It is undeniable that the digital age is driven by software. This has been accelerated with the impact of the pandemic moving more businesses towards digital channels and business models. If you add to this a generation of users who primarily want to interact with your brand via mobile then you need to embrace digital and products to remain competitive.
While software development has been around for a long time, it still takes a lot of skill and expertise to build world-class software.
Building a World-class Software
The context of your organization, where you are starting from, your culture, objectives, and many other factors will determine the best solution for you. You can certainly research and borrow ideas from companies like Spotify, Google, or other high-performing companies, but that should only be the starting point. Don’t copy other companies verbatim as that approach is doomed to failure.
– Identify the Problem
You first have to know with clarity what problem you are trying to solve and then create a plan based on solving your unique set of challenges. Consume the best and most relevant parts of the best industry scaling models, e.g., SAFe, LeSS, DaD, etc., into your target design. Design a target state that takes best practices tailored for your unique set of challenges. Make changes towards your target state design.
– Inspecting and adapting is a core concept of great software development
Inspecting uses an open mind and transparent feedback to look at what is working and not honestly. This feedback could be anything from processes, team dynamics, strategy, or inefficiencies, which impedes team performance and reduces their motivation and ownership.
Adapting is the process of taking the themes from introspecting and finding ways to respond and improve them. Adaptation takes creativity and effort, and it often takes the form of an experiment. A small test is performed with a subset of the teams to ensure that the solution is viable before it rolls out across the whole organization.
Make course corrections based on the feedback. An organization should repeat this process each time its organization is improved and moves closer to its ideal target state. CTOs are the best technical experts to help you build world-class software and help you with strategy, innovation, growth, and overall technology.
Engineering principles
A firm like Spotify is thriving due to its engineering model and product development culture they created for fast, motivated, decoupled agile teams. Over time, they developed some powerful core working principles that underpinned their high performance:
Trust your people: It is essential to trust and support your people without controlling them because most people do what is best for the organization. It would also help if managers acted as servant leaders. They should ask teams how they can help, rather than asking people what they are working on or completing a task.
Maximize value over busyness: Teams generate ideas, run short experiments and then measure the results. From this, they tweak their approach to maximize the value. Significantly, they optimize for maximizing value and not just output. Employee satisfaction is of the utmost importance.
Understanding CTO
A Chief Technology Officer is an imperative business asset that uses technology to generate value for a company and help it achieve its objectives. They use technology and strategy to develop the company’s products and services. They focus on optimizing and maintaining the technology that supports business operations. They, too, establish elite teams to help with all your technological needs and innovations.
Arif Harbott As A CTO
Arif Harbott is a CTO and Angel investor who has helped launch startups and new divisions within global companies. He has experience in managing over 1000 people and extensive budgets of over $1 billion. Born in the digital age, he has been at the forefront of technology, always looking for the latest innovation and next-generation tech to fuel his success in improving and transforming businesses. He has passed his experiences as an advisor to the world’s largest companies on innovation, growth, strategy, and technology.
What makes him unique is that he has been immersed in various industries through angel investing and has a wide array of experience, knowledge, and networking. With a CTO such as Arif Harbott, you can expect credible business transformation with the software he develops. You can reach out to him by
Email: arif@harbott.com
Website: www.harbott.com
