At Future, we use the Horizon planning model to frame our "what's important right now" to ensure we focus on growth for today and tomorrow. At any one time, the business will be undertaking a series of initiatives that would deliver short and long term goals. Please see the diagram below.
Within the Technology & Engineering team, we also apply this methodology when developing our tech stack. Our tech roadmap governs the projects we undertake. It ensures that we align our technical resources and prioritise work in tandem with our horizon goals. This is a joined up approach which enables cross team alignment and collaboration to all deliver against their objectives. At the same time, we are ensuring that we monetise our brands as efficiently and effectively as possible.
Technology & Engineering team constantly works with the business to deliver against the horizon goals.
The aim of this framework is to provide us with the right and the relevant level of focus. In turn, we can prioritise what would be the strategic bets and or projects that we believe we believe will make a tangible measurable difference to our business.
It allows us to generate top-down, bottom-up alignment. It also allows us to present, prioritise, invest and deliver new initiatives that be functionality, new product or project. There is also a feedback loop within, which gives us the checks and balances to inform us if our strategy is working.
At an operational level, we have flexibility woven within this framework in the form of the lean value tree. A cost-effective methodology to prove or disprove our hypotheses and strategies, and then course correct/pivot accordingly leveraging our ABtesting Platform to execute and bring ideas to life in the form of POCs (Proofs of Concepts).
(Image credit: Future)
In a nutshell, here are our key questions to keep our technology priorities aligned:
What is our purpose?
Does our strategy support our vision?
How can we deliver our strategy?
What is the quickest and leanest way to test our hypotheses?
We ask these questions of our core segments: namely PlatformUX, Adtech, and Ecomtech… this guides our technical resource investment against Horizon 1, 2 and 3 initiatives. And to bring this to life,
Test Driven Development: the Good, the Nice, and the Better
Write Better Code with SOLID Principles (PHP Examples)
Improving our internal tools - Part I: Design process for Flexi UI
