Is NoOps the End of DevOps?

By user | June 4, 2023 | Comments 0 Comment

Some say that NoOps is the end of DevOps. Is that really true? If you need to answer this question, you must first understand NoOps better.

Things are moving at warp speed in the field of software development. You can subscribe to almost anything “as a service” be it storage, network, computing, or security. Cloud providers are also increasingly investing in their automation ecosystem. This leads us to NoOps, where you wouldn’t require an operations team to manage the lifecycle of your apps, because everything would be automated.

You can use automation templates to provision your app components and automate component management, including provisioning, orchestration, deployments, maintenance, upgradation, patching and anything in between meaning significantly less overhead for you and minimal to no human interference. Does this sound wonderful?

But is this a wise choice, and what are some advantages and challenges to implementing it?

Find out the answers to these questions, including whether NoOps is DevOps’s end in this article.

NoOps — Is It a Wise Choice?

You already know that DevOps aims to make app deployments faster and smoother, focusing on continuous improvement. NoOps — no operations — a term coined by Mike Gualtieri at Forrester, has the same goal at its core but without operations professionals!

In an ideal NoOps scenario, a developer never has to collaborate with a member of the operations team. Instead, NoOps uses serverless and PaaS to get the resources they need when they need them. This means that you can use a set of services and tools to securely deploy the required cloud components (including the infrastructure and code). Additionally, NoOps leverages a CI/CD pipeline for deployment. What is more, Ops teams are incredibly effective with data-related tasks, seeing data collection, analysis, and storage as a crucial part of their functions. However, keep in mind that you can automate most of your data collection tasks, but you can’t always get the same level of insights from automating this analysis.

Essentially, NoOps can act as a self-service model where a cloud provider becomes your ops department, automating the underlying infrastructure layer and removing the need for a team to manage it.

Many argue that a completely automated IT environment requiring zero human involvement — true NoOps — is unwise, or even impossible.

Maybe people are afraid of Skynet becoming self-aware!

NoOps vs. DevOps — Pros and Cons

DevOps emphasizes the collaboration between developers and the operations team, while NoOps emphasizes complete automation. Yet, they both try to achieve the same thing — accelerated GTM and a better software deployment process. However, there are both advantages and challenges when considering a DevOps vs. a true NoOps approach.

Pros

More automation, less maintenance

By automating everything using code, NoOps aims to eliminate the additional effort required to support your code’s ecosystem. This means that there will be no need for manual intervention, and every component will be more maintainable in the long run because it’ll be deployed as part of the code. But does this affect DevOps jobs?

Uses the full power of the cloud

There are a lot of new technologies that support extreme automation, including Container as a Service (CaaS) or Function as a Service (FaaS) as opposed to just Serverless, so most big cloud service providers can help you kickstart NoOps adoption. This is excellent news because Ops can ramp up cloud resources as much as necessary, leading to higher capacity, performance & availability planning compared to DevOps (where Dev and Ops work together to decide where the app can run).

Rapid Deployment Cycles

NoOps focuses on business outcomes by shifting focus to priority tasks that deliver value to customers and eliminating the dependency on the operations team, further reducing time-to-market.

Cons

You still need Ops!

In theory, not relying on an operations team to take care of your underlying infrastructure can sound like a dream. Practically, you may need them to monitor outcomes or take care of exceptions. Expecting developers to handle these responsibilities exclusively would take their focus away from delivering business outcomes and wouldn’t be advantageous considering NoOps benefits.

It also wouldn’t be in your best interest to rely solely on developers, as their skill sets don’t necessarily include addressing operational issues. Plus, you don’t want to further overwhelm devs with even more tasks.

Security, Compliance, Privacy

You could abide by security best practices and align them with automatic deployments all you want, but that won’t completely eliminate the need for you to take delicate care of security. Attack methods evolve and change each day, therefore, so should your cloud security controls.

For example, you could introduce the wrong rules for your AI or automate flawed processes, inviting errors in your automation or creating flawed scripts for hundreds or thousands of infrastructure components or servers. If you completely remove your Ops team, you may want to consider investing additional funds into a security team to ensure you’re instilling the best security and compliance methods for your environments.

Consider your environment

Considering NoOps uses serverless and PaaS to get resources, this could become a limiting factor for you, especially during a refactor or transformation. Automation is still possible with legacy infrastructures and hybrid deployments, but you can’t entirely eliminate human intervention in these cases. So remember that not all environments can transition to NoOps, therefore, you must carefully evaluate the pros and cons of switching.

So Is NoOps Really the End of DevOps?

TL:DR: NO!

Detail: NoOps is not a Panacea. It is limited to apps that fit into existing #serverless and #PaaS solutions. As someone who builds B2B SaaS applications for a living, I know that most enterprises still run on monolithic legacy apps and even some of the new-gen Unicorns are in the middle of Refactoring/Migration which will require total rewrites or massive updates to work in a PaaS environment, you’d still need someone to take care of operations even if there’s a single legacy system left behind.

In this sense, NoOps is still a way away from handling long-running apps that run specialized processes or production environments with demanding applications. Conversely, operations occur before production, so, with DevOps, operations work happens before code goes to production. Releases include monitoring, testing, bug fixes, security and policy checks on every commit, etc.

You must have everyone on the team (including key stakeholders) involved from the beginning to enable fast feedback and ensure automated controls and tasks are effective and correct. Continuous learning and improvement (a pillar of DevOps teams) shouldn’t only happen when things go wrong; instead, members must work together and collaboratively to problem-solve and improve systems and processes.

The Upside

Thankfully, NoOps fits within some DevOps ways. It’s focused on learning and improvement, uses new tools, ideas, and techniques developed through continuous and open collaboration, and NoOps solutions remove friction to increase the flow of valuable features through the pipeline. This means that NoOps is a successful extension of DevOps.

In other words, DevOps is forever, and NoOps is just the beginning of the innovations that can take place together with DevOps, so to say that NoOps is the end of DevOps would mean that there isn’t anything new to learn or improve.

