What if you could measure what really matters to your customer?

In our latest episode of Talking Product, Collin and I chat with Alex Hidalgo—author of the O’Reilly book Implementing Service Level Objectives. Alex shares how Service Level Objectives (SLOs) can help teams zero in on customer priorities and bring people across the organisation together to define what really matters.

SLOs are powerful, but they can also be tricky to implement. I’ve struggled with them myself, so it was great to have the chance to explore this topic in depth with Alex and learn from his expertise.

In this session, we cover:

• Practical steps to get started with Service Level Indicators (SLIs), the foundation of SLOs.
• How to start small and iterate as you refine your SLOs over time.
• The cultural challenges of implementing SLOs—and how to navigate them.

If you’re just starting out or looking to improve your approach, I hope you find this episode full of insights to help you on your SLO journey.

Alex’s book is an excellent resource for making SLOs meaningful and achievable in your organisation. I highly recommend it.

I hope you enjoy listening to this session as much as we enjoyed recording it.

If you liked the episode, please give us a rating—or go all out and write us a nice review. It makes a big difference!

A huge thank you to Alex for making the time to share his insights with us.

In this session Collin & I use Volkswagen’s struggle to build Electric Vehicle (EV) software as a way to explore two themes:

1. the importance of getting a digital transformation right, and
2. the opportunity presented to competitors when large players simply cannot deliver good quality digital products.

We use two articles from the Financial Times as a springboard for our conversation. The first article, dated Jun 28, 2024 “Oliver Blume, VW and Porsche boss steering an EV strategy shift” and the second one, published September 2, 2024 “VW considers closing factories in Germany and cutting jobs” (both behind a paywall - sorry)

The first article describes an investment of $5 billion in the US based EV startup Rivian. The purpose of the investment is to create a joint partnership that allows VW to use Rivian’s EV software. The article quotes VW’s CEO Oliver Blume as saying, “In terms of a big tech transformation, you can’t do it all on your own… It should be a win-win situation . . . The motivation from our side is to speed up software transformation at Volkswagen in all our brands. Rivian has best in class architecture . . . Volkswagen has the scale”.

Collin and I explore this thinking of an acquisition / strategic partnership as a means for fixing an internal digital transformation challenge. For those of you who have listened to Collin and I, you probably won’t be surprised to hear that we are not convinced that such an approach will easily remedy digital product development challenges.

As we ask in the show, what mental models will need to change for these two companies - a digital native and a non-digital native, to work effectively together? As Collin highlights, ultimately these transformations are culture changes, which require heavy-lifting.

Since recording this session, the FT has come out with more articles on the challenges Volkswagen is facing. I have also started listening to some of the VW YouTube influencers who have been discussing software issues for a number of years. I am finding this to be a fascinating case study, albeit quite sad for the workers of Wolfsburg if the leadership of VW can’t get its digital act together.

In this session, I also refer to a 2017 Medium post on how Revolut used the build-measure-learn cycle to develop digital products quickly and acquire customers.

Hope you find the session useful.

If you like the show, please give us a nice rating and recommend the show. It helps others find the podcast.

In this last episode of our three part series, Collin and I continue to role-play an imaginary data-heavy product development project. In our last episode, Collin was granted some authority to get more involved in the project in an effort to reduce the risk that Collin felt was inherent in the delivery team’s approach. The delivery teams is a consulting firm that has been brought in by another group in the company. In this episode, Collin elaborates on the types of risks he sees, as well as how he would address those risks through an alternative approach to product development.

Collin and I are using this fictitious scenario to explore how ways of working, power dynamics and group-think play out in digital product development. In my opinion, these three forces are always at play in this type of work. Our goal in exploring this is to help listeners become better equipped to work with these forces on their own projects.

In this episode, Collin and I discuss the fact that using an approach that pushes risk out into the open earlier in the product-development lifecycle brings reality into the room very quickly. It forces people to stop imagining “happy-path” outcomes through Power Point and Gantt charts. This can often be experienced as “raining on the parade.”

In this episode, I ask Collin to help a senior manager identify the risks themselves by role playing the person who procured the consulting firm. In this scenario, a senior manager wants to be able to see the types of risks that Collin is seeing. This manager wants to be able to ask the questions that Collin is asking. And, they want to mitigate some of those risks without having to rely on delivery managers like Collin - “What is it that allows Collin to see digital product development in the way he sees it?”

Through the role-play, we discover risks that were hidden in the consulting firm’s Power Point presentation and Gantt charts. Because of the approach the consulting firm was taking, made worse by shrouding it in Agile lingo, these risks would not have revealed themselves until very late in the consulting firm’s engagement. As Collin says, “If the consulting firm had followed that plan they would have delivered late and asking for an extension. That may be good for the bottom-line on the consulting side, but puts the company’s strategic goals at risk.”

Hope you enjoy it. As always we would look forward to hearing from people.

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Thanks