Friday, September 13, 2013

Product-oriented technologists vs operations-oriented technologists

In the tech world, there are two types of technologists: Product-oriented and Operations-oriented. In this case, when I mean operations-oriented, I do not mean sysops or devops, but as a higher-level categorization.

Product-oriented technologists work closer on revenue generating and efficiency-improvement initiatives, such as media-based  systems with CMS, learning systems, ecommerce, cloud computing, big data and/or mobile. They generally have a better understanding of the business, know how to narrow the gap between business and tech, participate in roadmaps, and can provide product-level value add to the business to help support and grow with the application and back-end systems. They also work on making sure the servers are set up correctly and configured to support the product with speed, functionality, and performance.

Operations-oriented technologists work closer on keeping the lights on, making sure patches are up-to-date, bugs are fixed, and minor enhancements and features are completed. They generally need direction on initiatives from product-oriented technologists to help keep things moving forward at an accelerated pace so that the gap between business and tech can be as narrow as possible.

In the tech world, both types of roles are needed. Organizations in growth mode tend to lean towards product-oriented technologists while organizations in sustainability mode tend to lean towards operations-oriented technologists.

Product oriented technologists generally can veer towards play the role of an operations-oriented technologists. However, product-oriented technologists are not as interested in being operations-oriented for a long term. As a result, many end up leaving once a company goes from growth to sustainability mode.

On the other hand, operations-oriented technologists tend to stay at organizations for much longer, as their value is to sustain the business and are not as interested in product level initiatives.

Finally, industry-wide, there is more of a demand for operations-oriented technologists due to many organizations tending to move to sustainability mode and in need of a larger pool of technologists as the organization grows the business on the backs of the products that have been built.

At AcceleWeb, we are proud to be a product-oriented organization with product-oriented technologists. We are consistently creating and improving our applications and systems to be able to provide the best-in-class services to our customers.