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Building know-how from the ITX team blog

Maximizing Developer Value: The Intersection of Tech and Business Domains

In his role as Principal Software Engineer at ITX, John Roets knows the value engineers bring to the table and describes it in the blog below. Leaning on content curated from thought leaders like Amazon’s Jesse Watson, SVPG’s Marty Cagan, and others, John offers words of caution and support to his fellow engineers and their teammates: “If you fail to see beyond technical skill as what makes developers valuable, you’ve got it wrong.”

My new favorite article is The Hard Thing About Software Development, from Jesse Watson, a software development manager at Amazon. I discovered it through James Coplien, an Agile influencer, who has labeled the article as ‘profound.’

The article itself isn’t new – it was written in 2017 – but its message is as relevant as ever.

In the article, Jesse is responding to an independent remote developer – a freelancer, gig worker – who is lamenting the fact that gigs don’t pay well.

On the surface, this seems contradictory. After all, developers are in high demand and are paid well. Right? What’s going on here?

 

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Bridging the Gap: Highlights from ITX’s 2nd Annual Product + Design Conference

ITX hosted its 2nd Annual Product + Design Conference on June 22-23 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel Ballroom in downtown Rochester. The 2023 event’s 225+ Keynote Day attendees included every fashion of product maker and leader.

They may have entered the conference as product managers, designers, engineers, QA specialists, and content strategists. But they exited as members of a product team – collectively responsible for solving one shared problem: how do we improve the lives of our users

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Harness the Power of Discovery: Matching Team Skills to Client Needs

Keys to Stewarding the Client Investment & Maximizing ROI

Getting to the heart of a client’s concern is the crucial first step to delivering an effective software solution. But deciphering complex requirements and balancing competencies between a client and a technology partner can be a daunting task. This is where discovery comes into play.

In our series’ first post, Discovery: Understanding the Problem Space, we learned that discovery begins before kickoff with a client-focused “needs analysis session.”

In this blog, we’ll explore how discovery activities help teams gain powerful insights, establish trust, and deliver impactful solutions as they work to steward the client investment.

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Radhika Dutt Joins Product + Design Conference 2023 Speaker List

Author of Radical Product Thinking to Offer Workshop, Keynote

Shortly before publishing our June 2020 podcast episode with Radhika Dutt, she posted an article entitled,What’s sucking momentum from your product development journey – and what you can do about it. As soon as I read that piece, I knew we needed to invite Radhika to guest on our Product Momentum pod. The fit was just too good.

Here we are, 3 years on, and the fit is just as strong.

We’re excited to welcome Radhika to conduct a workshop and deliver a keynote address during our 2-day Product + Design Conference, here in Rochester, NY on June 22-23!

Radhika – an entrepreneur, product leader, and author of Radical Product Thinking: A New Mindset for Innovating Smarter, joins UX and product management legends Jesse James Garrett and Rich Mironov on an increasingly impressive speaker line-up.

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From Product Strategy to Roadmaps and Release Plans

In the Planning Stage, look for the ITX innovation lead to guide the product team from Vision to Strategy to Roadmap. In our recent post, we explained that Vision represents a desired future state. Strategy explains how you’ll get there, and Roadmap lists the mile markers along the journey. In this post, we examine the innovation lead’s role in navigating that path.

Building software isn’t about the features you add – the bells and whistles. It’s about helping your end users be more successful. Any notion that a product with more features is by definition better than a product with fewer features is a misguided one.

Innovation leads help their clients and teams discover the difference between adding features for features’ sake and adding features that solve problems for users and create business value for clients.

Our journey starts with Vision, which directs everyone’s effort and investment toward making users more successful. In addition to vision statement – a declaration of objective – innovation leads help teams strategically derive two additional artifacts: the product strategy and the product roadmap.

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Illustration showcasing how a Product managers starts out with a product strategy and ends up going through a product road map to end up in a product release.

How To Convert Client Needs To Establish Clear Product Vision

In this second post in our series, Leading Product Innovation, we look at how ITX innovation leads help clients establish a clear Vision for their software product. In the series’ opening blog, we talked about how Discovery activities guide the product team to answer Why? What? For whom? Here, we explore their role in building stakeholder alignment around the product Vision and articulating that Vision in a way that rallies the team to confidently commit to its fulfillment.

Managing risk. It’s the unavoidable reality of software product leadership. Sometimes that risk comes from not knowing what to do first, or next. Other times it’s the risk of not staying current with technology. Ultimately, product leaders face the risk that any one of these will damage their company’s brand or bottom line.

ITX innovation leads help clients manage that risk – first by guiding the product team through Foundation Stage discovery activities, later transitioning into the Planning Stage of the product development process with a clear product vision.

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