TECH DEBT, TECH INITIATIVES AND PROJECTS AND HOW WE’VE PRIORITIZED AND RESERVED CAPACITY FOR THEM.
Challenge
The transition to the cloud was very successful; we’ve followed the plan and our clients were showing growing confidence in our offerings. We’ve been very responsive to our clients and it paid off, but while executing in such a fast pace we were bound to accumulate tech debt. In addition, the move to the cloud taught us that there are many initiatives and features that were not prioritized by the traditional business analysis you’d do with the clients. We needed to be proactive, own that list and then prioritize the relevant items. Translating those requirements to business-worthy goals was one of my responsibilities.
Solution
We wanted to formalize and establish the Technical Roadmap. This is a Product Roadmap that focuses on anything relevant to:
Code Architecture
Performance
Scalability
Accessibility
Security
Bug Analysis
Underlying Technology
Infrastructure
Data Management
Plan and Execution
We’ve worked with the Engineering Managers and other stakeholders on coming up with the different items to go into the list. Grooming that list was iterative and was done in close collaboration with business analysts, services and product managers so we could determine what capabilities and business value each of the items will give us.
This gave us a rough high level roadmap for our Engineering Department. The initial roadmap had wide agreement from across the organization due to the nature of our process building it. We started recruiting for Technical Product Managers that will be responsible for executing the items and then to continue owning this dynamic roadmap.
The final part of this was to actually reserve capacity for those items and evaluate them against our other business needs.