In the following article, Gartner provides a series of tools to help your organization mature, enabling effective collaboration with other teams, reducing unnecessary efforts, and delivering superior digital products.

Refine your business acumen

As those responsible for delivering new digital products, software engineering leaders must bridge the gap between pure functionality and usability. Unfortunately, many fail to connect the dots between their team’s work and how it relates to the needs of the end user. This disconnect makes it challenging to build compelling business cases for the technologies, personnel, and platforms needed to create new digital products. If you can’t effectively communicate the business value of software engineering (including return on investment), you’re unlikely to receive more than lukewarm support from those controlling the budget.

To achieve high quality, software teams need continuous feedback and a DevOps approach.

Software engineering leaders who are not familiar with key business terms and concepts often fail to fulfill the product vision. Ultimately, products may meet requirements but fail to meet expectations; at best, they become temporary solutions that do not align with long-term product strategies. It is the responsibility of the software engineering leader to develop business vision for the benefit of the company (and their own job security).

Here are some tips to help you move forward in this area:

• Contribute content with business cases that illustrate how technical capabilities drive business capabilities.
• Help evaluate investments that align with business outcomes.
• Work with product owners to assess the technological costs of product roadmaps.
• Help your teams improve their business communication skills.
• Make sure each team knows exactly what they are asked to build. This means understanding the business case and the technical capabilities required.

Sync with product management.

A software engineering leader who hasn’t partnered with product management is missing half of the picture: the half that shows what the customer is looking for. Encourage your product owners to establish continuous user feedback and product analysis to provide insight into whether solutions and features are meeting business productivity goals. When engineers have access to user feedback, meeting customer needs stops being a guessing game. Delivered features can be refactored or improved to increase customer satisfaction. For software engineering teams, product management is essential to ensure alignment with roadmaps, including the continuous delivery of features.

• Work with product management to ensure that software delivery is aligned with business-oriented metrics.
• Ensure that engineers work closely with product owners and managers to refine the backlog, clearly defining and prioritizing work items to reduce distractions and improve delivery efficiency.
• Invest in instrumentation: Instrument the products to help teams understand how their products perform on the ground. They should monitor usage through web analytics, product data, and digital experience tracking.
• Enhance the developer experience and keep teams focused on continuous improvement by applying platform engineering.

Work together to change the culture.

Software delivery modernization includes automation whenever possible (e.g., in testing and deployment). To deliver a high-quality product, software engineering teams need continuous feedback and a DevOps approach.

• Improve delivery and reduce waste by automating the software delivery process and establishing a strategic process to identify, build, and use reusable services.
• Work with other functional leaders (e.g., product management leaders, infrastructure, and operations leaders) to change the culture by creating shared goals and metrics linked to the organizational strategy.
• Adopt agile methods and engineering practices that reduce waste by incorporating quality
• Advocate for continuous learning and experimentation.
• Reject the “tools first” approach: Form a cross-functional team, define processes and practices, and then acquire tools to support those processes.
• Use a platform engineering approach to create internal self-service developer platforms for software delivery and product lifecycle management.
• Identify critical gaps and prioritize investment in modernizing application architectures and technologies.