Anatomy of a Prototyping Engagement: AnyCompany & AnyProto
Part 1: The Ramp Up
This post is part of a series walking through how I approach a PACE engagement end to end: the considerations, the decisions, and the consequences of getting them right or wrong. Details here are anonymized and composited for illustration; AnyCompany and AnyProto are stand-ins, not a real customer or product.
Series index | Part 2: The Discovery →
Scene
The engagement begins when a Technical Project Manager from my team pings me to hop on a call regarding my next engagement. During a short discussion I'm briefed on very high-level details: who AnyCompany is, and a surface-level description of the use case.
Soon after the brief, I'm in a Slack channel with the account team for AnyCompany, where discussions about AnyProto are already underway.
Now What?
Despite seemingly receiving very little information directly, I now have a lot of resources I can leverage to prepare for the upcoming discovery session with AnyCompany.
Read the account's history first. Simply knowing which customer I'm working with gives me a high-level view of a lot of their history with AWS. That context can be useful for informing my approach and expectations with AnyCompany.
Figure out which situation I'm walking into. Some customers are technically adept and only need to partner with AWS when they need more hands on keyboards and development muscle (I can expect plenty of support from a technical stakeholder).
Some customers have very limited software development resources and commonly outsource the development of their systems.
Some customers are using this prototype as a "bake-off," pitting me in competition with another cloud provider (these are usually classified as "must win" scenarios where I can pull in additional resources if needed).
Sometimes the customer is coming to us because they've been very disappointed with the service of another provider and want to move (a potential big score and the start of a new relationship).
Sometimes it's a simple leadership change.
Whatever the situation and history, now is a great time to find out.
Know what to watch for. For this fantasy project, let's say AnyCompany has had several successful prototypes with AWS, but none have gotten off the ground due to conflicts with budget planning and "internal politics."
This hint tells me I have to be very watchful for stakeholder attendance, engagement, roles, and budget ownership.
If the right people or the right attitudes aren't in the room, that's something to escalate to my manager and account team. They have the ability to call out and influence AnyCompany's behavior.
Check the account team's alignment, not just the customer's. If the account team has done their due diligence, I'll have some written project briefs about AnyProto available to consume on my own time. It's very important for me to read those briefs, but it's also helpful to understand whether the account team has some kind of slant or ulterior strategy that AnyProto fits into.
Goals that lie at a longer time horizon matter because I may be better equipped to set the account team up for future success. Howeverm, I am equally curious to see whether the account team is on the same page as AnyCompany.
If goals aren't aligned amongst internal and external stakeholders, then there is plenty of room for chaos and dissonance in the project. The consequences of which lead to poor outcomes for everyone involved in AnyProto.
The brief itself. AnyCompany is a mature media and entertainment company that has petabytes of video archives recently acquired through the acquisition of another company.
The VP of video at AnyCompany has a plan to monetize the content by creating a searchable marketplace for archive clips. Until the discovery session, I'll use this info as a general signal for what I want to research in preparation for the engagement.
Prepare to listen, not pitch. I can also use the brief to present to the customer the high-level information I'm already familiar with, but for the discovery session, listening is more important than presenting.
I prepare a short discovery meeting slide deck with the five Working Backwards questions that will help guide the discussion and set the stage for AnyProto.