The Software Company CEO’s Guide to Innovation and Value Creation
There are a lot of stories that compare the success of software companies to the successful launch of a rocket ship. This analogy is particularly helpful in understanding how to efficiently deploy capital in order to achieve success!
To set the stage, let's say you’re the CEO of a software company here on Earth. Your customers, however, are up in orbit, and your mission is to create a rocket (your software product) that can successfully reach them in space.
In this article, we’ll talk about the three things you need to build the rocket to do that:
1: The Spacecraft?
Your spacecraft is your value delivery vehicle – it’s the thing that your customers can see and touch. Think of all of the aspects of your product that you can monetize:
Basically, all the things that save them time and money in their business are things you can monetize, and they'll happily approve your invoices.
You have to build the spacecraft because it’s what captures your unique value proposition.
2: The Booster
The booster is the launch vehicle that gets your spacecraft into orbit. Its sole purpose is to safely, effectively, and efficiently get your spacecraft into orbit and to your customers.
Now, the booster has to be specific to your spacecraft. Fundamentally, it’s just a whole heck of a lot of "plumbing code," that’s easy to get wrong. It can also blow up on the launch pad or in the air (and blow your spacecraft, budget, and target dates with it).
The booster is something you have to either build, buy, or do a little bit of both. There’s more flexibility here since it doesn’t really have anything to do with your unique value proposition, though it does have to be specific to your spacecraft.
3: Technical Leadership
The expression “it’s not rocket science,” has become popular to refer to any field that doesn’t require deep or nuanced expertise. But when you watch two SpaceX boosters land in synchrony after successfully flinging a Tesla toward Mars…yeah, that looks like rocket science!?
These days anyone can write code and run it in the cloud. That’s not the point. To?efficiently,?effectively, and?profitably?build successful, stable, scalable, single-source, multi-tenant cloud platforms and products takes some serious technical leadership talent.
You don’t need to hire a software rocket scientist – but having one on-call can certainly keep you out of trouble!
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The 80/20 Problem
Here’s the dirty little secret of software product development: your team is spending up to 80% of their time working on the plumbing code in your booster, not working on your spacecraft!
On one hand, it makes sense for your team to be spending the lion’s share of their time on the booster because it’s the most difficult, complex, and risky part of the rocket. If it doesn’t work, your spacecraft will never make it to orbit. On the other hand, your team is spending up to 80% of their time doing things that don’t deliver value to your customers, that they may not be particularly qualified to work on, and that’s very, very easy to get wrong!
Plus... don't forget that once it’s built, you have to maintain it. And since it represents 80% of your codebase, you’ll have to spend 80% of your maintenance budget and headcount just on that.?That leaves you only 20% for innovation, new features, or CI/CD things that actually matter to your customers!
Eventually, this problem means that you get lapped by your competitors.
Automate the 80%
A great development platform, like PlatformPlus by Modularis will free up your team to focus only on the 20% of code that delivers value to your customers – the things that generate your revenue. Here are three key factors for evaluating your next PaaS/development platform:
It Has to Be Reusable.
Just like SpaceX, your booster needs to be 100% reusable. Why throw it away time after time when you can build it once and reuse it? Horizontal platforms made specifically to help software companies de-risk and accelerate the creation of their own vertical platforms on top will reduce development effort significantly.
It Has to Be Well Maintained and Fully Supported.
Your platform should be accountable for maintaining your booster technology. It’s their responsibility to keep up with advancements in technologies from Microsoft, Amazon, and others. Since the right platform is based on timeless first principles of software architecture, you should always have access to a clean, low-risk, low-cost upgrade path to the latest versions of the platform's technology, which allows your products to remain current and fresh.
Support is also paramount. Make sure that the platform you choose as your booster comes with the leadership and technical chops to help you deploy the technology within your team.
For example, the ‘Plus’ in PlatformPlus gives you access to our senior technical leaders, who are responsible for training, advising, and guiding your team to attain the highest development velocity possible, while simultaneously minimizing risk.
It’s Has to Be Powerful and Automation Heavy
Automating the construction of the vast majority of the infrastructure/plumbing code for your software products and platforms is key to developing and deploying your product faster. The architecture must be sound, scalable, flexible, secure, and built to last.?
And no matter how complex your data or use cases, PlatformPlus can handle it. In fact, the level of automation actually?increases?with complexity.?
See you in Space
Your mission is to get your software product or platform to market: quickly, correctly, and cost-effectively. If you can slash development time by up to 80%, defects by up to 90%, and free your developers to work only on those things that you and your customers value, isn’t that worth a look? PlatformPlus helps you get the most out of the team you already have.