Today’s about better engineering. The big players in tech are making it hard for the rest of the companies to strive, the users are concentrating on the overall experience and not the technology you’ve built on and startups are starting to look alike, cloning themselves worldwide.
What can we do better? Well, let’s travel back to some talks we’ve had on better engineering at Techsylvania and let’s see what conclusions can we reach.
First stop: usability.
“User experience encompasses all aspects of the end-users’ interaction with the company, its services, and its products.”
Eric Wood from Telenav has put into the spotlight at a past edition of Techsylvania — the importance of UX. From his point of view, everybody within a company becomes responsible for this aspect: from developers to business people and customer service representatives. How product planning, product design, and product development intersect and why UX concept design and UX pre-flight review are two very important aspects prior to any development sprint — you can find out more on this topic by watching his talk.
Another important step in better engineering is optimizing tech throughput. Niv Liran from Auto1 Group (Europe’s largest car dealer to that date) based his theory on 3 principles:
- Ownership
- Laser-focus
- Transparency
Run less software
“Time is well-spent when our engineers are highly productive, solving only our most important and differentiating challenges.”
Rich Archbold from Intercom had a theory based on engineers’ well-spent time. To stand by his statements he presented some real-life examples based on how the big players (Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple) disrupt our tech world. Hip Chat and Asana lost ground to Slack, Snapchat’s features started to be invisible because Facebook and Instagram adopted them, too or Blue Apron almost went off the market because Amazon came with the same platform proposal. His general conclusion was that we must save time and concentrate on the things that create a competitive advantage.
Engineering reported to the business world
Joyce Shen pointed out technology’s primary means — to build things that can enable businesses. Also, to be open to disruption, because sometimes it’s good: emerging technologies can help a company better serve its customers or to reduce costs.
“Those are significant complex challenges and if any of those applications or technologies are going to address that — that’s good disruption.”
Compared to the business world, technology enablers have the role to make it accessible to anyone. For business owners to adopt technology, they have to understand it very clearly. After all, why adopt machine learning when there’s automation? Here’s where the technology enablers must intervene and develop the abilities to explain this area even to a 3y old.
“The ecosystem is not just about the individuals like you- the entrepreneurs or the developers. An ecosystem is about the universities, the research, the government grants the capital from the VC funds, the accelerators and the startups themselves and the entrepreneurs.”
Creating an ecosystem, being all eyes and ears to the users’ needs and always on the loop for optimizing are our ingredients for better engineering.