Destination: NoOps

There’s quite a lot of groundwork involved for true NoOps — you need to choose between serverless or PaaS, and take configuration, component management, and security controls into consideration to get started. Even then, you may still have some loose ends — like legacy systems — that would take more time to transition (or that you can’t transition at all).

One thing is certain, though, DevOps isn’t going anywhere and automation won’t make Ops obsolete. However, as serverless automation evolves, you may have to consider a new approach for development and operations at some point. Thankfully, you have a lot of help, like automation tools and EaaS, to make your transition easier should you choose to switch.

How to measure Engineering Productivity?

By Ramkumar Sundarakalatharan | November 27, 2022 | Comments 0 Comment

The fact that you clicked on this article tells me that you are leading/heading a Team, group or an entire Engineering function and most likely a fast-paced startup. Assume the following,

It was a regular weekday, and your CEO/CTO asked the most intriguing question.

Do we measure Engineering Productivity? How do we fare? What can we do to improve it?

Well, if your boss’s name is not Elon Musk or if you do not work for Twitter, you can still be saved. Go on and read through. I know it is a long read.

What is Engineering Productivity?

As with anything you’re trying to improve, it starts with measuring the right data. So, you can actually track the right metrics. This data will form the basis of your analysis and baseline. I strongly recommend you don’t change anything about your current engineering process before you can collect sex weeks’ worth of data about your processes. If you start working on processes, you could end up with a Survivorship Basis.

You should have sufficient historical data to make comparisons. On top of that, most teams work in sprints of two weeks, so six weeks of data allows you to collect data for at least three different sprints. This will give you the allowances for any spikes and eliminate any unusual stress or slack on the execution.

Next, you should make gradual changes to the engineering process to see what improves or impedes the value delivery. It’s ideal to only implement one change at a time, so you can see the effect of each change, with all other things being equal. (it never is :D)

For example, if your engineering squads suffer from significant technical debt, you may want to build an additional stub related to feature completion. Every time an engineer completes a new feature, they must document the new feature. This could mean describing the feature, how is it built, what are the outcomes, how it interacts with other functions and the reasoning behind the design decisions.

By continuously measuring engineering productivity metrics, you can determine if this change has positively impacted the developers’ productivity.

How Is Engineering Productivity Measured?

There are potentially 100s of metrics you can measure for an Engineering Org. Here are four key metrics that will help you to get started with measuring engineering productivity. And I have consciously excluded the Sprint Velocity.

4 Prime Directives of Engineering Metrics

1. The One Metrics to rule them all metrics – Cycle Time

Software development cycle time measures the amount of time from work started to work delivered. It is a metric “borrowed” from lean manufacturing, and it is one of the most important metrics for software development teams. In plain speak, cycle time measures the amount of time from the first commit to production release.

2. The Oracle of an Engineering Leader – Release Frequency

You should measure how often you deploy new changes to your customers (production). In addition, you can track deployments to various branches/instances, such as feature branches, hotfix branches, or QA branches. This data would show you how long it takes for a feature/fix to move through the different development stages. In addition, the Release Frequency reflects the throughput of your team. It’s a good stand-in replacement for Agile Velocity, so you don’t spook your Engineers and you are not blind as well.

3. The Guardrail – Number of Bugs

You should definitely track the number of bugs that your team has to resolve within 2 sprints of releasing a feature. This metric helps you to understand the quality of your code better. Higher-quality code should display fewer bugs after feature deployment.

While there are derivative and more evolved metrics like Defect Density, Mean Time to Detect (MTtD), Mean Time to Resolve (MTrR) and Code coverage, those onces makes sense after you’ve taken stock of and address the prime metric “ No: of Bugs” first.

If you want a more detailed list, methodology of QA metrics, refer the links given below.

4. What is your “Blocker” – Review to Merge Time (RTMT)

This may look like a zoom-in on “Cycle time” metric we discussed earlier. But, in fact it is very different. In fact, it is an interesting metric suggested by GitLab’s development handbook.

You should measure the time between asking for a pull request (PR) review and merging the PR. Ideally, you want to reduce the time a feature spends in the review state (or pending review state). A high RTMT prevents developers from progressing while they wait for feedback and encourages context-switching between different issues/features.

Arguably, Context-Switching is the highest productivity killer and should be avoided as much as possible.

So, why would you measure all these engineering productivity metrics?

Why Is Measuring Engineering Productivity Important?

When you’re a “fast-growing startup”, it’s important to keep an eye on engineering productivity. It happens that these startups favour growth through feature delivery at the cost of effectively scaling the engineering team and ensuring the team’s efficiency.

I hear your question.
But, why does my CEO/VP/MD not understand?
Answer is simple
Assume you have to manage multiple VP’s expectations and outcomes (Sales, Marketing, Support etc), Company’s OKRs, and investors (or) board, will you have more time to dedicate to Engineering Productivity?

In these cases, technical debt can quickly grow, which will slowly kill your team’s productivity. Technical debt can have many negative consequences:

More bugs for your team to fix
Lower code quality—not only bugs but also worse code design
Harder to debug code
Scalability issues
A decline in overall happiness and job satisfaction

To avoid all of these scenarios, you should measure the engineering team’s efficiency and avoid technical debt buildup. Avoiding these problems before they occur is an excellent Occam’s razor. But addressing them head-on will have a significant impact on your organisation, both materially and culturally.

In addition to preventing your team’s productivity from going down, the engineering productivity approach allows you to experiment with various approaches to try and improve throughput & efficiency.

So, the goal is to improve the engineering process itself. For example, introducing new tools or applying new techniques. Next, you can measure the impact of these changes on your team’s productivity.

In the next part, I will write down on how can measurement improve engineering productivity, Stay Tuned!

References:

Survivorship Bias.
1. https://www.masterclass.com/articles/survivorship-bias
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
Cycle Time
1. https://tulip.co/blog/cycle-vs-lead-vs-takt
Release Frequency
1. https://community.atlassian.com/t5/DevOps-articles/Why-should-we-start-measuring-the-Release-Frequency/ba-p/1786430
Detailed QA Metrics to ponder (in addition to No: of bugs)
1. https://reqtest.com/agile-blog/agile-testing-metrics/
Review to Merge Time
1. https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/development/performance-indicators/#review-to-merge-time-rtmt
Context Switching
1. https://pacohq.com/blog/guide/the-high-price-of-context-switching-for-developers/

Do you really need a Product Manager for a successful Product?

