Analytics Milestone 12.5 - Engineering Director Persona (Large FS Org) Research

Previous working Google Doc

What’s this issue all about?

Problem Validation - In prior Google Ventures research we learned that the jobs-to-be-done, pains and motivations for engineering directors vary in meaningful ways based on team size, methodology, technology, product type(s), etc. This has made it difficult to prioritise features in the analytics space.

As a follow-up, this piece of research aims to become more targeted with the type of engineering director we are interested in learning about. We will use this information to create a specific persona (potentially the first of multiple personas) that will help to shape our analytics product direction.

Who is the target user of the feature?

Director of Engineering

Role:

  • Director level

Industry:

  • Financial Services

Org:

  • Large engineering organisation with distributed teams
  • +20 people reporting to director

Culture:

  • Regular product release cadence
  • Interested in improving productivity through analytics... but don’t necessarily know how to do it correctly
    • Trying to establish OKRs, KPIs for individuals / teams / org
    • Monitoring application performance transparently
  • In the middle of a Agile/DevOps/Digital transformation… teams at varying levels of maturity

Tools:

  • Use GitLab

Admin

  • Video recordings ok... but won’t be shared externally

What questions are you trying to answer?

We are currently defining the scope of this milestone. The key questions [WIP] will be...

  1. Engineering Directors - What is top of mind for engineering directors right now? What are their JTBD, pains and motivations?
  2. Culture around productivity - Are they going through an agile/DevOps/digital transformation right now? How do they manage and track their teams? How do they manage their time?
  3. Productivity information flow - What are the key events/moments where productivity information may be useful? What information is needed for reporting upwards, downwards and sideways? What actions would be taken off this data?

What hypotheses and/or assumptions do you have?

  • Directors do not perform rigorous productivity analytics at the moment but would benefit from some guidance.
  • Directors do not want to invest much effort with heavy custom analytics dashboards instead they would prefer to get a bit of value from out-of-the-box dashboards
  • Productivity analytics can be used by directors to track/understand the maturity of teams in an organisation going through an agile / devops / digital transformation.

What decisions will you make based on the research findings?

  • Creation of Engineering Director Persona
  • Strategic direction of analytics product
  • Milestone and roadmap prioritisation
  • Design decisions around analytics dashboard content and layout
  • Further gaps in knowledge that future research can cover

When do you need this research to be completed? (Milestone or date)

By the end of milestone 12.5

  • Screening & recruiting: 21 Oct - 1 Nov
  • Stakeholder interviews: 21 Oct - 1 Nov
  • Interviews & synthesis: 4 - 14 Nov
Edited by Nick Post