Zone Management: Five Areas Under Construction Pt. 4

Zone to Win has been in the market for three years now, and in the past year, a number of companies, including Autodesk, F5, Forescout, Blackberry, Avnet, and Lenovo, have embraced zone management as a framework for “organizing to compete in an age of disruption.” Many of the ideas in the book are playing out pretty much as advertised, but there are a number of areas where it’s clear that innovation and adjustments are needed. Here are the five most prominent ones at present:

1. Integrating acquisitions
2. Performance contracts for the Productivity Zone
3. Performance matrix for product management and engineering
4. Engineering straddling the Performance and Productivity Zones
5. Professional Services straddling the Performance and Productivity Zones

We’ll be taking each of these on in a separate blog. For this one the topic is:

Engineering straddling the Performance and Productivity Zones

In the prior blog, we looked at how engineering’s relationship with product management has changed with the paradigm shift from an era of product-centric to one of customer-centric development. In a product-centric model, product management reports to engineering and processes market requirements into prioritized lists of desired features to feed a product roadmap. The engineering function transforms that roadmap into a series of releases which are then launched by marketing and sold by sales. By contrast, in the customer-centric development model that drives so many as-a-service business models, product management is accountable for product success end to end, from development to marketing to sales to customer adoption and value realization. Engineering works in a performance matrix with product management to co-create product for the Performance Zone, as previously discussed.

But wait, there’s more!

In the architecture of as-a-service, cloud-based applications are increasingly dependent on well-architected underlying platforms. These platforms develop through three stages, each of which creates significant incremental value:

1. Platform for internal engineering productivity. 
2. Open the platform to customers for company-specific application development
3. Open the platform to ecosystem partners for commercial application development

Unlike product development, platform development is engineering led end to end. Much of the heavy lifting is done during Stage 1, in the Productivity Zone, with no direct monetization involved. This means that the engineering function as a whole must straddle two zones. For product development it is a co-creator in the Performance Zone. For platform development, as well as other productivity investments in tools, methodologies, test automation, and quality control, it operates in the Productivity Zone. 

The impact of this straddle should not be underestimated. In zone management, each zone operates under a different governance model, each with its own metrics, KPIs, and ROI. It is critical to keep the zones separate. When one zone imposes its governance model on another zone, gears clash, tempers flare, and progress grinds to a halt. In this case, it is critical that the Performance Zone respect the platform team’s productivity objectives, including paying down technical debt, as well as freeing future development from low-level, error-prone task work. At the same time, it is equally important for the Productivity Zone to respect the product team’s economic objectives, especially the need to rapidly neutralize a disruptive innovator’s competitive differentiation. The Productivity Zone is process-centric. It wants to measure twice and cut once. The Performance Zone is customer-centric. It needs to stay alert to market signals and change course well before all the data is in. Both must seek the efficient frontier between furthering their efforts and supporting those of the other zone.  

That’s what I think. What do you think?

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Geoffrey Moore | Zone to Win | Geoffrey Moore Twitter | Geoffrey Moore YouTube