Product Vision for Tech Atlas

Alex Kurkin

Alex enjoys building, mentoring, growing teams and then lead them into deep water to tackle challenging problems 🚀 He is keen to experiment with ways of working and innovative technical approaches. It is important for Alex to be committed to highest standard in every initiative he is involved in 🧨

Intro

Below is a real-world example of a product vision written in Amazon's PR/FAQ style (read more about it in Working Backwards book)

Read why it's important to have clear definition of in our Tech Atlas - Product Vision article. Use it as an inspiration to define your future.

Tech Atlas Press Release

Brilliant Consulting - Privileged and Confidential - November 1, 2021

Build high-performance teams by creating alignment and reducing risk along the way.

A coaching tool that guides and supports engineering leaders allowing them to discover techniques and practices used by high-performing teams around the world, help them build up alignment within the team and derisk software development.

Global — November 1, 2021

Brilliant Consulting announced the launch of Atlas, product that provides a holistic overview of practices, approaches and techniques that can be used by product and engineering leaders in order to build up and maintain alignment throughout an organization. Atlas is a place to discover new techniques and practices that will help you align the team and derisk your software development.

There's a global shortage of Engineering talent. Growing engineering talent is hard, growing engineering leaders is even harder. COVID has forced us to go remote, but we didn't have enough time to prepare for it. There's no single "wide lense" view of possible approaches and practices to select from to ensure smooth delivery of your software products. Teams start misaligned and then it takes hard work to build up alignment. There's a lot of blindspots for emerging engineering leaders and doing it alone without appropriate coaching is hard.

Engineering leaders and teams need guidance on how to define what we are building, setup development process, what are our "Ways of working", how to build alignment in a team, what are crucial elements to derisk application development. Tech Atlas has been created to help leaders coach and guide their teams through 3 main features:

Discovery map. Categorised high level overview of useful approaches, practices and techniques used by successful engineering teams around the world to tackle 2 biggest issues for organizations: lack of alignment and risky deliveries.
Playbooks. Step-by-step guides that help guide you through a process to help achieve certain outcome. For example: What are the steps to take for developing new product.
Case studies. Don't just take our word for it, we've prepared case studies from around the industry to showcase example usages of certain tactics and approaches.

"We're thrilled to beta launch Tech Atlas with our existing customers to help engineering leaders build alignment within their teams and provide guiderails to their teams on how to derisk application development" said Alex Kurkin, CEO at Brilliant Consulting. "This is a game-changing product that revolutionizes how companies develop their engineering talent. We can't wait to see positive impact in organizations who started using Tech Atlas as part of their day-to-day operations."

Tech Atlas is easy to use and it is available as a responsive website that you can easily access both on your desktop and on your mobile when on the go. Built-in smart search helps you find right solutions to the problems you experience. It is simple to get started, intuitive to use and easy to share findings with your team.

"Wow, this is amazing how well it gives me bird's-eye view of so many different and hugely important topics. Previously I had to read dozens of books and hundreds of blog posts in order to get access to knowledge that is nicely packed together on this website. Huge win and time saver for me" said James Kristensen, 32, Tech Lead at eCom company from Austin, Texas. "I love how Atlas helps product and engineering teams bridge the gap to build up alignment between teams. Notoriously tough challenge to solve. Also it exposes some of the important topics we need to be covering from engineering perspective and it helps me align the team on these items."

"It's a great coaching tool I use with my reports to ensure the team is working using industry best practices and techniques", said Marc Crespo, 44, VP of Engineering at logistics startup from New York, NY. "Team that worked on Atlas did a great job to dissect the alignment issue and find right balance between discovery and guidelines"

To get access to Tech Atlas sign up here techatlas.dev

FAQ

Q: How to bring Tech Atlas into true implementation? What are the ways to apply Tech Atlas? A: There are couple of ways to bring Tech Atlas into implementation. First, you can get at a glance view of all of the areas that are important to get right in order to successfully devlier value to your customers on time: Team, Approach, Process and "cherry-pick" items for review that are relevant to you. Second, you can use pre-defined Playbooks that are targeted at helping you solve a very specific and narrow problem.

Q: How would you use Tech Atlas to solve a real-world problems engineering leaders have at work? A: Tech Atlas helps you look holistically at the problem and source of the problem. In addition to providing guidance on a solution it helps you look at "colateral" things that will help you get rid of the problem in a first place. Also, it helps you to find unknown unknown.

Q: Is Tech Atlas only useful for newly created teams? A: Tech Atlas is useful for any team that seeks to improve itself whether it's just forming or already performing. We as leaders are responsible for creating context and environment for a team to flourish and grow the talent within the team. Tech Atlas enables you to do exactly that.

Q: If you are forming new team, how would you use Tech Atlas? A: I would review Playbook related to Remote Native ways of working and see if it will be beneficial for my situation to apply those.

Q: How does Tech Atlas help ensure success in execution? A: Depending on the definition of what "success" is for your situation, Tech Atlas at the very least can increase your chances of getting to "success" state 🙂