By Ramkumar Sundarakalatharan | August 15, 2022 | Comments 0 Comment

This post is a summary of a series of “Mentoring” and “Advisory” calls I did with some early stage startups, over the past 6 months. Most of the time, one of the founder ideates, one builds/leads the build. But, they want to go fast and think they need a Product Manager. Unfortunately, most of them don’t need a Product Manager. If you are at a similar juncture, read on to find out more..

The title is a controversial question, I know!

The State of Product Management:

Off lately, Product Managers have to wear too many hats, leaving the role vague and blurring the boundaries of their area of responsibility. This ultimately leads to diminishing the value of the product manager’s core functions. Product Management is a strategic, cross-functional, front-line role that brings great value to the product and business.

But, it commonly gets abused by many fast-paced organisations expecting product managers to fill in the gaps in various disciplines. This may be process, pricing, unit-economics, partnerships, product-marketing to name a few. They can definitely do that due to their broad professional background.

Admittedly, product managers do have a broad background, otherwise they would have a hard time to be able to effectively collaborate with the stakeholders, lead the product and make the informed decisions. But this definitely should not end up with the product managers becoming de-facto “deciders” or “doers” originally intended to be done by other roles in other functions.

How do you decide if you need a Product Manager or Not?

Like any problem, there are two approaches, if an intellectual debate is more to your taste, continue reading on. If it is more of a rational “doer” approach, head straight down to it.

Intellectual Approach

Ask yourselves some questions:

If you are a founder or a leader or a decision maker, before hiring a Product Manager, question yourself as to your expectations from the product manager.

Think hard on what you want them to do:

What do you want your new product manager to change/fix in your organization? What is it that you are unable to do?
Do you not already have the in-house expertise that would help you address the current issues?

If you are still unsure about whether or not you need a product manager “in the house”,

I recommend that you go through this checklist and answer Yes/No to each of its questions:

Do you have a vision for your product? Do you believe it is aligned with the market needs?
Are you sure you are building the right product — the one that delivers value to your target audience?
Do you have a direction for your product? A long-term and a short-term roadmap?
Till now, have you been able to execute your roadmap without major distractions?
Are you capable of maintaining the strategic focus across all levels of the organization?
Do you know your competitors and what they have on the game? Proposition, not features.
Do you have an established feedback loop with your clients? (Not the feature request types)
Do you mostly base your decisions on evidence/data?
Do you find it easy to say “No” to various stakeholders from various functions while hearing their “suggestions” and “inputs” and explain them why what they think is not the “most” right thing?

If you answered “No” to more than 4 questions, you probably need a Product Manager, No doubt in that.

But the reality is, that hiring a highly capable Product Manager won’t magically change the DNA of your organisation. I have seen multiple orgs regress into a worser situation than before. Because, the person responsibl has delegated the product decisions to that Product manager with a shiny belt, without enabling/empowering him/her.

The result

Rational Approach

If you’re a CEO, founder, or senior leader considering hiring a PM, check this list and see if you need one. Lets play a guess and eliminate game.

If you can see your organisation is reflected in this article, don’t bother hiring a PM — save some money and hire a cheaper role. You would also spare a PM some misery.

Don’t bother hiring a PM…

If you have a fixed idea of what to build

You already know what you want to build, you just need somebody to build it. You’ve hired some engineers. You need somebody to gather the requirements from you and the team, and maybe manage the back-and-forth of different requirements from many stakeholders. This person then passes the requirements along to the engineers and makes sure they deliver on time.

You need a Project Manager, not a Product Manager.

If your Sales team or clients are dictating what to build

You have a handful of big clients and you’re ready to bend over backwards to deliver what they need, including building custom features. Your Sales team knows best what to build, surely, as they’re the ones talking to the customers all the time. Now it’s just a matter of writing the stories and prioritising them.

You need a Delivery Manager, not a Product Manager

If they won’t have access to your customers

You have some very-important-people as customers and their time is precious. You don’t want the new person you just hired to talk to them directly — may be they will say something untoward?

I don’t know what you need, but you certainly don’t need a Product Manager.

If you’re not ready to delegate authority

You know that product managers should be given a problem to solve, not a feature to build. Heck, you were probably a Product person yourself, who has now set up your own startup. You have the vision and the strategy and you know exactly how to get there…

What’s left for the Product Managers to do, then? Maybe hire an Engineering Manager or a Tech Lead?

If you see technology as a support function

An easy way to assess this: How much of your company budget is dedicated for product/technology/innovation? If you’re not willing to invest significant resources to staff the product/technology team properly, they’ll be left firefighting all year long.

Don’t hire a Product Manager — yet. Assess how you see technology plays a role in your company’s vision. Set aside a proper budget, hire a strong CTO or CPO, and let them build their team. Only do that if you’re willing to listen to them though — or don’t bother doing it at all.

In Sum and summary, Hire a Product Manager only if you believe you can delegate authority, and can come to a rational decision based on data. If not, hire a Project Manager, Engineering Manager or any of the other roles.

A Tech Lead writing code is a disservice to the company.

By Ramkumar Sundarakalatharan | August 7, 2022 | Comments 0 Comment

You have been coding your whole life or at least most of your professional life. Recently, you have been promoted/designated or as a Lead Engineer or a Tech Lead. Does anything change for you?

Should you stop coding?

People generally say, hell no!

And why should you now?

You like it;
You enjoy it and probably
really good at it too.

But then you start leading a team, which means that everything should change or at the minimum, something should change Or shouldn’t?

It’s an eternal question for every engineering manager. I have tried to answer it all along my career and

The hardest thing is to understand that you are not “just a” developer anymore.

I know, the above statement is controversial with multiple of my readers.

Most of you are now in a role with,

different responsibilities,
different daily schedules, and
tasks that involve different mental processes.

And you are most likely trying to combine two things at this time.

