How to drive tech improvements

The other day I was talking to a colleague who was frustrated about the difficulties of driving change. He has a good eye for improvement needs but experience that it is challenging to move from the idea to actually getting things fixed. The problem is either about getting people excited enough to drive the change or about getting buy-in from decision makers.

We started talking about how I go about these kind of situations and in this post I will share some things that I find helpful to do when driving change.

Get buy-in for the change

One really important aspect is to talk about the thing in a language that the people you are talking to fully understands. When you want to influence people in a certain direction you need to describe your proposal with words they would have chosen themselves to make sure they understand your proposal and the impact you are after. This will be especially important when you are talking to people that are not as technical as you are or people that lack detailed context about the domain you are in. To do this communication successfully you need to understand their perspective and the things that are important to them.

When prioritizing tech improvements we are choosing to spend our time on those improvements instead of doing product development. To know if that is the right decision or not we need to describe the impact of the tech driven efforts in way that enable us to compare those efforts with the business driven efforts. Describing impact for tech improvements might be difficult but I would argue that it is always a good idea to try. This is because even if we can not define the impact in a clearly measurable way, asking the question and thinking of the change with the business impact lens will increase our understanding of what this change will give and why it is important to push for it right now. And if you during this reflection get the insight that the impact of the change is not big enough to push for it right now, then you can decide to end it before it even started.

One aspect that sometimes makes it extra hard to argue for tech improvements is when the impact give us long term gains rather than short term gains. It could for instance be about doing an investment now to not get slow in the future. It will always be so much easier to prioritize business impact driven changes with short term gains over the less clear and long term improvements. Taking these short term decisions could very well be right, but we can not take these kind of decisions all the time. We need to balance our efforts and allow for some portion of long term investments since that is the only way to keep our tech health on a sustainable level. So my advice, if you are in an organization that has a tendency to always prioritize the short term (product) decisions, is to look into the ratio between short term and long term. If you have been taking short term decisions for a longer time you need to give room for some long term investments before continuing with the short term ones.

Questions to answer when making your plan

Getting buy-in from the right people will be crucial for the success of your initiative but before even starting the getting buy-in work you need to make a plan for the change you want to drive. Worth noting is that when I say plan, I don’t mean creating a 20 pages document together with a complex Gantt chart, what I have in mind is a simple as answering a set of questions to describe for yourself what you are up for.

• Why and what
  • What is it that you are trying to do? Which problem are you trying to solve?
  • Why is this problem a problem? What are the consequences of not doing anything about it?
  • Why do you think this should be fixed now? What would be the consequences of fixing the problem later?
• How
  • How would you like to address the problem? What are the things you think you need to do?
  • What will the output be from those actions? What will be in place when you are done with the change?
  • What kind of decisions will need to be taken along the way?
  • How does the timeline look? What needs to happen first and next? Any deadlines somewhere along the way?
• Who
  • Who will be the decision makers that will be important for your initiative to be successful?
    • What kind of information will they need to take the decision?
    • What would make the decision makers to take a positive decision? What would make them take a negative decision?
  • Who are the stakeholders that will be impacted of the change and that you need to have onboard for the change to be successful?
  • Who are your partners that you need help from to get the change done? Who will be part of the work to make this change happen?

There is nothing magical about these questions, but sometimes it can be helpful to have some structure to make sure to cover all angles. Every question might not be relevant in every case and some questions that are important for your change or context might not be in this list.

And another thing, if you believe that the change you are proposing will be emotional for people you have to expect resistance. If people get worried they might not listen to your reasoning but instead hear what they think you will say from the lens of their emotions. In  situations when people will be emotional about the change (or the outcome of the change) you need to invest even more in understanding what people think and feel from all perspectives and then make a plan with those learnings in mind. Continuous communication through the change will also be instrumental for the success, since when people feel they are not in the loop and don’t know what is going they will get worried and you will have to handle that worry instead of moving forward with your change.

In short

• Communicate in a way that is targeted towards the audience
• Describe the business impact of the tech improvement
• Balance short term and long term investments and make sure to create room for the longer term ones once in a while.
• Describe the change by looking at What to fix, Why to fix it, How to fix it and Who you need to get along on the journey
• If the change is sensitive for people, invest more in the preparation and communication

Some real world findings

The other day I was talking to my colleague about how the change initiative was going and found out that it was going pretty well. He had gotten some buy-in from the Product Manager who is an important decision maker in this initiative. He had got other people interested in participating that will help with the driving and he had also gotten important insights by talking to other stakeholders in the organization. On top of insights the stakeholder conversations had also identified some synergies since other parts of the organization were looking at similar problems why we have a great opportunity to help each other out.

All of that sounded super positive and I asked him what he had learned from the experience of driving this initiative. His answer was that the most important learning was that it all comes down to talking to people – and he is so right!