Where we understand the Serverless mindset…
Part I: Starting the expedition
Chapter 1: The Value Flywheel Effect
How extraordinary momentum is. The flywheel for business. What the Value Flywheel is: distributing power througout the organization, and turning technology and user needs into momentum and business value.
Chapter 2: Wardley Mapping
What is Wardley Mapping.
Chapter 3: How to Wardley Map
Anatomy of a Wardley Map. 3 types of maps: map of the organization, map of the market, map of the solution (the stack).
Chapter 4: Example Mapping Session
An example mapping session: the conversation anf the map of the solution.
Part II: Phase One: Clarity of Purpose (CEO)
Chapter 5: Finding your North Star
Many business talk about their north star, but in reality, few CEOs have the rigor to detail their north star in length and with metrics.
Frameworks and tools to define north star.
Chapter 6: Obsess over Time to Value
You should not obsess over innovation per se. You should obsess over Time-to-Value.
Chapter 7: Map the Market Competition
The idea at this stage is to understand the market, and find how you can differentiate your product from competitors.
It starts with a good understanding of user needs. To do so, you can use the Jobs-To-Be-Done framework.
Chapter 8: Case Study - A Cloud Guru
Fantastic case study, where we get to see how the founders created a Cloud Guru with a laser-focus north star. Serverless was the natural solution for them.
Part III: Phase Two: Challenge & Landscape (Engineers)
Chapter 9: Environment for Success
Chapter 10: A Sociotechnical System for Change
See your organisation as a socio-technical system. You have the people first (socio), then the tech which supports the people, then you should have in place Problem prevention (through the eye of the architect), and as a result fast Time to value.
See it as a Complex Adaptative System.
Chapter 11: Map your Org Capability
It is a valuable practice to map your org capabilities in a Wardley map. For example, you can map a framework (such as the Secure Development Lifecycle), or a book. To do that, you change the Wardley map x-axis into Concept / Hypothesis / Theory / Accepted.
Chapter 12: Case Study - Workgrid
Interesting use case where we learn how at Workgrid - after clarifying the company’s north star - , the CTO successfully set up a socia technical environment with Serverless-first tenets that enabled the company to build, and grow its product as a SaaS.
Part IV: Phase Three: Next Best Action (Product Leaders)
Chapter 13: The Serverless-First Edge
A succesful technology strategy is “Serverless-first”. Severless-first is the consequence of a relentless focus on business-value. That is the only point. There are obstacles - inertia.
We will also hear a lot of “serverless myths” that are often used by the ones that are reluctant to change. But we have to stay focused on our strategy.
Chapter 14: The Frictionless Dev Experience
One of the most important differenciator between organizations is how frictionless is the developer experience. It is critical that the engineers have an effective development experience. As an example, the use of CDK promotes reusability, and automation and reduces frictions in developing infrastructure as code.
Chapter 15: Map your solution (aka Mapping the Stack)
Map your solution with the engineering team using Wardley Maps. You’ll will learn a lot, and gain insight into the necessary roadmaps (how to move left-side components to the right side).
Chapter 16: Case Study - Liberty Mutual Insurance
This is the journey of Liberty Mutual. The CIO wrote a technology manifesto that commited the organization to a Serverless journey. This manifesto was like the starting horn of their marathon. With enablers such as infrastructure as code, a standard path to production, a learning environment for engineers, and a committed leadership team, they got their Value Flywheel turning. Not only did they achieved business value, but they also built a proud and recognized engineering team.
Part V: Phase Four: Long-Term Value (CTO)
Chapter 17: Problem-Prevention Culture through the Well-Architecture framewok
In the long run, this is essentiel to build a culture of problem-prevention instead of incident management. To achieve this, teams need to follow their Cloud provider Well Architected framework. It can be organized with process flows such as meetings reviewing SCORP qualities (security, costs, opex, reliability, performance) between teams (every 2 weeks). This process drives continuous improvement and knowledge sharing between teasm. The future is a future of high-performing engineering teams working with Wardley maps, probes and experiments. They will build high-quality services focused on delivering values to their customers.
Chapter 18: Sustainability and Space for Innovation
The high-performing organization will have resilient and sustainable systems. It will also have the ability to commoditize its own product, and take a second wave of innovation - through the ILC pattern (Innovate-Leverage-Commoditize). It will have situational awareness, understanding the evolution of its market. It will manage to reduce as low as possible technical debt, and carbon emission - investing thus into a positive image that will favor future recruitment of engineers.
Chapter 19: Map the Emerging Value
You can use Wardley Maps to map emerging value. You map the future capabilities and needs of your users. Maps have patterns. For example, when components move to the right, they create space for innovation.
Chapter 20: Case Study - BBC
Testimony of BBC Head of Architecture for Digital Product : how the BBC used Serverless for approximately 50% of its workload. Serverless provided agility, speed of innovation, with a low cost. For example, the team developed within 2 months a solution to track in realtime the number of users on their online web site (with AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, and Kinesis). They were some limitations of Serverless: some workload (workload with lots of opened network connections, or video transcoding requiring special hardware) could not be migrated. This is not a solution for everything, but it always bring value when it is possible to deploy. Use a Serverless-First approach.
Conclusion: Getting Started
Recognizing the difficulties (and the sad state of many business), this chapter summarizes the actions to be taken in each of the 4 phases to unlock sustainable long-term value from Serverless. Before everything else, business and technology must combine their thinking and align their efforts.
Using the Value Flywheel effect to move an organization serverless
A fiction story of an organization solving its production issues by replatforming in Serverless after an outage.
My Review
The Value Flywheel Effect, by David Anderson, is nothing more than a must-read for all architects, engineers, product owners, CTO and CEO in the digital world. It connects the dots from the user needs to the technology stacks, through a solid approach, using the power of Wardley Maps. The book is structured and illustrated by mapping, and there are gems in every chapter. The use cases presented are strong success examples.
As an architect, I feel I will come back again and again to this book.
When we think that Serverless is just Function-as-a-Service (Lambda), or clever Service capacity-management, we miss the point. Serverless is a mindset: this is alining business needs with technology, with a laser focus on time-to-value. And this focus generates the momentum that grows our business.