You’re trying to be a good developer (that you used to be).
You’re also trying to act as a “Coordinator” “Communicator” and also “Manage” things

I know, your designation/title says Tech “Lead” or “Lead” Engineer and not Engineering Manager. But, in most organisations, a TL is looked upon as an EM in waiting (For more insight on career tracks for a TL – Check out my previous article on Engineering Leadership on Startups )

And working two jobs may often lead to early burning out and, frankly, not being any good in either of them.

I will take two very probable examples here.

Case 1: You are a Lead and you want to own a particular piece of code rewrite, which is giving a lot of concurrency nightmares to both the product support and your on-call teams. Most design/debug and development tasks require high concentration and focus, which contradicts the very nature of the team leader’s work. Multiple planned meetings, calls, messages — a lead needs to be on alert. It’s tough to consider all the edge cases when your slack/hangout/teams is buzzing all the time.

Another essential element is most of these buzzing & pinging can be controlled if your team is good at Asynchronous Communication. (I will write more about it in a future article)

Case 2: You are a Lead, driving a new subscription module for your latest product. There are simply so many stakeholders, your PM, Payments team, external partner/vendor, Infra team etc. It will be hard to be prepared to answer your teammates’ or vendors or customers’ questions if all you can think about is the efficiency of that function you just wrote.

Time Share:

Another thing is that spending a lot of time on development gives you little time to do your actual job as a lead/manager. And your job is managing other people. Though you will probably make time for your primary duties — assigning tasks, making estimations, validating designs, communicating with the stakeholder — you will miss out on all the other “noncrucial” parts of your job.

You can get so invested in a feature that you will miss some critical signs of your employees becoming demotivated to do their work, tired, or less happy. And, as you are busy, you become less innovative. Who will come up with a new architecture for the 3-year-old service? Most certainly not you, since you are too deep in the code.

Anti-Growth

Minefields you’d inadvertently trigger are either the Martyr Effect or the Hero Syndrome (Think Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark). On the first & second one, You’d always take the toughest part of the code or the most interesting part of the code, respectively. Either way, you’d be creating a team who’d be ill-prepared to take up challenges on their own or ill-equipped.

But what if I do not want to give up coding?

It may so happen that plain management isn’t your path. So, from here on, you may not enjoy what the role has to offer. Being a Team Lead/EM is all about people; being a Principal Engineer (or staff engineer or architect) is about code. If programming is critical for you and brings you more joy, you may be more suited for a Technical Leader role. So choose wisely.

But as a Team Lead, you are still most welcome to join code reviews and help your teammates with challenging coding problems if you want to.

Consult. Guide. Assist. Communicate
This is going to be your Motto.

And of course, You should definitely continue to code in other “Non-paying” parts of your job. Start automating your units, create boiler plates, write smaller, niche, critical elements of your system.

How to select SSO Standard for your SaaS Application.

By Ramkumar Sundarakalatharan | May 1, 2022 | Comments 0 Comment

For anyone developing any application on the cloud, the major concern is always how is security implemented. Typically, you start with an authentication system viz. Usernames & Passwords. As your application grows in size of use cases and adoption, you’ll soon find a necessity to improve your security posture, these could range from MFA, Federated Identity management and finally authorisation. You now have customers who ask if you can support their AD authorisation or OneLogin or Okta etc.

This is when you’ll think about implementing a Single-Sign-On. But, the choice of how to keep data and identities secure begins much earlier for software architects and developers: selecting the standard that should be used to keep federated identities safe. This will involve two things, architecting an authorisation system – could be a separate service or bound with your application – this choice is critical to how you can grow as an organisation.

Architecture Choice:

If you choose to integrate it with your main product and 2 months later your board directs you to develop a new offering, you’ll end up doing it all over again. On the contrary, if you’re not going to pivot to any new business line, the additional time you will incur in building an external “Accounts service” will be a tax on the GTM.

Standards Choice:

IT Administrators and Security Architects must first choose the protocol or framework to use to maintain federated identity, or the mechanism of connecting a person’s electronic identity and attributes, safe while designing a plan to keep data and identities secure.

A Single Sign-On (SSO) account has the advantage of allowing employees to log in once to an application or network and not have to log in to several apps or networks during the workday. While this is beneficial to employees in terms of increasing productivity by eliminating the need to remember several passwords, it is also beneficial to IT and Security functions. The Identity and Access Management (IAM) platform responsible for maintaining employees’ credentials can assist make it more manageable by registering fewer passwords in the system.

It is, however, not an easy choice. Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), OpenID, and open authorization are the leading candidates in the federation process (OAuth). Let’s take a closer look at these technologies and determine when SAML, OAuth, and OpenID should be used.

What is Single Sign-On (SSO)?

SSO (Single Sign-On) is an authentication method that allows apps to validate users by using other trustworthy apps. Single sign-on allows a user to use a single ID and password to log into several applications.

SSO is an important part of an Identity and Access Management (IAM) platform for managing access. User identity verification is crucial for establishing what permissions a user will have.

SSO Standards

SAML

SAML is a protocol that allows an Identity Provider (IdP) to send a user’s credentials to a service provider for authentication and authorization. SAML allows for Single Sign-On (SSO) and streamlines password management. It is beneficial to businesses because employees are using an increasing number of applications to complete their tasks.

Keeping track of passwords for hundreds of programs used by hundreds, if not thousands, of employees can be difficult. SAML comes to the rescue by providing a single sign-on standard for businesses.

OAuth

OAuth 2.0 is a secure authorization standard. It allows secure delegated access by providing third-party services with access tokens rather than exposing user credentials. It does not, however, authenticate; it just authorizes.

You’ve probably used OAuth 2.0 if you’ve ever signed up for a new app and consented to allow it automatically source fresh contacts from Facebook or your phone contacts. This standard ensures that delegated access is secure. This means that a program can operate on behalf of a user and access resources from a server without the user needing to provide their credentials. This is accomplished by allowing the Identity Provider (IdP) to issue tokens to third-party apps with the user’s permission.

