Strategy

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. ...

Application Portfolio Management (APM) draws inspiration from financial portfolio management, which has been around since at least the 1970s. By looking at all applications and services in the organization and analyzing their costs and benefits, you can determine the most effective way to manage them as part of a larger overall strategy. This allows the architect or engineering leader to take a more strategic approach to managing their application portfolio backed by data. Portfolio management is crucial for creating a holistic view of your team’s technology landscape and making sure that it aligns with business goals. ...