How to Work with Engineers w/ Alan Chiu

How to Work with Engineers

Alan Chiu Head of Product and Co-Founder, Listo Partner, XSeed Capital Stanford GSB MSx 2011 @alanchiu Stanford Graduate School of Business November 12, 2015

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Stanford Graduate School of Business

Agenda

1. Product Owner

2. What Drives Engineers

3. Product Development Practices

4. Keys to Success

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Alan Chiu

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Agenda

1. Product Owner



4. Keys to Success

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Product Owner

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Final arbiter of product spec

Judged by product-market fit

Voice of the customer


Challenges

Product owner wants to ship now.

Non-technical product owners often do not

understand the implications of their asks.

Engineers want to build a quality product.

Engineers hate throwing away code.

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Agenda

1. Product Owner



4. Keys to Success

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Seek first to understand.

— Stephen Covey

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What Drives Engineers

Work with smart people

Work on cool technology

Build something people actually use

Build their career

Stay current with the latest

tools/languages/frameworks/processes

Want their work to be seen — street cred

Afraid of working on something inconsequential

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Implications

First engineer the most difficult to recruit

Freedom to choose

Open source vs closed source

Product shipping experience

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Stanford Graduate School of Business 11


Your Key Allies

Engineering Manager

GSD

Cares about quality

Motivated by commercial success and talent

development

CTO

Tech visionary

Owns product architecture

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Agenda

1. Product Owner



4. Keys to Success

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Development Processes

Historical approach: Waterfall

Works if the team understands both the problem

and the solution well — rarely the case.

"Throw it over the wall" mentality leads to

adversarial rather than collaborative relationships.

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Development Processes

How it is done today: Customer Dev + Agile Dev

Customer Development — problem oriented

Agile Development — solution oriented

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Customer Dev + Agile Dev

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Agile Development Process

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Agenda

1. Product Owner



4. Keys to Success

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Keys to Success

Be the voice of the customer.

Be genuinely curious and interested in

technology.

Rank features by bang-for-buck (value vs effort).

Include non-engineers in feature estimation

meetings.

Set aside bandwidth in every sprint to pay down

technical debt.

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Appendix

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Background: Agile Manifesto

Individuals and interactions over Processes and

tools

Working software over Comprehensive

documentation

Customer collaboration over Contract negotiation

Responding to change over Following a plan

http://agilemanifesto.org

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Agile Principles

Customer satisfaction by rapid delivery of useful software

Welcome changing requirements, even late in development

Working software is delivered frequently

Close, daily cooperation between business people and developers

Projects are built around motivated individuals, who should be

trusted

Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication (co-

location)

Working software is the principal measure of progress

... and more at http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html

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http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html

http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html


Common Agile Practices

Scrum

Test-driven development

Velocity tracking

Backlogs

User stories

Retrospectives

Kanban

Continuous integration

Continuous deployment

... and many more

Book: Agile Product Management with Scrum

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Bhaskar Ghosh

VP Engineering & Ops

Nerdwallet

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Alan Chiu

Head of Product & Co-Founder, Listo

Partner, XSeed Capital

How to Work with Engineers w/ Alan Chiu

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