OpenID

The OpenID Connect (OIDC) standard is used for authentication. OIDC is used by identity providers (those who generate and administer identities) so that users can log in with their IdP first and then access applications without having to re-enter their credentials.

This authentication option is recognizable if you’ve used your Google account to sign in to apps like YouTube or Facebook to log into an online shopping cart. Organizations use OpenID Connect to authenticate users, and it is an open standard. This is used by IdPs so that users can sign in to the IdP and then use their sign-in information to access other websites and apps without having to log in or disclose their sign-in information.

SAML VS OAuth VS OpenID

OAuth 2.0 is a framework for regulating authorization to a protected resource, such as a program or a set of files, whereas OpenID Connect and SAML are both federated authentication industry standards. As a result, OAuth 2.0 is used in quite different situations than the other two protocols, and it can be used in conjunction with either OpenID Connect or SAML.

OpenID Connect is based on the OAuth 2.0 protocol and uses an ID token, which is a JSON Web Token (JWT) that standardizes areas where OAuth 2.0 provides for flexibility, such as scopes and endpoint discovery. It depends on user authentication and is often used to make user logins easier on consumer websites and mobile apps.

Unlike JWT, SAML does not rely on OAuth and instead relies on a message exchange to authenticate in the XML SAML format. It’s more commonly used in enterprise settings to allow users to log in to several applications with a single password.

Final Thoughts

As technology advances and systems become more interconnected, federated identification becomes increasingly useful since it is more convenient for users. It saves them time by reducing the number of accounts and passwords they have to remember, but it raises some security concerns.

SAML has one feature that OAuth2 lacks: the SAML token contains the user identity information (because of signing). With OAuth2, you don’t get that out of the box, and instead, the Resource Server needs to make an additional round trip to validate the token with the Authorization Server.

On the other hand, with OAuth2 you can invalidate an access token on the Authorization Server, and disable it from further access to the Resource Server.

SAML provides a simpler and more standardized solution which covers all of our current and projected needs at ITILITE and avoids the use of workarounds for interoperability with native applications.

Business Value Delivery by Engineering Teams in StartUps – Part 2

By Ramkumar Sundarakalatharan | October 24, 2021 | Comments 0 Comment

In this multi-part post, I will try to articulate my view on the importance of business value and its delivery by engineering teams. This is the second part, where I will share my perspective on the “How of it”.

Part 2: The How of it – Define, Visualise, Prioritise, Develop, Deliver & Measure.

The PMI Model of Delivering Business Value.

1). Define Systems Development Strategy

The first thing a “Tech” Founder need to do is define the Systems Development Strategy. At a very high level, the systems development strategy should detail the state of the current/planned systems, the high-level business strategy for the next 2-5 years and maps out a plan to get there. An engineering leader will drive the creation and implementation of the development strategy to ensure the business can meet their current and future needs. Working closely with architects and technical leads, the engineering leader can formulate a solid development strategy.

The development strategy should detail the core architecture direction and technologies for the systems, including high-level plans for delivery. The development strategy is the crux of all efforts to deliver business value. Without a firm foundation of proper system architecture and technology, the business will have a difficult time delivering the value they need to survive.

If you’re an Engineering Leader who joined the startup after the MVP is created, it is your responsibility to understand the business strategy and formulate the Development Strategy as early as possible.

If your startup doesn’t have a solid development strategy or similar document, the following is a great place to start:

Gather business needs: Gather high-level business needs/strategy to cater for the now and future (2-5 years) horizon. Not a deep dive, but deep enough to judge existing systems and measure other options. (Question like How many new new users will be added month-on-month, what is the order of magnitude of transactions we plan to rake, is it thousands or millions or tens of millions – Each will point you in a different direction on the system design)
Review of existing systems: Analysis of current systems around fit for purpose and whether it can be maintained and extended to meet the future needs uncovered in the above. (The MVP may seem to work fine and it will be tempting to build “On-Top” of it with a plethora of “Features”, resist the urge and pressure, if applicable)
Technologies / Architecture: Based on the review of the first two bullet points, you may recommend a strategic direction. The decision here could range from rebuilding the entire system with a new solution, to replacing components of the system with off the shelf/Open-source components. Alternatively, you may find the existing system is a strong foundation which needs modernising or scaling. In which case, the development strategy document would detail a range of architectural and technologies for future development.

The above is a good starting point and will allow the business to get started on implementing the development strategy. You may do it even before starting with the Startup and make it a Pre-Joining exercise with the Founders and Senior folks. At the end of this exercise, you will have performed an extensive analysis of the current systems and have a strategic direction for the systems.

2). Help the Business Define Requirements

It is essential to understand what needs to be delivered before you can go ahead and deliver the next Amazon or Airbnb. It has been my experience that on occasion, the business will need some “External Inputs” to finalise what is required.

When the business has a lot of ideas for improvements, they can sometimes get muddled together and lost. To counter this, we at ITILITE do a “Quarter Theme“. Before ITILITE I worked with Zarget, where we had a similar “Themed Quarterly Roadmaps” as well. This “Theming” helps in prioritising the focus areas. More on that in the next section

After which, we can visualise the entire scope of these ideas using User Story Maps. User story maps are visual representations of functionality requirements where all the requirements documented using a system of cards. It becomes a more straightforward (not easy) task to slice and dice these requirements using a story map to cull anything that is not critical to the business.

For the remaining requirements, we need to gather a little more information to progress to the next step, for each requirement we need to capture:

Description: High-level description of the change. Not a HLD/LLD but enough to provide a high-level order of magnitude estimate.
Business benefits: Here we are looking to understand what benefits we can expect from the business change.
High-Level estimate: Order of magnitude level estimate, lots of refinement to still take place, however, gives us a good idea around sizing.
Business SME and Sponsor: Details of people we can go to get more information.

The detail we capture for each of these changes is small, the reason being these items are a wish list only and not confirmed, so we do not want to waste more time on these then we need (lean thinking). While it is the domain of product managers and business analysts to flesh out business requirements and benefit statements, the engineering leader also plays an essential part in this process. Engineering leaders can use their experience to provide the high-level estimates for development, or indeed recommend ways to implement the requirement without the need to write additional code.

