angrymouse

What do you think the good ones do? And how do they set direction in a way that’s good compared to a bad one?

Right in the middle of a retiring of a big external platform and moving it over, slice by slice into separate company owned products and APIs (and a few off the shelf things mixed in too!)

I think there’s plenty of sensible advice about getting a technical person with experience and expertise to help make the right decision. Between doing it yourself, building a platform with various tools stitched together to finding ways of getting what you need from existing suppliers and other tooling.

Something I would also suggest is to be really clear right now on how you currently work, how your existing platform works and the problems it’s causing or at least the opportunities you feel you’re missing out on.

To do this suggest getting a “discovery” team together and doing some service design and analysis to map out your user flows, business and tech. The as-is. and laying against that all the pain points and missed opportunities.

Then using the same team to help you craft how it should work. The to-be vision.

Then using that to-be vision and the insight and expertise you’ve developed to help you decide how best to get to that to-be vision. As cheaply and sustainably as possible.

Part of the organisation I’m helping out. There’s a vast difference between the parts where that discovery work was done (and done with clear purpose) and the bits that haven’t been done. And the endless delay and struggle they’ve had.