The Sync: Alexei Miller & Allan Wellenstein Discuss How to Plan for the Unknown in Software Design

Of course, thanks for having me.

I would say largely the cases that we're seeing in the practice now fall into two buckets. We have some clients who have very urgent tactical needs as a result of seeing their demand either crash or, in some cases, go up beyond what they're able to deal with, and they need to very-very quickly do things. Here is where the expertise in the solution design group which is all based on ideation, innovating, quickly prototyping, testing hypotheses, is quite useful because we can come in, analyze what the problem is, quickly get aligned with their stakeholders and then test various approaches very very rapidly of how we might be able to help them. So it's sort of this like Innovation lab, sort of product accelerator to help those clients who find themselves pretty urgently needing to make changes. The other type of clients is the type of clients that we've traditionally served in past And those themselves fall into two buckets. They see their need to modernize, and they see that the competitors, especially startups around them, are much more nimble and starting to eat their lunch. And those fall into two buckets: some, where they are capitalized well enough and they're able to invest through this in which case they're actually in a great position because they can use this time to invest in the future for when they come out of this. And then we have the other side where they know they need this transformation, but unfortunately, they're struggling and are in a cost-cutting reduction, so other than providing advice and helping, we're a little bit more limited. What I'd say is I haven't actually seen the time of COVID the needs of what everyone is shooting for now business agility is probably the best term. How do we shorten the time between someone having a great idea for how we can help a client and getting that into production. That hasn't changed, it's not going to change after COVID, the things that those companies needed to do before COVID are the same things that they need to do now. And they are not just technical, they are as much about changing their legacy processes and getting their organization used to what it means to be an agile organization. And we have a number of clients who we're working with, who are fortunate enough with their cash position to be able to invest through this, and others who unfortunately aren't so lucky.

Yeah, absolutely. I don't think that the recognition of the need to move towards digital more customer-centric, less friction, more efficiency has changed, but the urgency surely has. Before COVID the urgency was “wow we see these startups coming into our space and they're starting to behave in this way that if we don't catch up we're going to have a problem” and now post-COVID especially with so many business transactions moving to an online space, companies who haven't made that shift yet are under intense pressure to do it quickly.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's interesting too, it's not just like you said the efficiency of the cloud from a cost and performance perspective, but also with work from home it's putting a lot of pressure on corporate VPNs which become the choke point. They thought they were leveraging the cloud, but with everyone working from home and now coming through a choke point of a corporate VPN, they're recognizing that they still have work to do in terms of really taking advantage of what the cloud has to offer.

Yeah, not so much in terms of how it's changed our approach, but how it's changed the conversation. I'm finding that I'm spending a lot less time convincing clients that they need to plan for the unknown and plan for the uncertainty ahead of them. And the message about really investing as much in the process of how they design and build software as the specific architecture of what they're building. Now when I make a point that “we can all make certain assumptions of what tomorrow's going to look like, but the people who win in business are the people who are incredibly nimble and can change when demand changes”. That conversation now goes a lot differently; people sort of intrinsically understand how important it is to focus as much on their process as the specifics of what they're building.

I don't know if I necessarily agree that it's shortening the time between when you build and rebuild a system. I think that the players, who have been immensely successful in using technology to unlock opportunities. The thing that they've gotten right is the process. Is the recognition that actually they're never done it's not correct to think of when are we have done with this process and when is it time to build the new one, but rather to focus on the processes within their organization across departments of how ideas are prioritized, how they make it into the backlog and to focus as much on the velocity of their organization, the process by which these ideas more and more become unlocked. This is the thing that I'm seeing shifting is that enterprises in particular with very siloed departments where it used to be three-four years ago, it's not at all uncommon for us to work with one department and then say “oh I know it makes sense to integrate with that but boy that's so difficult to work with those people!”. Organizations are really starting to see how much that's going to get in their way for what all of their startup competitors are doing, and organizations are starting to see a lot of value with getting the dance correct between the various departments. So that you're not building something and then you're done, but you're building something, and you're focusing on the process by which you're building it and changing it and changing it and changing it and changing it.

I read a sobering article over the weekend that suggests maybe one or two people sitting in a room together is going to be within a few months, but larger groupings of people unfortunately maybe sometime in the future. But as somebody who doesn't love traveling, it's not the worst thing in the world that people get used to being productive remotely.

My pleasure, thank you so much. Take care, Alexei.