James Sandford - The Dynamic Product: Create tech products that delight your customers

Copyright 2020 James Sandford

All rights reserved
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-8380938-0-8
Cover design by: ebooklaunch.com

For Sarah and Charlotte, with total admiration and deep gratitude for your inspiration, support and love.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

Foreword

As with any writing about career experience and lessons learned along the way, this book is a personal account. The thoughts and guidance stem from my direct experience rather than any academic research undertaken. Whilst I have business analysis and project management certifications, this writing isnt really about a curriculum or a definitive syllabus, its about summarising the conclusions I have arrived at, from their practical application on projects and the patterns of behaviour that I have witnessed and continue to witness in good practice. As with any experiential account, the mistakes I have made were most certainly as instructive as the successes, and probably more so

This book is my collection of thoughts and ideas on best practice in the area of tech development teams, both working on projects more generally and in the development of products. My experiences are specific to the roles I have carried out, and as such they may or may not have any relevance to you reading this. The roles and projects I have worked on have been in medium to large-sized organisations, whilst also partnering with smaller software vendors and third-parties.

It is my considered hope that this writing will resonate with those for whom it was intended. I hope the ideas will get you thinking about how you are organising your projects and resources.

To all, I wish the best and every courage in your craft!

Experience

This book is based on my ten years working in a variety of diverse roles across technology teams and business change consulting, all within City of London Investment Banks. Over this period, I worked inside five different firms on multiple projects, each of those with a very distinct ethos and culture. I have worked in projects and on products of all sizes and budgets; from those that were cobbled together with barely any budget to speak of, all the way through to projects spanning multiple years with budgets running into the tens of millions of dollars. My time was spent working inside very different types of institutions: globally-recognised Investment banks, niche wealth management firms and in boutique financial advisory houses. I was a member of Technology teams, while also making several forays into banking operations. In recent years, I have been involved in leading the teams and helping to define the products that we would build.

Some of the products and projects were highly enjoyable and constructive experiences for me personally, with top-quality products placed lovingly into the hands of waiting customers, on time and slightly under budget. Others quickly became an unrelenting slog, nagging doubts haunting the team as to whether anyone was ever going to actually even use the product we were working so hard to get over the line. I have worked on wonderfully successful products and also been employed in massive-scale dismal failures with eye-wateringly large budgets. Although it is a truism, is it worth stating that the successes were only so recognisable and well-cherished due to the acute contrast with the many hours toiling away on less successful undertakings. Many long days spent trying to reconcile rather grandiose managerial aims with the very limited resources at our disposal. I remember too those times spent, trying to help a segment of a very injured and ill-suited project, hobble to the finish line and wishing to put it out of its misery, so we could all just get out of the cold and go home.

The vast majority of my experience has been designing, configuring and delivering tech products and tools for internal business teams. These projects have delivered both small and extremely large-scale solutions to internal stakeholders in all parts of the Investment Banking business. These internal customers hailed from; M&A, Private Equity, Legal, Collateral Management, Compliance, Operational Risk, Not-for-Profit, Fintech, Financial Advisory and Private Banking. I have a worked on several products that were for the exclusive use of external customers and Fintech partner agencies in a Business-to-Business context.

In addition to working on new products, I have integrated many software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor applications in an enterprise context. The lessons that accompanied these projects have added valuable insights and experience, and have greatly influenced the following pages.

The insights and observations are mine and mine alone, collected across each of the roles I worked in, along with all of the mistakes and lessons learned along the way! I dont regret any of the time spent on any of the projects; in fact, everything I ever worked on was instructive, however pleasant or otherwise the experience at the time.

A common understanding

Lets start by getting a shared understanding of the terms I am going to use frequently in the book, so that you can identify to what I am referring, when I use the phrases below. Most of my usages should be pretty standard, but here goes:

Software product Any custom tool, app or set of configurations in an existing software platform that together make up a set of functionality that is of business value to the customer. This might be a standalone software application; however, this may also refer to a component that bolts into an existing software platform.

Requirement I refer here to a characterisation of the business need from the customer or a description of functionality for the tool or app that has been requested.

Project A collection of resources organised around achieving a desired goal.

Product The finished app, tool or customised set of configurations that represent the currently released version of the tech.

Application, App or Tool The software application. I use these terms synonymously with the term; product.

Team Software can be successfully created by individuals; however, I refer here to organising ourselves into groups with the common aim of working together to produce a tech product.

Manager The line manager or senior manager responsible for the software that is produced.

Sponsor The manager ultimately responsible for your output. Often the manager that decides on allocation of budgets.

Developer A software team member skilled in configuring and writing software that is used to make a product.

Configurer A term that I use to represent expertise in a software platform, such that business software functionality can be created without the need to write custom code, or only a small amount of custom code.

Customer I refer here to Internal Business (and Support) teams that commission the development of software products, also to external Customers in several specific cases.

Product Owner A newish job title which is a hybrid of: Project Manager / Business Analyst / Change Manager.

Phase I The first development phase, where the first set of agreed functionality is delivered in a usable format to the customer.

Phase II The subsequent phase, following Phase I. Where features are built that did not get included in the Phase I development. At the end of Phase II, enhanced functionality is again delivered to the customer team.

Business Logic Software functionality that attempts to mimic and automate the kinds of logical processes that are carried out by team members in the normal course of their jobs.