Performing a department review/reboot

Just before I recently went on holiday our CEO set me some “homework”.

Key questions

In my role as CTO, he asked me to think about the following questions:

• What would the company look like if we started again?
• What structure (tech, organisation, people, responsibilities) would we put in place for the SaaS business so it can scale and operate to its best?
  • Take a purist view and then a pragmatic view.
• What constraints will we have in future and how can we address them? (Capacity, teams, iteration, technology)
• What would be the next steps?
• Is there anyone we need to let go or change their role?

The approach

I made some notes beforehand and then mostly forgot about work. Occasionally something would come to mind and I would make a note of it and then go back to enjoying my holiday.

When I got back I started to collate my thoughts. It started as a bunch of one line reminders and slowly started to form into something more concrete.

I asked the heads of each team what they thought the future looked like for their teams and the way they would work if, sorry, when the company is successful. This gave me even more material.

I use writing or making notes as a way to think so the first step was to start to flesh out all my notes and bring them into some semblance of a coherent set of thoughts.

I spent two weeks, in between meetings and other commitments, working through this and answering some of the questions it raised. There were a few big decisions that needed to be made so I spent time thinking and analysing the impact of them before making those decisions.

Once I was happy with the document of thoughts, after a bunch of reworking, the next step was to produce a slide deck to present to the rest of the management team. This was relatively quick to produce but the challenge has been to keep this at the right level to be able to explain things and the decisions made without getting too “techie”.

This will be presented to them next week.

A template

In case, it is useful to someone else these are the areas I covered and reviewed in my document - obviously the actual content is commercially sensitive so I can’t share that.

Roadmap - a view of the roadmap ahead for the product(s) after discussion with the product team.

Architecture - the direction that the architecture of the products will take based on the roadmap. This includes some fundamental decisions that impact other areas including resourcing.

Resourcing - what do the teams need to look like and where are the gaps we need to fill.

Organisation - a discussion around how we will organise the department and teams as we grow. This includes changes to our processes, the way we deliver software and interact with other departments.

Culture - a reminder of our current culture, that we have worked hard to build, and how we maintain and improve that. This is really important as we add new people and create new teams.

People - a review of the people in the department and their strengths and areas that we need to work on together.

Tools - a review of the tools we use and plan to use in the future.

Expected Pain Points - identifying the pain points we are likely to encounter and how they can be minimized.

CTO Role - a review of my role and how it will need to change.

First Steps - the initial first steps that need to happen to deliver this.

Hopefully this exercise and the decisions made will help set the company up for success going forward.