A deepdive into our operating model

In order to set any product up for success it's crucial to define a refined operating model with a limited set of roles, an underlying talent model, a flexible delivery model and a transparent administrative model. Let's unpack...

Setting product teams up for success

Product development involves many different viewpoints. It's tempting to branch out roles for various specialty domains and build large teams, introducing overhead and unnecessary alignment. Our base assumption is that it's more efficient to work with a small and multidisciplinary team towards clear north star objectives. This north star can take many shapes and forms (i.e.: improving scalability and uptime, increasing conversion, new feature development etc). These objectives will evolve over time as your product evolves.

We created a lightweight model with limited roles but maximum ownership to reflect this philosophy.

• Product owner: embodies specific industry or academic knowledge
• Product manager: shapes the product roadmap and orchestrates the daily delivery process
• Chapter lead: subject matter expert who assures consistency and training across multiple teams
• Delivery: people from various chapters delivering on the product roadmap objectives
  

Our chapters consist of the following subject matter domains:

• Product design: turning roadmap objectives into validated clickable prototypes
• Software engineering: front-end, back-end and embedded engineering
• Data science & engineering: structuring and activating data
• Growth marketing: attracting and converting the right user audiences
• Customer success: setting users up for success and turning them into ambassadors

We standardised schedules across all products:

• Sprint model: planning / daily standup / demo / retrospective
• Roadmap meeting: weekly sync with relevant stakeholders where we validate the next (functional) objectives
• Product chapter meeting: every 6 weeks we bring the whole team together to validate specific chapter quality standards. Each chapter has a default checklist that we run through that gets validated with the delivery team and the chapter lead.
• Product vision sessions: periodic moments where we take a step back to get fully aligned on the overall product direction
  

Delivery vs flexibility

It has been well-established that there is a net-positive business case in the long run if you introduce flexibility into the software development process. There's a simple underlying reason: it's impossible to define all parameters upfront when you build something from the ground up, yet you want your engineers to make good, long-term oriented decisions in the interest of the product along the way.

There's a common misunderstanding with regards to the daily activities of a software engineer. Creating new features is crucial, yet it's just as important to deal with technical debt, refactoring, infrastructure optimisations and monitoring essential quality indications (errors, security, performance, ..).

The traditional waterfall model has rightfully been set aside and replaced with an operating model based on 'agile' principles. This leaves every team to define its own flavour of agile, operating principles and roles.

Operating principles we hold on to:

• Play the long game: success won't come overnight, but over longer periods of time the best product will always win
• Welcome change: priorities and requirements will shift constantly based on user requests and feedback
• Pull on the same rope: real co-creation is the only path towards sustainable value creation with shared tooling and objectives
• Choose progress over process: break through the roadblocks - build!
• Honour great engineering: celebrate delivery and codebase quality
• Raise the quality bar: the work is never done, always aspire for more and better
  

How we partner

Our partnerships reflect these principles. We simply want to set bold ambitions up for success.
There are 3 types of engagements we enter into:

• Service model: the created intellectual property will integrally belong to the client in return for a correct payment of fees
• Venturing model: a structural partnership in which we co-invest into a separate legal entity in return for a minority part of the equity
• Licensing model: we absorb the investment and we reserve the right to exploit the product to a broader market

Don't hesitate to reach out to hello@panenco.com to discuss a possible cooperation.