Another area where engineering leaders should influence is ensuring and non-functional (technical strategy items or technical debt) is included for development prioritisation. These technical plumbing is not attractive to the business but could be critical for the business to achieve their long term goals. Engineering leaders are the people that need to fight to ensure they are on the table.

Also, while you analyse requirements, where possible, try to group requirements where they affect the same code or system module. Grouping requirements will assist us in prioritisation, sequencing and hence the Go-To-Market, which is a key parameter for the business. The last thing we need to do is storing these requirements in our product backlog, to be reviewed and prioritised by the business in our next step.

3) Visualise the work and prioritise

In our third step, we are getting closer to the business deciding on their valuable items. Taking our list of requirements from our product backlog, we now present these to the business to discuss and rank in order of importance.

As discussed above, there will always be x+n “Projects” in the asks. Where “x” is the number of features you can effectively deliver in the timeline. And all “Projects” will look like they are P0 to solve.

If Everything Is a Priority, Then Nothing Is!

Well, the quote wasn’t from Morpheus, I just liked that Meme (it is debated to be in between Yuri Van Der Sluis and Garr Reynolds)

Having an extensive list of items to visualise enables the business to understand that we cannot have everything, and need to select the items that will make the most significant difference to their business (i.e., highest business value).

This is again, not because of intent, but because of trying to do “Too-Many” things and “Too-Soon”. Independently, all of the asks may sound truly important. Every Leader/Function within your Start-Up will come with several competing “Projects”. The Finance Team may want that flashy invoicing module or an ERP integration with your suppliers/customers, the Customer Success would want that Advanced Analytics platform integrated, The Support Teams may want that long-standing “Quirks” on the product ironed out. Left to Engineering, this is a sure recipe for disaster. This is where a Strong Product Leadership helps!

A business analyst or product manager typically runs these planning and prioritisation meetings. However, the engineering leader also has a place at the table to provide insight and assistance to the businesses decision-making process. Who from the business should attend these meetings? It is essential to gather a broad cross-section of business stakeholders for every Department or Function that uses the Product in question. We don’t want one department having too much influence that may not be of benefit to the business.

The meeting could have the following Agenda:

Review items: The group will discuss each item in the (curated) product backlog in an open and honest discussion.
Accept or reject: The item will be approved for development or rejected. Rejected items will have their requestor notified, to ensure they are in the loop.
Ranking: Approved items get added to the backlog in priority order.

At ITILITE, We have the backlog/Thematic items in a Google Sheet, which is distributed at least a week before the meeting to ensure the Leaders have enough time to review, ask any questions before the meeting to ensure a smooth meeting. During the meeting, we view the sheet, top to bottom taking notes where required.

At the end of this meeting, we have something special. We have a prioritised list of business value and Key Outcomes.

The prioritisation meeting can be held quarterly or monthly, depending on the speed of change in your Start Up. We do it on a quarterly cycle to meet with the Leadership, so as not to overload these folks from actually getting their work done.

If the business has urgent changes which require attention, an emergency prioritisation session can be called-in where a meeting can occur to review and approve changes to the delivery schedule. Alignment should happen outside on one-on-ones and this meeting is a platform for other leaders to either ascent or dissent on the re-prioritisation.

4) Schedule and communicate delivery

In the fourth step, we now have a list that ranks all the business requirements in priority order. We now have confidence that the business indeed wants these work items completed and the order they prefer. The engineering team can now spend time working out how to deliver these items. Remembering from step two, we gathered very high-level requirements, (so not to waste time before they were endorsed), we now need to finish fleshing these items out enough to commence delivery.

There are a few mechanisms we can use to gather the information we need to get going, and the main one I like is the feature or project kickoff & inceptions. The kickoff is a process where we get the delivery team together to discuss the work that needs to be delivered. Inceptions can run anywhere up to a few weeks for big projects; it depends on how much time you allow here. During our inception, the delivery team all get on the same page with the requirements in question and can ask questions of each other or the sponsor to get all the information they need.

Technical delivery decisions can also be made, including creating simple prototypes to test out delivery options. Once the inception is complete, the delivery team have all their information, more confident delivery estimates are possible, sprint planning can take place, and the overall delivery schedule is known.

From here, the final step is the communication of the delivery schedule to all relevant stakeholders. Ensuring people can ask questions or point out any problems they see with this schedule.

5) Deliver value often get feedback

The final step here is to get the job done. The best way to deliver software is in small chunks completed during our sprints (typically two-week blocks). Sprints are the quickest way to deliver business value, allowing the business to gradually use this value much quicker than waiting for a monolithic release to occur.

At the end of each sprint, the team should be running product demo events. A product showcase allows the product and engineering teams to show off their excellent work to the business, who have an opportunity to provide their feedback on the product. This can start even before the first “releasable” product is out. It can start with mockups, design and prototypes. Then it will progress to V0, V1 and so forth. This feedback loop is another mechanism to ensure we are hitting the mark in terms of the delivery of business value.

Conclusion

I hope i was able to do justice to the process in this article. The key to delivering business value is having close relationships with the stakeholders, ensuring that they are involved in each step of the process. The business stakeholders are the only folks that can define business value. However, it is the role of engineering leaders to ensure proper technical oversight takes place to ensure the timely delivery of business value.

Business Value delivery by Engineering Teams in StartUps – Part 1

By Ramkumar Sundarakalatharan | October 17, 2021 | Comments 2 comments

In this multi-part post, I will try to articulate my view on the importance of business value and its delivery by engineering teams. While most of this is written from the view of a StartUp, some elements of an established organisation are also used.

Part 1: Defining Business Value & Role of Leadership in it.

Business value is a concept that can mean multiple things to multiple people and the tricky part is all of them could potentially be valid. A product manager may value a long list of features that his/her customers have demanded for months. Another Product Manager working with internal teams to improve efficiency (revenue) will value the enhancements the accounting or support team was after. While the support manager may value a more stable product to keep the customers, s/he deals with happy.

Business value & impacts are a difficult thing to define and deliver, while it is even more difficult to measure.A collaborative effort is required to define and deliver business value, with consideration needed to ensure all voices are heard.

