Unconsidered Needs

Performance testing on its own isn’t useful, it’s a waste of time and money. Testing can be a great method to understanding at a deep level where you can make radical, innovative and disruptive business change. But few use it this way.

Almost every dev/product team out there can at some level of run automated performance testing, it might be very basic but it’s a start. They’ll typically:

1. Setup a JMeter or python script
2. Run x iterations of a user journey
3. See if it was as quick as the last time
4. Check-in code

If you are lucky you might get a meaningless report with response times and throughput, maybe even on a graph. But what does good actually look like?

Good companies know what response times ‘should’ be and the relationship to the throughput (users/traffic/something) on the system.

Great companies measure of application efficiency. Monitor and fix stability issues in dev. Consistently instrument their design, using data to influence the future. Create small, flexible, mutable services and applications that scale up, down and across. Forecast and provision the right type, level and placement of capacity, moving with the sun. Build scalable resilience into applications before it’s needed. And of course, know how fast their application should be and how many things it should do at any time.

I’ve talked previously about creating logical maps of systems, end to end. Using business>service>infrastructure data and map this to customer behaviours. Then using this to influence the new products that you bring to market.

Test for insight.

Testing for the sake of testing is wasting everyone’s time. Test for insight. The insight you gain will let you create great products, market to the right audience and stay ahead of the future.

Those who really understand their systems and how they work will have a superior understanding of their customer’s needs and wants. They will be able to make whatever changes they want without worrying about what the underlying tech stack is doing. How liberating would that be?

Testing is often used as a tick box exercise and in most cases, the results you get aren’t even good enough for that. Forget about testing, start thinking about how and where can I get the insight that will let me do something nobody has done before.

Thats where the real value is.

Thomas

• Twitter
• LinkedIn

You can sign up for more ‘unconsidered needs’ below.

---

Sign up if you’d like regular insights with ‘Unconsidered Needs’, a short weekly email about the trials and tribulations of tech value creation.

A common symptom of working with private equity is that the people you start the journey with are not the same as you end with. Most CTO’s will get their key leadership team post-acquisition and tell them:

1. PE partners will have ‘some’ involvement going forward
2. Expect ‘some’ changes in people, strategy and velocity.
3. Don’t worry!

With 10% of key employees leaving during the first 12 months, how do you keep teams motivated and engaged? Great CTOs will give consistently give clear strategic direction to their technology leadership teams.

10 things great CTOs need to make clear to their technology teams

1. What the vision is
2. Why we are doing it
3. Your role in all this
4. How long we have
5. How PE will be involved
6. When PE will be involved
7. How we will measure success
8. The rewards for success
9. The cascading messages
10. How often we will review progress

Great CTO’s won’t treat this as a once and done exercise, they will make a regular commitment to their teams to continually assess and reiterate this vision.

Great Leaders understand the importance of bringing their team on the journey, making sure everyone knows their place in the new world.

Thomas

• Twitter
• LinkedIn

You can sign up for more ‘unconsidered needs’ below.

---

Thanks to Clare Eagle for the discussion that led to this unconsidered need!

Sign up if you’d like regular insights with ‘Unconsidered Needs’, a short weekly email about the trials and tribulations of tech value creation.

The real value of ‘cost optimising’ in the cloud isn’t really about how much money you save, it’s what you can do next…

Value is made on the journey, understanding at a deep level where you can make radical, innovative and disruptive business change.

Today most companies have internal teams who can do this work with some special tools etc. Low hanging fruit is not technically challenging or particularly exciting. You will see this trend:

1. Move to the cloud
2. Adopt more cloud technologies
3. Decide its costing too much so buy RI’s (or equivalent)
4. Renegotiate
5. Turn off dev/test instances at the weekend
6. Rightsize simple workloads
7. Rest

What good companies do is all the above, earlier and quicker.

What great companies do is create logical maps of their systems, end to end. They use business>service>infrastructure data and map this their customer behaviours. They then use this to influence the new products that they bring to market.

Those who really understand their customer’s needs and understand how their system ‘really’ works can start making radical, innovative, disruptive business changes without worrying about what the underlying tech stack is doing.

I suspect we are 2 years away from cost optimisation being run like a disc cleanup tool. You’d get an optimisation score from 1-100 ‘would you like to optimise your cloud estate now?’

Cost optimisation isn’t sexy, it’s not even that interesting. Imagine how much value you can create by doing something new with your business and not having to worry about the tech, that is sexy!

Thomas

• Twitter
• LinkedIn

You can sign up for more ‘unconsidered needs’ below.

---

Sign up if you’d like regular insights with ‘Unconsidered Needs’, a short weekly email about the trials and tribulations of tech value creation.

Big transformation must be done within an intelligent, appreciative, and principled framework … if you’re looking to succeed.

Many companies look to overcome the fear of failure but throwing as many ideas to the wall and seeing which ones stick. When sometime, you can improve your life by taking things away

I started thinking of the times I’d seen ‘big’ transformation heading for the cliff. A previous client who made and sold electrocompetent parts that you’ll find in half of the worlds computers, phones or fridges. They came to me one day and said we’ve been thinking and we want to move our monolith to the cloud. We’d also like to change our dev methodology from Agile to DevOps. We’d then like to mix in security, so DevSecOps, and then extend into Performance, so DevSecPerfOps. We’re actually thinking we should reduce our teams from 8-6 devs but have them all full-stack. We’ve also been thinking about doing this at the same with our SAP system.

And we need to do it within 6 months…

6 months turned to 12 turned to 18 turned to a programme cancelled. The transformation wouldn’t go ahead.

If they had taken it one step at a time, starting small they would have been able to do the cloud migration, then move on to the next initiative and the next. With vision and commitment, they would have made all the changes in 18 months and looked back with a sense of real achievement.

Thomas

• Twitter
• LinkedIn

You can sign up for more ‘unconsidered needs’ below.

---

Sign up if you’d like regular insights with ‘Unconsidered Needs’, a short weekly email about the trials and tribulations of tech value creation.