My previous post shared my journey into my early days as a CTO, taking you through my challenges and opportunities in my new role that experienced high degrees and uncertainty, and despite the ambiguity, I had to not only come up with a 100 day plan, but also win hearts-and-minds all-round.
[Disclaimer: I write about my past work experiences, dating back to 2017 referring to entities that no long exist today (in 2023). Previous mentions of such entities are widely in the public domain through news media outlets, press briefings, launch announcements, etc. I take time to ensure that nothing I share exposes commercially sensitive material. My intent is to rather showcase my work portfolio to current and future prospective employers, through my writing].
Despite the uncertainty with the mothership corporate's complete overhaul of its business operating models, we had to go on as business-as-usual. As such, I had to create a credible three year plan for the technology platform: Create future online video platform V2.0 that replaced the existing V1.0 (let's call this platform Delta) and combined the best of a standalone partner platform (Sierra).
Both platforms were roughly the same age, with Delta create to pretty-much replicate the traditional PayTV's Set Top Box (STB) experience (via a Satellite broadcast) but over the internet and consumed through devices other than STBs (i.e. mobile phones, web browsers, game consoles, smart TVs). Delta wasn't a truly home-grown, native internet application, being tightly coupled to existing broadcast and satellite workflows. (To understand the world of difference between Internet Over-the-Top video and traditional Broadcast TV systems, refer to my white paper here).
Sierra, on-the-other-hand, was built from the ground-up, as a pure internet streaming platform, but only for on-demand content, like Netflix - but didn't provide live broadcast TV & thus didn't experience the realtime expectations that the Delta platform did.
Nevertheless, the business strategy was to create a more unified, homogenous viewing experience for the customer, simplify the multiple applications problem by providing the customer (end-users that consume video over the internet), a single container application to enjoy any type of media content, on-demand - i.e. xVOD. From a product and user experience perspective, this made perfect sense. For the technology platforms though, it meant choosing a path forward that involved a technology modernisation program: Build out the new platform, migrate as much as possible, reach parity and provide the new 2.0 experience.
The job of creating this technology strategy naturally falls on the CTO, me. This initiative, to be a success would need the full co-operation of 5 separate commercial entities, impacting the day-to-day work and operations of 500+ people, including 50+ resources from our partners.
How do I simplify a complex technology strategy & execution plan on a single piece of paper?
How do I ensure the picture shows all the key elements (workstreams) that tell a credible story?
How do I present and communicate progress overall to non-technical stakeholders?
How do I influence stakeholders & bring in a wider audience than just the engineering teams?
A Visualization is sometimes more powerful than a Narrative
Even before joining Amazon, I was in the habit of writing narrative documents. I would take the time to process my thoughts, write them up in a document, submit for discussion and review - gather feedback and fine-tune my thinking. In my previous role however, much of my narrative docs went unread, because the prevailing culture (being a media company) was a storytelling, presentation-based culture. Whilst the detail narrative helped me ground my own thinking, I needed to still represent the essence through visualisations and powerpoint slide decks. And do a lot of story-telling.
I am a big fan of One-Page visualisations. I believe if you can't distil on one page, visually how a plan will work, then the plan needs to be reworked. Even now, whilst working with Amazon AWS, I miss the days of pictures (not the powerpoint decks) - but I really miss visualisations. My opinion: Written narratives can be complemented by simple visuals that tell a story.
The picture below shows how I mapped out the Technical Strategy showing the impact not only of product and engineering outputs, but also the essence of the outcomes from a process and team organisation perspective, drawing much inspiration from the work of SEMAT Kernel (my favourite state management capturing the essence of Software Engineering).
 |
| 3 Year Technology Migration Strategy |
There's a lot of content condensed into that single picture. It speaks to the classic migration pattern (migration seems to be a constant thread in my career): Track 1, keep-the-lights on stream, existing product needs to be serviced until at such point we're ready to handover. Track 2, the next-gen stream - involves not only figuring out what to build, but also how to build. In my case, track 1 was old-stack, non-cloud native, and Track 2 was new, shiny cloud-stack, new technologies, etc - which is essentially starting up a new line from scratch.
Diving deeper, here's a visualisation I used to show how the plan, product roadmap along with milestones and releases; and the key technology outcomes would be achieved in 3 years:
 |
| A higher level view calling out key Technology Drivers |
And here's how I communicated the whole thing as the Single Threaded Leader to the business folks, by way of slides. Hidden behind all of this high-level was detailed tracking documents, covering every single project - at the time, I was responsible for 50+ project streams.
So, did we end up completing the migration then?
Alas, no. As I mentioned, the environment was still quite volatile, ambiguous and uncertain. Due to forces beyond our control, the mothership's major investor decided to unbundle all PayTV related businesses altogether - which resulted in my business unit being further re-organised, shutdown and started up as part of a different entity altogether, pseudo-independent with a new strategy for online video...so by the end of year 1 (2017), we decided to relook and redefine the strategy in 2018 going forward once the new business unit was resourced up. There was some good work done regardless, so not much was lost or wasted work, we'd learnt a lot of what was needed on all sides to future fit a new tech stack and the resulting impact on business & technology operations, end-to-end.
No comments:
Post a Comment