The Unicorn Project: The Fifth Ideal — Customer Focus
Software Engineering Topic of the Day #46
Credit: Originally written and published by Benedict Dodd on Armakuni’s internal Slack
The Unicorn Project: The Fifth Ideal — Customer Focus
Lastly, the fifth ideal is customer focus. It was a really fun one to explore, and it was brought to my attention by Chris O’Malley, CEO at Compuware, and by Jeffrey Snover, technical fellow at Microsoft. Customer focus relates to the difference between core and contextas defined by Geoffrey Moore. Core creates lasting durable business advantage, whereas context is everything else. Core is what customers are willing to pay for, context is what they don’t care about. As an example, we love our HR systems, we love payroll and the systems that support employees, but customers are not willing to pay organizations for world-class payroll systems. These systems are mission critical, but they don’t create competitive advantage. As we fund core features and applications, we need to make sure that context doesn’t kill core. — “The Unicorn Project and the Five Ideals: Interview with Gene Kim”, InfoQ
With this we’re taking the idea that some things do contribute to a Unique Selling Point and the goal for the company and other things to not. It also says that while things outside core might be interesting, really the’re not contributing to the organization.
Radical Focus calls spending too much time on Context “Shiny Object Syndrome”, and is a nice story exploring defining core, context and pitfalls along the way.
Q1: Should Core & Context work be managed differently?
Q2: Simon Wardley says “there is no core”, is he right?
