A New World for Architects

For nearly 20 years, I have held several roles within the Enterprise Architecture – namely Account Architect, Transformation Architect/Lead, and Enterprise Architect, to just name a few. The primary responsibility has always been #doBetter, find new ways to leverage the capabilities of information technology to help run the business better. In 2020, I transitioned my role from Architect to Product Owner. I discovered, there is a lot of commonality between these two roles, however, there are several fundamental and important differences – such as RESPONSIBILITY for Business Outcome. 

The goal of this blog is to highlight these differences and I hope they could be useful to other transitioning architects, also learn from those who have already made this transition ahead of me.

Role as an Architect 

As an Architect, my day-to-day activities included – meeting with stakeholders, translating business strategies into capabilities roadmaps, creating blueprints, defining business cases, ensuring implementation and managed roadmap compliance, and worked with project teams.   

Both personally and professionally, I extracted job satisfaction from the fact that I helped the organization make the right choices, helped build solutions that meet the needs of those whom we called customers, managed to keep the middle bureaucracy at bay, so our staff can freely do their job. During this period, I witnessed many stellar successes and perhaps just as many disastrous failures, but most with mixed subpar results.

I was looking to do something different, COVID-19 pandemic provided a catalyst for change.  

New Role as a Product Owner

The Opportunity: This new role had no handcuffs, a blank slate to create a compelling product to address:

• Problem space: Enterprise 
• Problem to solve: Build a platform that will bring Social Software tenants into Corporate Systems to help improve Relationshipism (improve the relationship between staff and the organizations)
• First use case - Improve Intake for Change Programs with a keen eye on Execution and Post Change Value Optimization. Through Relationshipism, help improve the investment efficiency of change programs. 
• Product Name: Platform WhiteSparrow 

This was an enormous opportunity not only to define an architecture roadmap but to drive positive change. I defined my new role in terms of how will I spend my working hours. 

1. Product Position – understand the market and create a fit-for-market product that people will love to use: 70% of my time.
2. Architecture Challenges – find solutions to technical problems. Given we are using cloud-native technologies, there is no shortage: 15% of my time.
3. Financial Return on Investment – ensure the most prudent use of limited financial resources: 5% of my time.
4. Relationshipism – ensure our team working environment is consistent with the type of product we are creating: 10% of my time. 

1) Product Position 

I was familiar with the Product Excellence Framework (Productboard), which defines three dimensions and each dimension has five stages of maturity. At the start of this project, we were at stage 1 on all three dimensions: 

• Deep User Insight 
• Clear Product Strategy
• Coherent Roadmap  

My immediate task was to help us move along the maturity path of all three dimensions, not as an academic exercise, but on the shop floor. 

• User Insight: I spend most of my time, seeking out consumers, payers, and associations that guide the work of our customers – Value of Relationshipism. My goal is to build true partnerships and engage in a sincere dialogue to understand real pain-points and obstacles, not in a covert attempt to sell. After three months – I believe we are now at stage 3.5 out of 5 on the Deep User Insight dimension. This work will continue until we reach and stay at stage 5.  
• Product Strategy: At the start of the project, the product strategy was brief. It was a two-page document that changed nearly every week, at least that is how it felt. After three months of diligent work, product strategy is now based on a reasonably sound understanding of our customer and their needs, technology capabilities, financial resources, and staff skills. As we learn and do more, the product strategy will further get refined and entrenched in our team’s culture.
• Coherent Roadmap: One thing everybody on our team understood from day one, the Purpose of the Product and litmus test of success. The product roadmap was developed iteratively by elaborating on four innovation data points - understand the problem, unique nugget, MVP to validate the next hypothesis, product adoption obstacles. I maintain the roadmap and ensure everybody on the team has shared ownership of the total roadmap and their respective parts.  

2) Technical Challenges

• Technology: WhiteSparrow utilizes Cloud Native (Kubernetes @ Azure), SSO, Mobile Computing, and Machine Learning technologies. We worked through many technical challenges. In all of this, I have developed a new appreciation for complexity in this technology, business continuity risks, and the need for skilled staff.
• Machine Learning Model: The value add is enabled by the machine learning capability, the goal is to find ways to engage and retain productive and mutually beneficial engagement with the staff. There are no defined models for this, we are constantly designing and testing new models to build – value-based mutually beneficial trusting relationships   

3) Financials – Return on Investment 

• As a product owner, I have the ultimate responsibility to deliver reasonable Financial Benefits to our customers, employees, and investors.
• Within this task block, I spend my time on two major activities – raise funds and ensure the most prudent use of scarce resources. 

4) Relationshipism

• The core of the WhiteSparrow platform is to develop tools to engage enterprise staff for mutually beneficial returns. Social media has found ways to successfully engage 3.5 billion people (Oberlo) from all walks of life. 
• Relationshipism implies that when people share a common Purpose, not only they can accomplish the unthinkable but the work becomes satisfying and rewarding. Our goal is to leverage Social Media techniques to build Value-Based Trusted Relationships between employees and among Organizations and their employees. 
• Not only WhiteSparrow platform is designed to promote Relationshipism for a Shared Purpose within the enterprises but also in our daily lives.

?Challenges Ahead

As an Architecture community, we often focused our energy on finding new modeling techniques, tools, and methods. The biggest challenge I found is how to build better relationships with people.

After some experience, I now engage with people not with the intent to sell WhiteSparrow, rather learn more about their experiences. I regularly add about 30 to 40 people to my LinkedIn account per week and routinely have 5 to 10 new conversations every week. 

Looking forward to learning from the experiences of others?