OUR METHODOLOGY

Holistic Methodology.
Our proven methodology, learned and honed over the years, takes a comprehensive look across all aspects of the software product development lifecycle. It borrows heavily from popular industry methodologies and is supplemented with our own learning. Our end goal is to help set your product direction, platform, experience, and engineering efforts on the course for long-term success.

A Strong Foundation.
Our methodology spans four major dimensions or pillars – Product, Technology, Systems, and Team. It is important to keep in mind that the various aspects outlined below are not necessarily relevant in every situation. There are also contingencies that are planned for in advance, but with the implementation deferred until needed. The goal is to make the right decisions on the critical aspects as well as to anticipate the common pitfalls, at the outset. This minimizes the likelihood of gut-wrenching changes and fire drills down the road. By doing so, there will be more time and resources available to focus on handling the truly unforeseen challenges that will inevitably be encountered.

Clarity and Balance.
In spiritual circles, the moonstone is thought to promote clarity, intuition, balance, and business success. Similarly, the application of our methodology helps you formulate a solid plan for your solution, thus bringing clarity and balance to your product and leading to eventual business success.

 

PRODUCT

Our end goal is to help you make sure that the product experience is tightly aligned with the overall product strategy, key customer scenarios, and desired customer outcomes. Key aspects covered in the Product pillar are:

  • Strategy: Understanding the market type, customer segments, customer value proposition, monetization model, product scope, and roadmap based on market and customer data already gathered.
  • Scenarios: Customer scenario definition and prioritization guided by desirable customer outcomes, personas, and the customer journey mapped across the entire value chain.
  • Experience: Overall experience spanning the UI model, experience structure, information hierarchy and its presentation, customer onboarding, and notifications.
  • Metrics: Defining and deriving key product metrics and insights such as the performance of the product against top customer outcomes, user funnel, task completion rates, customer sentiment, and so on.

TECHNOLOGY

Our end goal is to help you make sure that your technology foundation is well-matched to your product needs; your platform is secure, robust, and scalable; and your entire system is architected for the long-term. Key aspects covered in the Technology pillar are:

  • Platform capabilities: Deriving the core set of platform capabilities required to support the product definition and experience.
  • Fundamentals: Articulating clear requirements and plans for system basics such as availability, reliability, scalability, manageability, security, privacy, and globalization.
  • Back-end architecture: Putting together a service-oriented, modular design that meets the goals for performance and availability along with clear understanding of the component interactions and information architecture.
  • Technology stack choices: Reusing appropriate pre-existing technologies for the core building blocks as much as possible and identifying additional services and components that need to be built around this foundation.
  • Front-end design: Making the right choices for front-end technologies to maximize feature agility and minimize cross-platform burden.
  • Instrumentation: Planning for the right level of instrumentation in the back-end and front-end systems to provide detailed telemetry that can be analyzed to extract insights.
 

PROCESS & SYSTEMS

Our end goal is to help you make sure that the business processes, systems, tools, and engineering processes required to build, deliver, support, and improve a high-quality solution or product in an agile fashion are in place and operating well. Key aspects covered in the Systems pillar are:

  • Business processes: Assessing and optimizing existing business processes as well as exploring and defining new processes that lead to greater business success.
  • Customer development model: Defining the process and capabilities needed to rapidly iterate and improve your product based on customer feedback.
  • Engineering with agility and quality: Operating with an agile development methodology by utilizing the appropriate continuous delivery pipeline, DevOps tools, and quality assurance model.
  • Health monitoring: Establishing the plan and system for real-time reporting of availability and reliability, with rich diagnostic capabilities and capabilities to provide a deep understanding of its performance characteristics.
  • Operational systems: Establishing the plan for the various operational systems and engineering processes used for managing your service infrastructure, deployment, service failures, disaster recovery, and so on.
  • Insights: Deriving product and customer insights based on analysis of user telemetry as well as other sources of customer data to help refine your product and strategy.
  • Customer support & community: Putting in place systems and processes for supporting customers and engaging with them to learn from their feedback so as to build a community of loyal customers.

TEAM

Working in this fast-paced, complex environment is just as much an organizational and people challenge as it is a product and technology challenge. One cannot create a great product without the right talent and a supportive organizational environment. It’s important to create a flexible and dynamic work culture that is suited to the product you’re building, embodies your values, and enables your people to learn, grow, and do their best work. Our end goal is to help you make sure that you have an engaged, diverse, and inclusive work culture which enables employees to innovate, deliver excellent results, and become your company’s greatest advocates. Key aspects covered in the Team pillar are:

  • North Star: Ensuring guiding principles, values, vision and strategy are well-socialized and understood.
  • Objectives: Establishing transparent, shared objectives mapped to strategy from management down.
  • Measures: Establishing and tracking measures of progress towards results which are mapped to shared objectives.
  • Method: Ensuring that the systems, tools, and processes are well-understood and are designed to help employees be more effective rather than causing friction.
  • Delivery model: Determining the release cadence and deployment models that are needed for your business.
  • Decision-making: Fostering crisp, timely, data-driven decision making done at the appropriate level in the team.
  • Accountability: Establishing a clear accountability model with well-defined roles and a lightweight organizational structure.
  • Capabilities: Assessing team capabilities and talent needed to be successful along with targeted recruiting efforts to fill identified gaps.
  • Learning: Encouraging the team and leadership to constantly learn and grow by establishing mechanisms to solicit feedback and take action.
  • Recognition: Building in celebrations of individual and collective successes done in real-time and in an open fashion.

METHODOLOGICAL INFLUENCES

Our methodology borrows heavily from existing, popular industry methodologies, supplemented with our own learning. It has been most influenced by the following:

  • Insights on innovation described by Clayton Christensen1
  • The Jobs-To-Be-Done methodology championed by Tony Ulwick2
  • The Lean Startup movement3
  • Continuous delivery engineering model4
  • The body of online literature on Agile software development methodologies

1. Christensen, Clayton M., and Michael E. Raynor. The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth. Harvard Business School, 2003.
2. Ulwick, Anthony W. What Customers Want: Using Outcome Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services. McGraw Hill, 2005.
3. Blank, Steve. The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products That Win. Second ed., 2013.
4. Humble, Jez, and David Farley. Continuous Delivery. Addison-Wesley, 2011.