software development | Technology | thought leadership
Welcome to Create Impact, a new series from Aviture focused on the topics that inspire our engineers to innovate. In each article, an Aviture team member will take you on a deep-dive into a subject they’re passionate about, showing you the thinking behind cutting-edge engineering advances, the latest UX trends, development theories, and other unique topics that enable Aviturians to embrace the Art of the Possible for our clients.
In this post, Aviturian and Decision Logic Chief Technology Officer Matt Mixan explores why strategic guidance is crucial for software consulting, allowing you to move beyond bug fixes and toward real long-term solutions.
Keep reading to learn more!
When a client confronts a tech problem, they usually start with a very focused need:
- I'm hearing this feedback from the market about my product, so let’s correct this
- I need to build this new feature to improve the user experience
- My architecture isn't scaling and I need to make it scale alongside company growth
These are common issues facing many companies in the modern tech landscape, and the straightforward solution is to build a product that solves for the specific initial need.
But we think more can be done to confront the underlying conditions creating the problem. Part of what Aviture brings is experience in building not just greenfield or brownfield projects, but the ability to go into an existing project and figure out how to take it to the next level.
When we get into the engineering minutiae with a client, we like to unpack that need and figure out what's driving the “client ask.” We then determine what are the things around it that the client isn't thinking about that could be affecting usability or market reach? By having those conversations, they lead us to understanding not just the tactical solution, but the strategic solution.
We wouldn’t be doing our jobs as partners if we didn’t bring up the more strategic approach and be completely honest about what’s going to create long-term growth.
A New Approach to Retail Software
What really opened my eyes to this need to offer not just software and hardware guidance, but true strategic guidance, was Aviture’s partnership with Decision Logic.
You can read about this partnership in a case study that highlights how the insights from Aviture and the work we do led to a complete revamp of how Decision Logic operates. The Agile approach to software delivery and a user-focused mindset led to a brand-new development cycle and, ultimately, the rapid expansion of a brand that continues to thrive to this day.
Unlike some of our other partnerships, where we build a feature and consult on the strategic direction, we have leeway within Decision Logic to set the full roadmap and determine what product updates will be rolled out and where to set our sights strategically.
This increased responsibility makes it more apparent than ever why the strategic approach to software consulting is so critical. When you move away from a “feature-first” mindset, you can more easily align your engineering capabilities toward the growth of a company as a whole.
For example, one big thing Decision Logic has pushed toward the last few years is mobile-first development. As a restaurant software-focused company, Decision Logic has heard from customers who don't want to spend as much time on the computer. They want to be out in the restaurant, able to make adjustments on the fly on their phones and tablets.
We aligned the vision to that real-world need. We know the userbase needs mobile-first design, so that fact guides our strategic roadmap and tells our engineers what to focus on and, just as important, what to cut.
It’s been a very iterative process. We’ve had to make sure, for example, our components and our style guide will scale as everything else scales up as well. And this means more traffic is going to go through our API, so the API is going to have to scale. We’re looking at everything strategically to make sure the different dominos line up.
We closely analyze how sprints move forward and the features are built, always asking: what's the strategy? Are we still heading in the right direction of scaling and creating the necessary mobile architecture for continued growth? And then within that, thanks to our Agile development process, we’re reacting to things as they change.
The Vision Directs the Action
If there isn't a strategic plan, all you're doing is reacting to stimulus.
You need the vision of where you're going with these things and figuring out where along the way you can do X, Y, and Z to make the product and the solution even better for your customers.
It brings focus to the process that otherwise wouldn’t be there. We know all the things we're trying to do. With strategic delivery, we can pick when they need to happen and line them up in a priority order that matches up with our long-term goals. We get to determine the place where each piece fits.
We recently had a need to implement a new point-of-sale (POS) integration, and this aligned with our need to update our internal cloud management system to assist in on-boardings and POS configuration management. We knew this internal tool development would dramatically change quality of life for the integration specialists and developers, but we had to pick the right time to do it.
Rather than reacting like a dog chasing cars, we identified, months ahead of time, when we're going to execute that integration. Then as we got close to it, that became one focused effort. We implemented the integration that we were already planning on implementing, yet we didn’t lose sight of other efforts at the same time. And that integration aligns with our Azure cloud goals, which meets our long-term strategy as well. It all came together in a perfect storm, allowing us to maximize resource use and support our business goals.
It's like music. We knew what was coming down the pike on our roadmap and we were able to plan for it, making adjustments along the way to accommodate the changing marketplace. It all came together like a symphony, and it's just gorgeous.
The Path to Innovation
These are the ingredients that make innovation possible. Without that strategic roadmap, you end up working a bit like you used to when you were in school and had a paper due. The paper’s due in December, and you procrastinate and wait until December to start working on it.
In engineering, there’s always going to be short-term problems that can take up much of your focus. If tickets come in regarding code that needs to be fixed, it’s easy to devote yourself fully to those immediate concerns, while the long-term goals get put off as long as possible.
A strategic approach enables you to do something more transformative. It forces your company leaders to look at what can be moved, what should be moved, and what should be prioritized. You get to examine your roadmap and weigh the balance of the immediate value with the long-term value.
A perfect example of this is a custom reporting engine that now exists within the Decision Logic software. This was something restaurant customers had been asking about for a long time, but it wasn’t necessarily an immediate concern. But we kept hearing about how useful it would be, and it caused us to look and say, “Hey, we know this isn’t in our immediate roadmap, but given how much value it brings, what can we push out so that we can slot this in? Because it really does align well with our long-term goals, even more so than some of these other projects in the pipeline.”
This aligned well with the interest of one of our all-star engineers, and we were able to use our internal Ship-It Days process to prototype and focus energy exclusively on that reporting engine. Before we knew it, we had a demo that just blew the socks off everybody. We recognized the value and immediately moved it up in the roadmap, because we knew it aligned with our long-term goal and would wow customers too.
This is one of the most powerful tools to come out of that process, but we wouldn’t have gotten there if we were laser-focused on the immediate feature or bug fixes. The Agile, strategic approach let us prioritize as necessary, and we have even more exciting things happening in the future. What unites these disparate workflows is a drive to innovate and a roadmap that provides the stability necessary to do so.
Pivot!
You have to think about not only how to pivot, but where the pivot points along the journey even are, because I guarantee they're going to come.
The world is in a constant state of evolution, especially when it comes to tech. Market forces will arise and dictate changing conditions you need to account for.
You can’t be purely consultative and turn a blind eye to external (and even internal) factors affecting the product. There's always some new variable thrown into it. You have to look at everything coming at you all the time and adjust to those variables as they arrive.
That's what Agile affords us, and it’s why putting strategy first provides the recipe for long-term growth and success.
