Presentation created by Michael Rutledge, Senior Product Leader for IT Arena conference 2018. Key point is that Product Managers need to take ownership of technical quality in addition to delivering features and customer value. This ownership is becoming more important as more companies have mature products in market which have larger scale and quality demands.

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What a Product Manager Needs to Know about
1
Code Quality

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HELLO!
I’m Mike Rutledge

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§ Review the role of Product Manager
§ Explore downsides of sacrificing quality
§ Apply learnings to advance the way we
manage products
§ Understand the importance of quality
§ Equipped to better manage long term
health of products
§ Balance short term & long term value
During this session, we will Following the session, you’ll
Objectives & Outcomes

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So, why should you care about quality?

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“Quality is the best business plan.”
John Lassetter

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Why don’t we care about digital quality & safety?
https://www.xkcd.com/2030/

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What is Product Management?
UX / Customer Technology
Business
Product
Management
Mind the Product
© 2011 Martin Eriksson.

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As a Lean Product Manager…
1) Represent the voice of the customer
2) Set the product vision and strategy
3) Maximize customer value over time
4) Balance short and long term product needs
5) Mange the overall product process – design & execution

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Lessons of the Lean Startup
http://theleanstartup.com/
1
3
2
5
4
Entrepreneurs are Everywhere Entrepreneurship is Management
Validated Learning Innovation Accounting
Build-Measure-Learn
Company takeaways
üEmpower Product & Engineering teams
üOrganize cross-functionally
üTechnology is as a value creator, not cost center
üSmall, incremental, measurable changes
üCustomer feedback before, during, after feature releases

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Beware the one way flow!
UX Technology
Business
Product
Management
What to build

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UX Technology
Business
Product
Management
How to build
Beware the one way flow!

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The more quality is sacrificed, the slower teams go
Time struggling with complexity
and debt
Time available for new
feature development
https://iuliantabara.com/tag/technical-debt/

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Mentality for growth, not for quality
Sales
Time
Introductory Stage Maturity Stage Decline StageGrowth Stage
Product Life Cycle
Quality is most
important
Speed is most
important

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Quality needs are growing
Even the biggest tech companies have 10-
20 years of code in production.
Ø Growth phases are slowing, more focus on maintenance,
scalability & optimization.
New industries entering unfamiliar
consumer apps market - airlines,
healthcare, finance, media.
Ø Little consumer tech know-how and legacy systems.

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The Lean Fallacy
Users will fuel your feature factory
Short term business focus can emphasize
features and incremental thinking over health
& quality
1
Users can’t know how close your
product is to collapse
2 Users want more features for less cost

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Technology is an important source of jobs to be done
UX Technology
Business
Product
Management

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Roadmap with balance of features and quality initiatives
Features
Quality
Backlog
Growth Stage Maturity Stage

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So what to do?
Talk about it! Track it! Do it!

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Talk about it
1. Interview the team
a. Isolate and prioritize the scariest areas of the code
b. Discover what stands in the team’s way
c. Learn about the codebase, get more technical
2. Create awareness and visibility to leaders & stakeholders
a. Visualize risks
b. Suggest high level costs & timelines for improvement

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Track it
1. Push for practices & tools that bring visibility to the current state
a. Unit / functional test coverage numbers - Android studio, Xcode, etc
b. Adopt standards with static code analyzers - Sonar, Checkstyle, OCLint
c. Push for a best practices with clean code and architecture standards
2. Push metrics visibility each sprint
a. Create dashboards that shows on the screen to engineers
b. Set targets and hold each other acountable
c. Trend additional metrics like mean onboarding time, bug rate, and mean time to recover

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Do it
1. Plan the time
a. 25-40% per sprint for technical improvements
b. Look for opportunities in each new feature to improve state
c. Bugs can be a good opportunity for small refactors
d. Beware generic “refactoring” initiatives
2. Balance needs for speed vs. quality
a. Always discuss solutions and whether they’re fast, or high quality way
b. Support and buy time for high quality deliveries, communicate trade-offs
c. Integrate technical needs into long term roadmaps and product conversations
d. Select KPIs cover technical health and platform stability

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Thank You!
© 2018 Michael Rutledge

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Sample Questions
1) How can I integrate quality in a consulting or outsourcing context?
2) Can you give an example of X at Y?
3) How can I distinguish myself as a product manager?
4) Can you talk about more differences in tech & non-tech native companies?