monetization models

Answer 31

Transaction models: Constraints - User volume, products per user and transaction profitability Subscription models: Constraints - User volume, Subscription length and subscription profitability Advertise models: Constraints - User volume, Ad views per users and Ad profitability Marketplace models: Constraints - Marketplace Liquidity, transaction volume and transaction profitability

Question 32

Finance Strategies - Finance models attributes

Answer 32

Growth Expectations Exist Goals Timeline

Question 33

Finance Strategies - Finance models

Answer 33

``` Bootstrapped Debt Public Shareholders Private Equity (PE) Venture Capital (VC) ```

Question 34

Finance Strategies - Finance decision rubric

Answer 34

Cost management

Question 35

Finance Strategies - Finance decision rubric - Cost management

Answer 35

``` Use the money to buy time Evaluating cost 1. Opportunity Cost 2. Marginal Return The focus is on initiatives where the marginal return is larger than the opportunity cost of your next-best option ``` Use time to save money Unit Economics 1. Build a baseline 2. Forecasting expenses

Question 36

Finance Strategies - Finance decision rubric - Resource Availability

Answer 36

Flexible vs Fix

Question 37

Finance Strategies - Finance decision rubric - Risk Appetite

Answer 37

Low vs High

Question 38

Solution Development Toolkit

Answer 38

Divergent thinking - generate ideas | Convergent thinking - make trade-offs

Question 39

Convergent thinking - Making trade-offs

Answer 39

1. Guiding principles 2. Build or buy 3. Scope, time and resources

Question 40

Convergent thinking - Making trade-offs - Guiding principles

Answer 40

1. Customer principles | 2. Development principles

Question 41

Convergent thinking - Making trade-offs - weak code ownership

Answer 41

``` Pros 1. Independent teams 2. Faster no dependencies Cons 1. Small inefficiencies 2. Stringent processes 3. Duplicate waste ```

Question 42

Convergent thinking - Making trade-offs - When to Break Guiding principles

Answer 42

Break principle 1. when principle doesn't serve its purpose 2. Responsible maintenance 3. Conflicting principle Change principle When the product, market or company changes

Question 43

Convergent thinking - Making trade-offs - Build or Buy

Answer 43

1. Strategic Value 2. Available resources (also consider maintenance) 3. Cost 4. Vendor reliability

Question 44

Convergent thinking - Making trade-offs - Scope, time and resources - Don't add more resources

Answer 44

1. When working across shared surfaces 2. When writing code in the same files 3. When work is customer experience integration, mostly depending on a central team/code 4. When it's late in the project 5. When the work is highly specialized 6. When an exploratory, nimble team is needed

Question 45

Strategic Execution - Execution Approach

Answer 45

1. Designing execution systems | 2. Delivering continuous customer value

Question 46

Strategic Execution - Execution Approach - Designing execution systems

Answer 46

Design system to increase speed 1. Run one-week sprints 2. Commit to less each sprint 3. Reduce distractions

Question 47

Strategic Execution - Execution Approach - System health

Answer 47

Evaluation metrics 1. Availability metrics 1. 1 Network uptime 1. 2 Functional uptime 1. 3 Number of major incidents 2. Delivery metrics 2. 1 Deployment frequency 2. 2 Lead time, amount of time between product request and when it is merged 2. 3 Change fail percentage, rollback% 2. 4 Mean time to restore (MTTR) 2. 5 Sprint pass rate (sprint 100% done)