Insights

How to identify the right product engineering strategy

Miguel Garcia, Chief Technical Officer, UST Product Engineering

In our first blog, we discussed the role of product engineering. Once you have embraced how product engineering can transform your business, you must decide how best to approach it.

Successful product engineering enables a faster time to market, reduced total cost of ownership, readiness for scale, enhanced customer experience and increased valuation and brand equity.

The next step begins with an assessment framework, which provides a holistic product assessment covering engineering, design, interfaces and technology. Frameworks and customization are not incompatible. On the contrary, the right framework helps companies and their partners identify the best way to take best practices and apply them to their unique situations.

The right framework requires a big-picture view of your enterprise architecture, which allows you to analyze your challenges and helps you overcome them with comprehensive, cost-effective and time-bound solution recommendations.

Frameworks provide a comprehensive analysis of performance while recommending actionable and sustainable short-term and long-term strategic initiatives and an individualized easy to read roadmap.

Unsurprisingly, it is difficult for an organization to conduct a meaningful and robust framework analysis by itself. For maximum impact, a trusted partner with a set of diagnostic tools and decades of experience is required to present the right approach. At UST Product Engineering, our proprietary assessment platform EDIT helps us comprehensively understand symptoms, concerns and analyze key vital signs across engineering, design, interfaces and technology.

Here are some of the things we focus on in our EDIT assessment.

Talk to the right people: It’s important to interview a variety of shareholders to not only understand everyone’s point of view but also to avoid the tendency for any one individual (like a CTO) to dominate the current state of play.

Ask the right questions: Is your current architecture “Fit for Growth?” Are you able to meet and excel at your biggest business challenges with existing resources? Do you have a user experience on par with or better than the competition?

Ingest data: A modern organization ingests an incredible amount of data, much of which companies fail to document beyond their initial needs. Bringing in a partner with fresh eyes who can request and analyze this torrent of information can find hidden problems and potential solutions.

Conduct a maturity assessment: How mature is your IT organization? Product engineering is a mix of people, processes and technology. What do you have on hand and what needs to be supplemented either by a partner or new hires, technology or processes?

Conduct a 360° assessment of your product portfolio:

Leveraging a robust assessment framework to comprehensively understand symptoms, concerns and analyze key vital signs across engineering, design, interfaces and technology. We will then prescribe recommendations articulating improvements and implementation roadmap aligning to your organization’s growth vision.

After completing the above, we create an adequacy score across the Engineering, Design, Interfaces and Technology buckets to help you understand where you benchmark against the industry standards.

Shortly thereafter, our tactical and strategic recommendations helped companies re-engineer their architecture to support growth.

However you approach your product engineering deficits, it’s crucial to include a strategic partner who can take a big-picture view of your enterprise architecture, analyze your challenges, and help you overcome them with comprehensive, cost-effective & time-bound solution recommendations.

To learn more about how the EDIT assessment helps clients create new products, rationalize systems and transform legacy products and platforms, read our latest eBook.