Business

I work on Workiva’s cloud platform engineering team, where we design and operate Kubernetes and AWS infrastructure supporting more than 300 microservices across multiple AWS regions. The platform spans networking, observability, CI/CD, compliance, and internal developer tooling. Lately, our team has been busy developing and codifying our strategy. I’m not a big fan of reinventing the wheel, and neither is the rest of our team, so we welcomed the opportunity to use existing business strategy frameworks and methodologies as a way to get started quickly. We used the Playing to Win Framework, and were able to flesh out a meaningful strategy focusing on things such as reducing cognitive load for development teams and streamlining how we report the customer impact of incidents. ...

I’ve been reading the excellent book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman and came across a strategy for dealing with a common human behaviour problem that has direct impact on software development: overconfidence. According to Kahneman’s research, “overconfidence is a direct consequence of [how we think] that can be tamed — but not vanquished.” In other words, our brains are wired to make overconfident predictions and forecasts. In software development, this overconfidence usually presents itself in estimates of the importance of projects to the business, the success rate of new projects, and in development timelines. We all seem to have an intuition that these biases exist, but what can we do to counteract them? One idea presented by Kahneman’s colleague Gary Klein is the premortem. ...

One of the first steps in selling a new product or service is finding your target market and one of the best ways of finding your target market is by defining your ideal customer. Ask yourself – out of all the people in the world who would be the most likely to buy this thing? If you can clearly answer this question you have your ideal customer and you can start a marketing campaign targetting exactly the demographic you are trying to sell to. Let’s go through an exercise that can help to find that ideal customer by asking three simple questions. ...

I recently received the good news that my business idea was accepted for the University of Saskatchewan’s 2014 Tech Venture Challenge. The Tech Venture Challenge is a business plan competition for students and alumni where participants are judged by their finished business plan and pitch after a four month workshop program. I’m going to blog about the experience as a way to absorb the material and hopefully help someone else who may be applying in the future. This post will provide some admittedly biased advice on submitting your application to the Tech Venture Challenge. ...