<quote> No one goes to the gym to willingly get punched in the face by the senior vice president of boxing. But some folks eagerly pay for a sparring partner when it's time to get better. The difference is obvious, but we've forgotten to say it out aloud. No grades, no check marks, no badges. I'm not in charge of you, and I'm not manipulating you. I'm simply establishing the conditions for you to get to where you said you wanted to go. You tell me where you're going and what you need. You make promises about your commitment and skills development. I'll show up to illuminate, question, answer, spar with, and challenge you. I'll make sure you're part of a team of people who are ready to care as much as you do. We can get real. Or let's not play. </quote>
Started in 2011 as my outlet to share my experiences on personal life and work topics. My handle is khanmjk. My friends & colleagues call me "Mo". This blog is an experiment, work-in-progress. Life: Self-awareness, personal development, growth hacking (quantified self). Work: Software and Systems Engineering, Leadership, Management, New Ideas and OpEds.
Tuesday 29 August 2023
Be the leader you wish you had
Wednesday 14 June 2023
A blast from the past: my experience building a large-scale tech platform
Why am I claiming Fusion as large-scale (even in 2023, 13 years later)?
- How we "scaled agile" to adapt to our unique global challenges
- How to design a global org-structure to deliver a large-scale project in a scaled agile way
- What mechanisms are needed to deliver a large-scale technology initiative in an agile way
- How we executed and raised the engineering & product management bar
- Business Impact - Fusion started off with a $75 million investment and later a joint-venture with the flagship customer, Sky. The entire company pivoted to focus on Fusion as its next-generation software platform, with up to 3000 engineers world-wide working on multiple streams, some strategic foundational streams kicked off at least 2 years before the mainstream program. In my role as software delivery owner for Sky Darwin project, it was critical the project delivered successfully, flawlessly - as it involved migrating software in 10 million people's homes (their living room TVs) seamlessly with no rollback. To the end customer (the person sitting at home watching TV), they would notice very little change to their experience. Overall, Fusion software components delivered to multiple middleware stacks, at the time of 2011 when I departed NDS, our software was running in excess of 60 million people's homes daily, globally.
- Scope and Size - Fusion introduced a new paradigm of the TV software ecosystem, end-to-end, including broadcast headend components as well as embedded software architecture. The stack was open, based on a Linix/Posix and a complete departure from the initial decade of TV software operating systems. This was before the advent of Android TV or fully open source middleware. Fusion's product backlog captured over 2000 epics in the form of work packages, cutting across multiple customer needs, in parallel. The scope included all layers of the device software stack: Chipset drivers, hardware absraction layer, Linux kernel, Linux abstraction, Middleware services, Application SDK/APIs, multiple frontend application engine proxys for C / C++ / Java / HTML / Flash applications. Take a look at the software architecture diagram - it is multi-layered, multiple service teams. Another point on scope, we managed initiatives or epics in the form of work pacakages (WPs), that could impact up to 25 service teams in one WP, see here.
Wednesday 31 May 2023
Why I never ran a program without a Project Charter
Lessons on large-scale delivery program management ...
So what do I mean by using the Project Charter in "clarifying the essence" then?
- Start by understanding the why. Why is this program needed? Why is it important?
- Move on to understanding the who. Who are the sponsors, stakeholders and teams impacted? Who will be working on the program? "First who, then what"
- A program manager must be sufficiently well-versed with all the roles expected from the program, and work hard to secure the roles needed. Yes, this means the program manager must escalate to get the people needed for the program (on the bus, as well as off the bus). A responsible program manager would raise all these risks & concerns up-front, before officially kicking off the program.
- Clarify the what, including calling out what's missing - Set up the mental model for the program. What is this program about? What is it not about? What's in scope? What's not in scope? What workstreams make up the program? How do all pieces come together?
- Agree, Align, Action - The 3 As of project execution involve agreement on the deliverable, alignment of all parties involved which includes acceptance of their workstreams and ultimately agreeing on the action plan to execute.
Example Program: Transform Digital Self-Service of a $3 billion run-rate business
Sunday 9 April 2023
How I scaled engineering ops excellence to ±10X with Mission Control
Continuing with me sharing my experiences as CTO, in this post I share the actions I took to help improve an engineering organisation's operational health in our journey of scaling an online video streaming platform from 1X to 10X, from May 2017 to October 2020. To get to 10X improvement takes a journey, which I achieved in under 3 years, and after reaching the goal, I decided I'd learnt enough of the CTO experience and exited, after having set up a strong succession leadership pipeline in place.
- Establishing the team despite constant re-orgs going on at parent company - getting the right people in the right roles at the right time
- Transforming a rag-tag undisciplined team to a disciplined, clear-headed, focused organised unit
- Introducing laser focus on product engineering by unbundling non-core video apps to other businesses
- Being critical on the technology platform by establishing a baseline of the architecture, using third party auditors to rate the scalability of the platform
- Improving physical infrastructure: networking, compute, storage and data centres. Move away from self-hosted and self managed data centres to partnering, shutting down data centres as needed.
