But, we are a product company

Technical leadership consulting work takes me to various technology organizations based primarily out of Bangalore. I meet people in following roles: manager training, VP HR, VP/Director engineering, head technology or CTO, head of a business unit and India center head. By now, I am quite familiar with first responses I get after I introduce myself as a consultant assisting organizations in maturing technical leadership. One such peculiar response is: “But, we are a product company”.

As I try to understand the underlying assumptions behind this response, I discover either or both of following:

1. We are part of a global product company. Technology innovation is part of our DNA and technical leadership is very important to us. Hence, technical leadership is not our problem (at least not among the top few problems).
2. You seem to come from a services background (i.e. majority of your experience comes from IT services business). We are a product company. Hence, our challenges are different.

Both the assumptions have an element of truth in them. However, many times, I find that the element weighs much lesser than the overall truth.

I talk to senior technical specialists to understand the kind of work India center is doing. I ask what kind of contribution they are making to product roadmap either to the product features (called feature roadmap) or to its architecture (sometimes referred to as product quality roadmap). Usually answer is “none”. Hardly anyone considers mentoring as a serious responsibility. Assisting business development is not part of their agenda. Writing white papers or prototyping is unheard of. These are hardly indicative of a mature technical leadership.

The second assumption (services vs products) misses the most fundamental objective of a for-profit organization: economic value creation. For an engineering organization, it does not matter who owns the IP. What matters is what value you are adding. I have been part of services engagements where we had end-to-end product development responsibility including requirement specification (way back in 1998). On the other hand, I meet many technical specialists whos work hardly creates any value in the overall product context. Many times, product manager (who sits in one of the developed countries) does not have time for these people and one can understand why.

It is no surprise that Economic Times article “Grooming Technical Leaders” which presents technical leadership at Texas Instruments (which has created brand for its technical leadership) says that “While publishing papers and patents are important criteria for selection, a bigger criterion is the impact of the technology created by the engineer on the business”. It is time India centers of global product organizations start assessing themselves on the business impact due to technology creation and not just cost saving.

What is technical leadership?

Welcome to this blog on technical leadership!

It has been 9 months since I started conducting 1-day workshop on “Becoming a successful technical leader”. Over 150 budding technical leaders from 10 technology organizations (all based in Bangalore) have participated in this workshop. Information about the workshop can be found here.

During the workshop, we discuss various topics related to technical leadership mostly in the context of the technology industry in India. For example, why do we need technical leaders? Do we really need them at this point? What should be the role of such people in services industry? What should a technical leader be doing in a products company? And so on. I end up meeting various stakeholders like senior managers (including Chief Technology/Development Officers), project managers and technical leaders. I intend to use this blog to express my own ideas on this topic as well as publish conversations I have with various stakeholders.

In this article, we will look at various connotations of the term “Technical leader”. I have come across following usages:

1. Person with designation “technical leader”
2. Person leading or managing technical people
3. Person on technical career ladder (known as tech-ladder)
4. Person who carries a personal technical brand

I guess all the usages are relevant in their contexts and they are overlapping in their meaning. For example, most of the time, a person with designation “technical leader” is also a person who is managing technical people. Similarly, a person on technical ladder is also the one who carries a personal technical brand. However, if I were to choose one defining characteristic of a technical leader, I would choose the last one: i.e. the one who carries personal technical brand.

What is a personal technical brand? It is your ability to influence a bunch people with your technical expertise. These people may or may not be reporting to you. This is where it differs from what is called “span of control” (people directly or indirectly reporting to you). Many times personal brand goes beyond the organization. We will discuss this in more detail in the subsequent articles.