While most of what I will be covering in this article is typically the purview of product management, I have learned that engineering leaders have a critical role to play in this space. (Will write more on that in the next part.)

Engineering leaders bring product development experience and technical expertise to the table to provide a crucial element to the delivery of business value which I will try and explain in this article.

What is Business Value?

I would define “Business value” as any improvements to systems, processes or people that augment the products or the ability to deliver products or services to the customers, thereby increasing the revenue or experience or both. No two companies will have the same definition of business value. Forget two different companies, a company in its 5th year will have a very different perception of value to its first year. This is due to their products and customers being different and requiring different elements to add value. One company may find value in the ability to build out its new product offering quickly. While another may find value in responding to customer support requests in a timely manner.

Due to the rapid changes around us, the things that businesses value changes often. Companies often face new challenges that require a quick response.

“Be agile, be nimble” is the key phrase.

These challenges can come in the form of new product features released by competitors, or a specific feature request by a key customer, or changes in the market that render the current product/feature obsolete. Business needs or desires, therefore change just as quickly as any of these external changes.

You have probably worked for a company that comes to the engineering team with new requirements, seemingly daily?

It is not because they cannot make up their mind; It is in response to the changing business needs. This changing goalpost is one of the main reasons that Agile development practices have taken precedence from more traditional waterfall methodologies for software development.

Velocity is everything, a report by McKinsey on how Developer Velocity fuels Business Performance will give more insights on this. A snapshot from the report is below.

Why is business value important?

Reacting to change and delivering business value with haste is a crucial area of importance for modern businesses. All companies exist for a purpose. The majority of companies exist to return a profit for their owners (individuals or shareholders), while some companies exist to provide a social service. The critical thing to note is that they all exist to fulfil a specific purpose which guides their definition of business value.

No matter the company large or small, if they stop innovating, and their products or services stop being relevant to society at large and market in particular, that company will whiter and eventually die.

Kodak is a prime example of this occurring in recent history. In today’s world, IT, whether it be hardware or software, is the largest driver of business value. It is therefore critical that the software engineering teams keep delivering the things that the business need to fuel their innovation.

We, as engineers, are not employed to just build that shiney app in the latest technologies, but to deliver our contribution in support of the business purpose (If not drive it!)

The importance of Engineering Leadership in Delivering Business Value

An engineering leader is, of course, a People Leader, and s/he is also responsible for the Execution, both technology and delivery of the engineering team. However there is a third dimension which often goes unrecognised, is that great engineering executives must also be great Business Leaders; they help drive alignment with other leadership/executives and shape the strategy and direction of the business itself.

It is this underutilised/forgotten element which I will try to detail here.

A People Leader & an Execution Champion:

Engineering leadership is often naively thought of as being simply a great Architect or Engineer or a Manager. But most of you already know it’s more than that. Team leadership will involve some combination of team building, culture, leadership development, and performance management.

For detailed coverage on Engineering Leadership – Please checkout my Previous Post

Most of this responsibilities will be bang in the middle of the comfort-zone of a rising Engineering Leader. But one of the hardest things for most engineering leaders as we scale is, to continue having an accurate forecast of when products and features will be delivered – what the business always asks for.

That is partially because this bleeds into the third, and the least recognised dimension of engineering leadership.

The Missing Sauce: A Business Strategist

Engineering leadership isn’t just about delivering products faster, or making engineers more productive. It’s about guiding the team in the same direction as the business, about continuously improving, and it’s about being the voice of engineering as a part of the decision-making process of the executive team. Of course, these are all dependent on our ability to understand the work our engineering teams are doing and how it aligns to business goals.

The third dimension – Business Alignment – is often overlooked or made difficult by other executives, but is absolutely necessary for the management of a successful engineering org. This is the strategic practice of engineering management, and all operational decisions depend on it. Business alignment means ensuring your organization is focused on the right projects that align with the business’s goals.

The Product org can detail/design and Engineering org can build as many features as they can agree on, but what/how does it matter, if they do not align with the business objectives or goals? Business alignment involves the right allocation of resources that supports business objectives, and helping to drive those business decisions of which projects are strategically important. (at itilite, this is always the First Principle)

How do we deliver business value?

So how do we actually deliver business value? Business value isn’t created by a soloist delivering a virtuoso performance, but a collaboration of the business, product, engineering and customer success teams working together to realise a shared vision.

Below are the five ways this can take place; together, these provide a roadmap for delivering business value;

Define systems development strategy
Help business define requirements
Visualise the work and prioritise
Schedule and communicate delivery
Deliver value often and get feedback

I will try to articulate through each of these one at a time and dig into a little more detail in Part 2 of this article.

Engineering Leadership in Start-Ups: Engineering Manager, Director, VP of Engineering.

By Ramkumar Sundarakalatharan | January 30, 2021 | Comments 1 comment

This post is partly the result of my discussions with our People practice leader and talent acquisition executive. ITILITE is at a phase of growth, where are looking for more engineering & product management bandwidth. And I had to think hard to write the various Job-Descriptions. So, I have tried to generalise it using my experiences from the last 2-3 stints. In case you’re interested to explore an Engineering Management role with ITILITE, please get in touch with me or write to careers{at}itilite.com

Engineering Leadership

As apps are becoming increasingly omnipresent and in most cases, there is a startup behind them. Engineers make up to 70% of a tech startup’s workforce, there is an increasing need for managers who look after those developers. As a result, there is a rise in the number of engineering managers in recent years. Engineering managers are responsible for delivery teams that develop these “Apps”. The following is a very generalised version of what you could do in these roles and a possible career progression.

Engineer to Tech Lead/Lead Developer

The first step in your journey from an Individual Contributor(IC) to a management role. This could be a mix of people management, delivery management, process management etc, depending on the context of your organisation. In most organisations, it is a “technical mentorship” role with some aspects of people management, quality and delivery ownership.

Most Tech Leads are natural technical leaders. They are great engineers on their own, they were well respected by the engineers around them, they worked reasonably well with the team, they understood how the product/module was designed, built and shipped, they had a decent sense for making the right kinds of product tradeoffs and they were willing to do just enough project management and people development to keep the team/project humming along.

