Just as a ship without an anchor risks being swept away in a storm, product development floats off course without a solid connection to the core objectives of the business. Honestly, it’s pretty easy to get lost in a whirlwind of features and functionalities if you don’t anchor them to your core business goals.

But instead of getting lost in sailor metaphors, let's dive into how you can align your business objectives with your product decisions -  with the backend emerging as a pivotal player.

Setting clear objectives

First of all, you need business goals. Defining your business goals for your product provides clarity and purpose for your team. It's about creating a shared short-, mid- and long-term vision and ensuring everyone is on board with where the product is headed. It’s only with this shared understanding that your team can generate ideas and insights from various angles, driving the product forward and pushing progress.

While these goals serve as guiding principles, it's important to understand they’re not set in stone. In fact, it’s crucial to regularly update and communicate the future vision and goals of your product. Being open to adjustments ensures your strategies stay relevant and effective in meeting your objectives. Also, it sets your product up for flexibility in a fast-changing world. 

Aligning your goals with your roadmap

Consider your business goals as the compass directing your product roadmap. For instance, if your goals include doubling your user base and enhancing customer satisfaction, your roadmap might prioritise scalability, performance, and code efficiency.  

The action items of this example will have a big impact on the backend and architecture of your product. Improving quality attributes like scalability, performance or reusability implies a lot of work under the hood of your product. These decisions will affect, in turn, the front-end side and user experience of your product. 

See how your business goals can guide your backend decisions and vice versa? They will help you shape and prioritise your product backlog to make sure you’re working on the right user stories. And, here, it’s crucial to get the full product team on board with this vision and goals.

A collaborative effort of the team

Translating the business goals to a product’s backlog isn’t a one-man job. We expect everybody in our teams to think along and give advice based on the specific knowledge they have. This helps to source the product backlog with features, refactors, and platform improvements to reach these business goals.

We listen to the knowledge and insights of our different team members to not only come up with valuable work for our product but also to discuss and set priorities.

Case in point: The perspective of the SRE

Your Service Reliability Engineer(s) - or culture, will have a huge impact on the predictability of the performance of your backend. Involving SRE in prioritising your roadmap makes sure someone is keeping an eye out and that the engine is running smoothly in your shiny-looking product. This in turn enables growing the product that can achieve your business goals.

"Involving SRE in prioritising your roadmap enables growing the product that can achieve your business goals."

Case in point: The perspective of a software engineer

Software engineers, on the other hand, often have the best view of the current state of the product’s code. For instance, they could advise refactoring parts of the code to make it cleaner, more efficient and more maintainable. Or suggest working with IaC (Infrastructure as Code) to eliminate the downtime of your product, making sure that heavy loads can easily be taken up by automatically scaling the infrastructure running your backend.

Driving towards success

Every ticket on your product's roadmap should contribute to your business goals. While new features and UX enhancements are important, don't overlook the significance of enhancing the quality attributes of your backend. By harnessing the collective knowledge and skills of your team, you can maximise the impact on your business objectives and propel your product towards success.