Tech Leader Chats: How to get buy-in to a technical roadmap at a startup with Vindhya Joseph

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About the talk

One of the primary roles of an engineering leader is to craft and get buy-in to a technical roadmap. Not only does it provide guidance for your team and organization but it ensures everyone is on the same page and moving towards a common goal.

So how do you ensure your technical roadmap aligns with company goals, while still prioritizing technical debt? What is an appropriate level of detail to share? And how does this differ in a startup relative to larger organizations?

To explore this topic, Vindhya Joseph, Enterprise Architect at Foodstuffs and previously a Director of Engineering at Unibuddy and Senior Engineering Manager at JumpCloud, shared her practical tips on getting buy-in to technical roadmaps at a startup. Identifying that technical roadmaps come back to managing technical debt, Vindhya shared the impact of tech debt, strategies for managing it, and how to manage conversations with key business leaders to ensure you get the outcome you need (more time to work on tech debt!).

A few of key takeaways from Vindhya's talk are as follows:

A technical roadmap is fundamentally about managing technical debt ‍

The best way to craft the roadmap and get buy-in is to align technical needs with business needs. There shouldn’t be a technical roadmap separate from the product one; we’re all one team.

This then begs the question – what is technical debt? According to Martin Fowler, technical debt is shortcuts/compromises to achieve short-term outcomes, resulting in deficiencies in quality, making things harder to understand, resulting in extra effort and time for new features to get out to market.

While tech-debt itself isn't necessarily a bad thing – you can have intentional "good" technical debt too – it's simply a consequence of a business needing to make compromises to get a product or feature out to market, faster.

‍How to manage technical debt‍

To successfully advocate for, and execute on a technical debt roadmap, you need to be able to manage technical debt. Vindhya's tips for this are:

Track and measure technical debt

Make it visible – quantify technical debt through a well-groomed, regularly updated tech debt backlog. Give it the same care as you would for a product backlog.
Measure your Tech Debt Ratio = total tech debt story points / sprint velocity.
Set a debt ceiling and baseline – the Tech Debt Ratio shouldn’t go above the ceiling or below the baseline.

Minimize technical debt

Build just enough – resist the temptation to build for scale if it’s not yet needed.
Get comfortable with refactoring – embrace iterative development. Write, rewrite, and refactor as you go.
Don’t let shiny new technology lead your team astray – evaluate tech choices carefully and consider your existing team’s experience and expertise.

Continuously address technical debt

Use an effort vs. value 2x2 to prioritize tech debt.
For smaller pieces of work, use it as fill-ins.
For big projects/when there’s lots of tech debt, set aside dedicated capacity – e.g., a dedicated sprint, a “fix-a-thon” (hackathon for tech debt); this is great for new hires and interns – helps them learn the codebase.
To get buy-in from business leaders, work with customer success & product leaders to link tech debt to business & customer impact.

How to get buy-in to a technical debt roadmap

To get buy-in to your technical debt roadmap, you need to speak the language of the business leaders, and communicate the business impact of the technical debt item. Vindhya's two tips to help with this are:

‍Find your amigos‍

Product Leader + Customer Success Leader + Engineering Leader = 😍
Customer success understands the customer point of view and what’s causing pain now, while product leaders have a view to what’s coming up.
With that, the engineering leader can get a sense of how tech debt is likely impacting the company today and in the future‍

Remember, technical debt is a business problem, not just an engineering problem‍

Tech debt impacts all areas of the business, and directly affects customer value delivery.
Unaddressed tech debt creates business risks: reduced frequency of deployments, increased lead time for changes, and limited innovation capacity (as you can’t add new features).

Resources

View the slides from the talk and the full talk transcript.

Specific resources mentioned by Vindhya during the talk are listed below:

Defining, Measuring, and Managing Technical Debt – Thoughtworks framework
Shared by a community member, with reference to a point Vindhya made during the talk – don't be tempted to chase shiny new technology: https://boringtechnology.club/