Product Team Etiquette: How to Get Your Team on Board with DevHub

August 23, 2016

This post originally appeared on Linkedin Pulse here

It’s a familiar situation for many product team leaders: we’re pushing the product roadmap forward and want to recommend a different foundational web platform. But before we make a recommendation, we want to make sure we’ve properly vetted the platform. How can we best do our homework so that, when the time is right to propose the new platform, there is enthusiasm on all levels?

Some tips we’ve learned over the years on how to approach this situation:

1) Approach the re-platforming or platform migration scenario gently, and then immediately identify why DevHub works for your specific use case

There are going to be plenty of times when your team has already started working with a related platform. Yet, based on current workflows or previous product rollouts, you are sure that DevHub is the better use case in this circumstance.

We’ve seen product managers make the mistake of vetting DevHub without getting the entire team’s consensus. When it comes time for production teams to use DevHub, they feel like they are being forced to learn something new. Remember that DevHub solves your need to quickly roll out digital experiences at scale, so avoid problems from the get-go by looping in the product and marketing teams during the DevHub demos to calm nerves, get everyone on board and ensure team success.

2) Show & Tell: Relating your familiarity with DevHub

Introducing a new web platform, especially when managing digital experiences at scale, is never easy. In our experience, understanding all of the platform’s current and potential functionalities makes this process run a lot smoother. Once your team understands why using DevHub is the best solution — whether your goal is to improve quality, decrease production times and/or provide flexibility in executing on long-term product roadmaps — their enthusiasm will make the transition that much easier.

DevHub provides crystal clear documentation for your CTO, as well as for your marketing and production teams. When you know the platform, you can confidently share the right information with the appropriate teams.

3) Check your current platform prejudices

We all know that product teams, marketing teams and C-level executives are fully engaged, especially around a new product initiative. Those who are passionate about new product roll-outs or new web platforms tend to have very specific opinions of the platforms they like (and those they don’t).

As in all things tech, people tend to avoid choosing a new web platform whenever possible. But in a crowded market, DevHub offers a unique angle to a familiar platform — i.e., a website builder with the flexibility of unlimited scale, all controlled by you and your team. The communities built around today’s popular platforms feature security, control and scalability flaws. Understanding these problems, and why DevHub offers a clear solution to them, helps you guide your team in selecting a safe and easy to manage platform.

4) Tactfully broach cost

“What is implementing and running DevHub going to cost?” is typically the immediate response to learning about the added value DevHub brings to your current product suite, use case or digital offering. DevHub is priced 1:1 — no out of the box pricing. Instead, DevHub’s pricing includes a host of services from customizations to strict SLAs. 

The reality is that initial platform cost discussions are always going to be more integral to choosing a platform than to choosing long-term value propositions. Be mindful of the actual cost, not just the platform costs, but also those costs DevHub reduces — production inefficiencies, not executing on your product roadmap and being unable to scale.

If you are charged with modeling costs, be aware that many platforms don’t disclose the hidden costs of customizations, training and support in their initial proposals. This is where DevHub excels — we fully disclose our pricing, simply and up front. If you don’t have the right information, your models are always going to be wrong.

In short, effectively interacting with your various teams in on-boarding a new product is a key skill. Your careful selection of the appropriate platform will be scrutinized in the weeks, months and years to come. Know that utilizing DevHub is the safest and easiest way of achieving organizational goals across all levels of product, development and marketing. As the saying goes “No one gets fired for choosing DevHub; you might just get promoted."