- Build an industrial grade networking stack and leveraging modern peering facilities and overhauling the server infrastructure
- Setting the roadmap for cloud by transitioning first from single region data centres, to multiple data centre deployments, to running multiple stacks simultaneously, introducing containers and microservices then finally getting ready for cloud and leaping first into serverless paradigms
- Embracing cloud partnerships with big players: Akamai, Microsoft, AWS, etc.
- Improving product and engineering delivery by revamping and overhauling the agile work processes and backlog management.
- Introducing communications mechanisms that helped remove doubt and earned trust across the many different business units and teams (we were known as the online pirates doing their own thing)
- Improving risk, governance and security - bringing it to the top, raising awareness
- Creating strategic partnerships internally and externally to leverage skills and expertise I couldn't get in-house or afford to build or manage ourselves
- Introduced technical operations controls - Mission Control, more active management of operations daily, 24/7 with increased focus, planning and prep for peak times, like weekends and major events planning.
- Aggressively reducing costs on key platform components whilst capitalising on gains through economy of scale
The dreaded 403 We're sorry, something went wrong
Sunday 2 April 2023
ChatGPT as CEO/Chief People Officer handling layoffs with empathy?
So this must've been one of my most interesting conversations with ChatGPT to date! This morning, we discussed business challenges Amazon is facing today - the subject of layoffs or "reduction in force" which is top of mind to many folks, including myself as Amazon recently announced another round of layoffs planned to start in April. ChatGPT clearly understands the MBA topics of optimisations that business implement as they seek to navigate downturns in business cycles.
We dove deep on the topic of how to approach layoffs - from the CxO communications plan, to the manager who has to unfortunately break the news to the impacted employee. We delved into diversity topics of how to approach conversations who identify a faith-practicing individuals, to the generational archetypes that exist in the workplace today. As an extract from the conversation, here's how ChatGPT summarised the key focus areas for each generational archetype for a manager when discussing layoff with an employee:
I interacted with GPT-4 and ran out of credits just as I asked my final question to close the loop for advising the manager "What would you recommend to the manager as the person breaking the news to employees about layoffs? What about the manager's state of mind and overall well-being? What advice can you give there?"
It just shows how deep the conversation could flow - I think we were both into a flow state - just reflect on the words I'm using. I know I'm talking about a piece of computer code here, a machine, but I could spend hours just having a chat with this thing. I missed out on my Sunday morning run just talking to this thing!!
How would I rank this conversation - 5 stars?
Thursday 23 March 2023
Sense making, apples v oranges, finding a path forward from multiple options by asking searching questions
- How should CTOs (engineering leaders / technology executives) communicate to all groups of stakeholders?
- What tools of writing and visualisations to use?
- How to use critical thinking and the art of reflection to deep dive on the technology strategy - calling out the good, the bad and the ugly?
- How to dive deep to sense make by asking searching questions, that force upwards stakeholder management to engage in guiding the teams on strategy?
- How to find a common ground and build bridges between two (perceived) competing technology organisations?
Questions & Answers Tree - Seeking Clarity from Executives
In 2017, I took on the role of CTO for an online video streaming technology platform. The business unit was part of a traditional satellite PayTV company, that created an online companion application to supplement its existing TV subscribers to watch TV on the go, initially through web & mobile applications ("Delta" platform) - by investing in digital media division. Not long after this value added service was created, about two years later, the parent investment company, started up a new video streaming business ("Sierra" platform borne in the cloud, no attachments to traditional PayTV like Netflix), completely independent from the existing PayTV business. The two businesses hardly interacted or shared common product, marketing or technology elements for the first two years. When I joined in 2017, there was talk about potential synergies and closer partnerships - which directed my three year turnaround strategy - to modernise Delta closing the gap on Sierra, thus creating comparable modern video consumer experience (Netflix was the bar). A year later, additional complexity and uncertainty came in when the parent investment company, decided to unbundle its independent video businesses to allow itself to focus solely on e-commerce ventures. What happened? Naturally, Sierra business was folded into Delta - create a new business with two product & engineering organisations running in parallel: 2 CPOs, 2 CTOs - tasked to figure out what the future world could look like in creating a Delta 2.0 strategy.
As part of the interactions, still being the management consultant (at the time, I was regarded as independent without any affiliations to taking any sides - since I worked with all businesses before and had existing relationships with all), I helped the executives tackle their options.
The first one - let's understand the assumptions and questions that challenge assumptions. Can executives be clear about their end game? What is the vision? Why are you so caught up about the apparent duplication in tech platforms?
