Developers and the Equation for Digital Transformation: Interview with Mark Birch

Today we have the huge privilege of having Mark Birch with us! In this interview, Mark expounds on the role of developers in digital transformation.

Mark is an enterprise software tech entrepreneur, business development expert, and startup advisor based in Singapore and NYC. He is the founder of DEV.BIZ.OPS, helping enterprises build thriving developer communities. He is also the founder of the Enterprise Sales Forum, a global community of 25,000 B2B sales professionals that meet in local chapters to share ideas, network with peers, and learn new skills.

Here’s the breakdown of the interview, by timestamp:

0:11 Dev.Biz.Ops company. Mark Birch is the founder of Dev.Biz.Ops – a company for consulting services focusing on engineering to help organizations better collaborate and work together efficiently.

0:48 Mark’s background. Initially, Mark was a developer, a start-up founder, and an investor. A few years ago, he joined Stack Overflow to help them launch an enterprise version of the public Q&A site. There was a successful product launch and more companies are starting to adapt to the platform. After this, Mark decided to go on his own and focuses on the Southeast Asian region. Markets in Southeast Asia appeals to be fascinating because of the growth of developers and the appreciation of software engineering in its organizations.

2:26 Digital Transformation defined. In simplest terms, Mark defined digital transformation as being able to deliver products faster to the customers across digital channels.

2:54 The difference between Digital Transformation and Digitalization. Digitalization is mostly focused on digital technology that often digitalize offline banking services and create mobile applications for both consumers and businesses. What makes digital transformation different is that it is not solely all about technology. Thus, it is a transformation in all sides of the organization including its people, processes, and technology in unison. Digital transformation removes all the barriers that prevent an organization from moving quickly therefore enabling them to work together effectively.

5:42 Views on engaging developers in digital transformation. Developers are a critical component of this digital transformation story. Instead of motivation, what the developers need is to lessen the hours spent on things that do not allow them to be creative. The reason why organizations have developers in the first place is that these people have unique skills in delivering digital experiences. They should focus on what is needed to be done without numerous interruptions.

10:09 What companies should be doing. Mark shared a famous quote from Steve Jobs: “We don’t hire smart people to tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” Likewise, companies spend a lot of money on hiring seasoned engineers, but they tend to tell them how to do engineering tasks which never works out effectively. Companies should give the trust and accountability to the engineers so that they could focus on thinking creative ideas.

11:56 The role of Agile. The first thing a company needs to create is to think about the lifecycle of a product that is continuing to be improved and expanded. The second thing is that there should be a tight coupling between what business owners expect and what technology understands. Agile is meant to break the cycle of building multi-year projects to get features out the door quickly.

15:08 Digital Transformation in companies that do not have agile. For companies that do not have agile, Mark described their situation as hard-pressed. Some organizations recognize that their process is fragmented so they start building Dev.Ops tool tree that will enable technology to try and release code out into production. Unfortunately, the actual process in a company has not changed after all these efforts.

18:21 Mentality of legacy organizations. Today’s Covid-19 situation is certainly a wake-up call. Mark shared some experiences wherein certain banks are still requiring people to do their banking in person despite having lockdown in many countries. This will end up becoming a forcing function for these organizations to walk their talk when they say digital transformation.

21:20 Culture as an important part of digital transformation. It takes a strong leader to initiate change and ensure that they have the type of culture that allows them to innovate creative ideas. Both the leaders and people in the ranks are needed to work hand in hand to make things happen. If they don’t recognize that change is coming, then they will end up getting left behind.

26:33 Digital transformation is serious right now. Nowadays, there are almost 700,000 developers on Stack Overflow in the Asian market and will be approaching millions of users soon.

28:38 Myths that people say about digital transformation. There’s a lot of skepticism because of the vast number of failures and restarts but change really does happens. It may not happen within an expected speed, but it does happen eventually. Digital transformation just takes a lot of leadership from the top and collaboration within the subordinates to make things possible.

31:51 Pay your developer better. Organizations should rethink how they treat and raise the creativity level of their developers. Companies can also do Hackatons regularly to bring people together and be able to break down the walls by exchanging ideas and concepts with each other.

Some Interesting Points

• Mark defines digital transformation as the ability to deliver products faster to customers across digital channels.

To Mark, the challenge in digital transformation is how stakeholders in organizations can align interests on goals that were agreed upon prior, in order to deliver good products and services to customers. The issue therefore is not about technology and more about alignment of goals.

• Since appealing to the intrinsic motivations of developers is important when it comes to digital transformation, Mark also pointed out that most engineers are motivated by solving exciting and cool problems, working without interruptions and having the agency to do work. He urges management to then give greater autonomy, trust and accountability to developers, since it is developers who will be coding the technical infrastructure.
• