How often do we see the brazen and innovative actions of startups usurp existing market leaders in a space? OFTEN….
How often …. well, the rotation on businesses on the stock exchange is something around ~70% over the last hundred years — that is a lot of de-thrown ing…
Look at it another way, by tech — the shift in technology firm dominance when viewed from 1995 to 2020, it is striking.
The anchor points in each of these stories is a culture tied to old behaviors and thus the business missing trends it could very capably have built upon.
Product Cloud Strategy
For the leading businesses it includes a rigorous use of the entire technology stack. For product launches the fundamentals always exist:
- risk management
- threat assessment
- resolving of risks and vulnerabilities
- enhancement of features
- regulatory and operational features — such as OTA updates and FIPS
- product launch testing
- then sustainment
Of course — cybersecurity is woven into all of the MVP to the future generations equally and the integration and or absolute sole use of cloud is totally absolute.
To guide these engineering solutions and on-time market deliveries — we build from a common product strategy from which all policy, process, and tooling extends. Here is the crux, and where we dive into …
To develop products beyond Legacy
You must have these fundamentals:
1 A culture encouraging developers to utilize cloud native technology. This means micro-services, proprietary Azure / AWS offerings, and the ever impressive and growing list of open source components.
2 Policies and processes do NOT profess using virtual machines (and the massive technical debt and cost of their agents, CPU utilization, and slow to scale architecture)
3 Tools, pipelines, services, and architecture are viewed as factory elements where — regulatory, operations, cyber, privacy, etc.. tune the elements and the instruction sets directly vs meddling with the product code directly
For example:
Visualize a car driving down a road rattling along … assuming we’ve done the hard work already to improve the car mechanics, at some point we need to tune the road whereupon the car travels. You see no matter how superb the car, driving on gravel will never beat smooth asphalt.
In our example the pipeline is the road .. our code / product the car
4 Shift in metrics — as you go more cloud native the ability to speed up deployments, scaling, A/B feature tests in products, and more all become possible. Equally arises the potential for failures. The culture and tooling must have HIGH recovery rates from errors, not a lack of errors. In fact, the more successful and faster you execute I would expect you to cycle through many more errors and failed build than ever before. I would also expect your release schedule to be 10–20x.
Imagine what you will do in innovation and market impact with even just 10x production releases!
Ultimately it’s about our customers
Achieving this release cycle is all about the customers and what we bring to them. By changing how you release products at the core of your engineering groups, you can take advantage of the technology innovation curve at hand.
In the end, you’ll release more product; be more competitive, and attract the best talent — because who doesn’t want to ride the wave of innovation and challenge. Open the potential with your company through a well thought out product cloud strategy.
I have a SCORECARD of how mature you are leveraging Cloud technology, would that be worth sharing?
About the author
- 24 Year technology veteran
- Helped launch clouds for EMC and Cisco
- Oversaw / Part of team deploying / Managed Cloud Compliance for Google, Microsoft, and global businesses for FedRamp, ISO 27002, and others
James — executive to deliver products to market; author; inventor; speaker, and technologist with decades of experience across all technology and cybersecurity. (LinkedIN to connect and engage)
James is a leader that has balanced product market success with rapid regulations, cyber, customer demands, and supplier challenges at Honeywell, Google, and Microsoft in the recent past. Successful in building large teams and influence driven initiatives that have saved millions in new revenue and savings for Honeywell. Passionate about the product creation process; the value of intertwining privacy and quality together, and the opportunity present through branding and value.
James leads with the Senior Leadership across the globe and partners for critical priorities at Honeywell to identify new innovation opportunities through strategy and practical implementations within the Azure cloud, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and industrial products.
James has successfully grown from zero to $50MM business and brands as a founder, owner, and within the Fortune 200. A track record built with wins and losses, that are always building on his network across the globe with the best technologists and great peers to bring the best talent and resources to each project.
James began transforming the Honeywell supply chain strategy that have delivered efficiencies (reduction of idea to signature) and pragmatic development of partnerships that have expanded our market offerings across Honeywell.
James’ continues to lead and advise on their cloud strategy, cloud innovation, cost consolidation, cyber security, and compliance across the various businesses within Honeywell.