Here's the tree:
Comparing Apples to Oranges: The decision table view
Wednesday 22 March 2023
How to sell a technology strategy to senior executives
Monday 20 March 2023
How I managed a technology budget ($100m) with 5+ CFOs, 3+ CEOs
Enter the Financial Model & Technology Budget Commentary Document
Financial Model (brilliant, if I say so myself!)
Sunday 19 March 2023
An example of resource planning a 100 person technology team
Saturday 18 March 2023
Visualising a technology roadmap and year plan on just one page
- Physical Platform Infrastructure and Networking - Data Centres (Compute, Storage, Networking)
- Cloud Services commercials & workloads
- Software Engineering - multi-platform, multi-device software development & testing
- Enterprise & Solution Architects
- Video Streaming Hardware & Software infrastructure integration & management
- Recommendations & Content Discovery Engines - AI/ML scientists and engineering
- Agile Program Management Office - Agile Specialists
- Technical Operations & Integrations - Command Center & Mission Control 24/7/365 support
- Security, Anti-piracy, Risk & Governance streams
- The themes that categorise the work so non-technical customers & stakeholders can understand
- The cadence of releases for product feature delivery for product & marketing teams
- The key KPIs our work drives - growth targets for monthly active users
- The key events happening during the year that would put a strain on the platform load/stability
- Show what the tech team will be producing month-on-month
- The owners and points-of-contact for each work stream
Click to enlarge: An example of a technology leader's roadmap / year plan |
Friday 17 March 2023
An example of a CTO's operating year's business plan
I'm continuing my series of posts sharing my work portfolio from my past as a technology executive (CTO) when I was directly responsible for a large engineering team (150+ people excluding partners). I approached this role as the next big challenge in my career aspirations. I gave myself a timebox of 3 years, after that, I'd intended venturing on to something else outside of the video world. I'm grateful for the experience as I left with learning all types of executive-management skills for managing business and technology operations. I also accomplished praiseworthy results in what would seem a short amount of time, in just 3 years. This shows how much intensity and density can be packed into a 3 year work experience. I know I would probably not see that much excitement and high-stakes challenges again for some time, even as I write this post in 2023, five years later, whilst working with Amazon's AWS...
Every CTO/Engineering Leader must write an Operating Plan
Thursday 16 March 2023
How I led the turnaround of a tech platform from 1X to ±9X in just 3 years
Technology Strategy Map - North Star / Key Focus Areas |
Platform growth over 3 years under my leadership |
Wednesday 15 March 2023
How I communicated a CTO's 3 year plan through writing
In Q1 2017, I was tasked to build the future online video platform (Delta) for the group. By the end of 2017, the group inherited another business unit, bringing its own video platform (Sierra) into the mix. The parent company created a new business unit as a result, consolidating a new operating model, bringing all entities servicing online video customer segments into a single operating business unit. With two different product portfolios, serving different market segments and powered by two different technology stacks, Sierra & Delta. Sierra was borne in the digital world from day-one cloud-native, with Delta having evolved from the traditional broadcast PaytTV world, pre-cloud. So you now have two independent CTOs (separated by continents apart) responsible for two different tech platforms, talk about ambiguity! From a high-level cost accounting perspective, it looks like there's much duplication going on surely!? Simply put: both organisations build apps that consume video, why don't you guys merge into a single platform? :-)
Tuesday 14 March 2023
How to Visualise & Communicate Technology Migration 3 Year Plan
Monday 13 March 2023
My One Page Project Scorecard
Back when I was an independent management consultant, I used to lead very large enterprise-wide programs that cut across multiple business units, each with its own project management office. My job was to lead, direct, coach and deliver through others, without myself having any hierarchical power - apart from referent power as my sponsors were the C-suite themselves. The job itself was interesting as I had to wear multiple hats: dive into the detail working with implementation teams whilst at the same time, be ready to communicate with my higher-level stakeholders, abstracting the detail. But if asked any questions, I must have the answers for them, without differing to the workstream owners.
Typically my programs would entail any number of workstreams, from ten to fifty. Some workstreams (or work packages) themselves would be considered programs in their own right. A program being a collection of multiple projects. Projects being a unit of work usually involving a single group, to deliver a series of tasks. I would be leading and executing through many program and project managers, as well as individual functional managers.
Over time, I'd developed my own mechanisms for structuring and managing these large-scale initiatives. One such mechanism is a simple project dashboard, on a single piece of paper, that shows the full map of all the initiatives, calls out the owners responsible and overall status - highlighting a call to action.
As a consultant however, my role was to guide, raise risks and mitigate as much as I could (within my scope of influence and control), and then escalating upwards for decisions outside my control. What's a consultant to do, eh?
Let me know what you think of this visual?
An example One Page Project Report from 2015: large-scale media workflows automation program |