In this role,

Most TLs would retain some independent deliverables in addition to anchoring and owning the deliveries of their team.
Most of the team still works on the same module/feature or sub-system
They do code & design reviews, suggest changes and have the final say for their modules.
Together with the Product Managers, they “own” the feature/module.

We at itilite, call them Engineering Owners, much like Product Owners

Tech Lead to Engineering Managers

The next step in the Engineering Manager. In this role, you will be “Managing” a collection of inter-related modules/projects. In this role, the focus on timely delivery, people management and quality are higher than technical design & architecture. But, you are very much an Engineer and may be required to occasionally write quick hacks, frameworks for your developers to build atop.

The main difference is you will be responsible for the delivery of multiple projects in a related area. You will be expected to optimise the resources (Devs, Testers, etc.) available with you to maximise the outputs of your group, across multiple projects/modules

In this role, you’d be

Expected to actively engage with the Product Management teams to define what needs to be built
Defining how you will measure the outcomes of what your team is building and quantify the outcomes with metrics
Ensuring quality, getting stakeholder alignment and signoffs
Macromanage the overall deliverables of your group

The Pivot – Tech, Product, Solution Architect

The next step in your career gives you two options. One with people management, P&L accountability and other a purely technical role. If you’re planning for a pureplay technical role, some organisations have Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer etc. In essence, they are mostly a combination of Tech Lead+Architect type roles. Depending on your seniority/tenure and organisational context, you may be reporting to an Engineering/Delivery Manager, Director/VP or the CTO. In this rolw,

You will work closely with Engineering Managers, Quality Assurance leads/managers and Product Owners to design the system architecture, define the performance baselines
You will work with Tech Leads and Sr.Devs to drive the performance, redundancy, scalability among other stuff.
You will be called into discussions/decide when the team can’t reach consensus on engineering choices

Engineering Manager to Director of Engineering

A Director of Engineering role is completely different. You now have multiple leads+managers, likely multiple projects within a general focus area of the organisation. This will mean there will be way more individual deliverables and project milestones than you can track in detail on a regular basis. Now you have to manage both people and projects “from the outside” rather than “from the inside”. You’ll likely start appreciating the metrics and dashboards, as they will help you in tracking those multiple projects and deadlines, schedules, overruns etc.

You have to make sure that your managers and leads are managing their resources appropriately and support them in their effort rather than managing individual contributors and projects directly.

Lots of great technical leaders have difficulty making this transition.

While being an engineering lead/manager is certainly managing, it’s type of managing from “within the project” is much easier than “managing from outside the project” and as a director, you almost always have to manage multiple people and projects “from the outside”.

Also, as a director, you will be responsible for a number of aspects of the culture, such us

What kind of people are you hiring, setting responsibilities and workload expectations,
What is the team(s) doing for fun, how do they interact with other functions
What kinds of performance is rewarded/encouraged vs punished/discouraged.

Now, moving to some serious responsibilities, you may be the first major line of responsibility for what to do when things does not work,

an employee not working out,
a project falling behind,
a project not meeting it’s objectives,
hiring not happening in time, etc…

While most of these things are the direct responsibility of the engineering manager, the engineering manager is usually not left to face these issues alone, they work on it with the director and the director is expected to guide the process to the right decision/outcome.

I’ve seen people who were great technical leaders and good engineering managers who did not enjoy being a director at all (or weren’t as good at it) because it was a whole different type of managing bordering the administration.

Director to Vice-President

The VP of Engineering is the executive responsible for all of engineering. Development, Quality, DevOps and partly to Security and Product Management as well. While both the engineering manager and director of engineering have managers who themselves have likely been engineering managers and directors before, the VP may work for the CEO (in an early stage Startup or a smaller company) who has never been a VP of Engineering before.

A large company may have multiple levels of VPs, but in most cases, you work for someone who hasn’t been a VP of Engineering or doesn’t actually know how to do your job. This means, there simply is no first-hand experience from your Manager, that you can rely on to solve your problem. The first time you step into that role and realize that, it’s a sobering thought. You’re a pretty much on your own to figure things out. Not only are you completely responsible for everything that happens in the engineering organization, but when things aren’t going right, there’s pretty much no help from anywhere else. You and your team have to figure it out by yourselves. Many successful VPs eventually come to like this autonomy, but it can be a big adjustment when moving from director to VP.

At the director level, you can always go to your VP for help and consulting on difficult issues and they can and should help you a lot. At the VP level, you may consult with the executive team or the CEO on some big decisions, but you’re more likely talking to them about larger tradeoffs that affect other parts of the company, not how you solve issues within your team.

As a VP, you are primarily responsible for setting up processes and procedures for your organization to make it productive:

Team/Project tools such as bug system, project tracking, source code management, versioning, build system, etc.
Defining/improving processes to track, monitor and report on projects.
Defining processes to deal with projects that run into trouble.
Hiring: How you hire? What kind of people do you hire? how do you maintain the quality of new hire?
Firing: When someone isn’t working out, how do you fix it: reassignment, training, performance plan, transfer, firing?
Training: How does your team get the training they might need, it could be hard-skills, soft-skills or managerial
Rewards: How do you reward your top individual contributors and for your top managers?

You may be part of the Leadership “Council” or participate regularly in business discussions that may or may not concern your department directly. In a startup, you are often “the” technical representative on exec staff. You help craft the strategy of the business. You are relied upon for technical direction of the company (sometimes with the help of a CTO).

As a VP, you are expected to understand many important aspects of other departments, what is important to other departments and how your department serves or interacts with or depends upon other departments. Two classic example might be,

Sales depending upon certain product features/capabilities being delivered in a given timeframe to be able to convert a prospect.
Customer success depending upon certain product fixes being delivered in a given timeframe.

As a VP, you will participate in the setting of these timeframes and balancing these against all the other things your department is being tasked to do.

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As you can see, Engineering Management/Leadership is a very interesting career option. We have multiple opening across Product and Engineering functions at ITILITE. Please see if any of these roles interest you.