In a large tech company, there are layers and layers of teams that contribute to the success of a product or service offered. Many of these layers tend to only have indirect impact on customers. Teams that have a direct relationship with customers tend to have a lot of power. They bear the burden of delivering perceived value, in exchange for larger investments.
As organisations grow, responsibility of focusing on critical parts of a product gets split up and assigned to various teams. Many of these teams would would be in the middle to lower layers, not having a direction relationship with customers. Their contribution often go unchecked and under-appreciated, as their value isn’t easily captured and accounted for. This starts to erode their understanding of the value they provide. Focus shifts.
Let’s take an example of a team tasked with creating a data analytics library for a website. Collecting analytics on a product is critical to improving it. How important is it compared to contributions from the frontend or services teams? Should the analytics library team focus their efforts on accuracy, library performance, or perhaps, code quality?
As different parts of an organisation starts to think about value very differently, it becomes much harder to innovate and continue to be competitive. The product itself starts to suffer.
The key thing to work on here is “attribution of work” at every layer. If the business is making 100M a year, what percent of that is thanks to the analytics library? The relationship is not direct, and therefore, no obvious. But it is a worthwhile exercise to understand attribution.
Once attribution is understood, we can share growth targets based on that. Teams at each level can start to work towards a common goal. This facilitates collaboration among teams. Decisions like prioritising backlogs and staffing investments starts to become easier.
If the analytics library team understands that they will be at least 5% contributors to the 20M growth target for online sales, they can start to power features towards the growth target itself. They can start to ask questions like, “would innovating a new feature enable teams to evaluate and capture market segments that wasn’t understood before?”
Speaking a common language of value is a hard thing. Understanding exactly how “the janitor helps put a man on the moon” is tough too Doing these hard things can lead to a much more cohesive working environment and innovation.