5 Ps: Ingredients for Technology Success

There are lots of ways of organising a digital or technology capability, and I’ve tried many of them. Most of them don’t work, resulting in slow, bureaucratic organisations which fail to? realise the full potential of technology. However, over time, through difficult lessons learnt in many different places, I have come to believe that there are five ingredients of a successful technology organisation. They all begin with the letter P, so let’s call this the 5 Ps model. It looks something like this:

And it can be described something like this:

Platforms are highly homogenous, standardised, software-defined technology capabilities which enable products to be built at speed, with confidence that they will scale and be reliable and secure.

Products are highly specialised functional capabilities which deliver value to end users.

People are people! But the talent and capabilities of the people who do these jobs matter, as does the level of trust and autonomy they are afforded. In this model, people are expected to to be trusted experts with the power to manage, develop and continuously improve their products and platforms.

Practices are common ways of working which unite people who are otherwise distributed into autonomous platform and product teams. They are at least as much cultural as they are formal, and are driven by the pride and experience of expert professionals.

Performance comprises a set of meaningful metrics which describe the success of platform and product teams, and which are owned and driven by those platform and product teams.

This is a very simple model, and there is much to challenge and qualify. For example, we could point out that platforms are products too - except that the end users are development teams and data science teams within the organisation. Similarly, we could observe that there are no true end users in this picture, which will probably horrify user centred design people. We could add them, but to me they are the reason that product teams exist, and their experience and feedback is a fundamental aspect of performance.

Despite these shortcomings, there are a few reasons that I like this simple model.

First, I think that the platform and product distinction is key to settling the debate between standardisation and autonomy which has been going on since the first technology teams existed. Platforms are those things where standardisation has high value, and products are those things where variation has high value. The distinction helps us optimise for the features of each.

Second, people appear twice! Despite automation, despite the advent of artificial intelligence, technology is still a human endeavour, and the ways we build, treat, support and respect teams are the most important leadership choices we make.

Third, performance and practices are a function of teams rather than (or as well as) a function of leadership. Teams that own their own professional practices and goals tend to outperform those with practices and goals imposed upon them.

This simple picture is clearly not a full operating model or a transformation plan. But it helps me think about the features I am looking for when leading a technology team: are we clear about the distinction between platforms and products? How well do we understand and treat our people? Have those people developed professional practices? Do they have clear measures of their performance, and do they own them?

I am sure that there are better models, but this simple set of 5 Ps helps me make sense of a complex field: I hope some readers will find it helpful too.

(Views in this article are my own.)