How to tackle friction between product and engineering in scale-ups

Thoughtworks Technology Podcast

Thoughtworks

Careers, Business, 907234, Technology

4.7 • 53 Ratings

🗓️ 9 February 2023

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As an organization matures and grows, silos will inevitably emerge. That can pose problems, particularly in the relationship between product and engineering functions — friction can slow growth and make delivering at speed much more challenging than it was previously.

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Thoughtworks CTO Rebecca Parsons is joined by colleagues Rick Kick (Head of Application and Platform Transformation in the Enterprise Modernization team for Thoughtworks North America) and Kennedy Collins (Head of Product and Design for the North America Central Market), alongside Anthony Maitz of Pariveda, to discuss how to manage the various frictions and tensions that can emerge as organizations scale. They cover a wide range of tactics and strategies to improve alignment between product and engineering, and offer an insight into what can actually be done to address a common scale-up growing pain.

Read Rick and Kennedy's article discussed in the episode: https://martinfowler.com/articles/bottlenecks-of-scaleups/03-product-v-engineering.html

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, everyone. My name is Rebecca Parsons, and I'm one of your recurring co-hosts on the ThoughtWorks Technology podcast.
0:14.8	And we're here today to talk about product organization and engineering organizations. And we have three individuals with us.
0:25.6	Rick, would you like to introduce yourself? Sure, thanks. I'm Rick Kick. I am the North American
0:31.3	head of enterprise modernization platforms and cloud for ThoughtWorks. Kennedy?
0:38.3	I'm Kennedy Collins. I'm the head of product and cloud for ThoughtWorks. Kennedy. I'm Kennedy Collins.
0:39.3	I'm the head of product and design for the North America Central Market.
0:43.3	Tony.
0:44.3	Hi, I'm Anthony Mites.
0:45.3	I am a product consultant at Paraveta, and I have been doing product management for a good long while.
0:52.3	Excellent. So let's start with an introduction to the problem.
0:58.8	This podcast is part of a series that are based on some articles that are being written about the
1:06.3	challenges that scale-ups face. And this product and engineering tension is one of those scale-ups. So
1:15.8	what exactly is the problem? How do we see it manifest? And what are some of the characteristics
1:25.0	of this problem? I'll take a first crack.
1:29.3	So one of the things that Anthony actually were just talking about is this article had gotten picked up on some other websites.
1:37.3	And one of the pieces of feedback that it came in was we don't see friction between product and engineering and startups.
1:45.0	And that's a really important thing to start to focus on because we're not talking about startups.
1:50.0	We're talking about scale ups.
1:52.0	And scale ups then they grow into larger organizations.
1:55.0	So when you think about a startup, there's some regular level of organized chaos, right?
2:03.0	But as that organization starts to grow and scale, you need to switch from organized chaos
2:09.4	into more chaotic organization, right?
	...

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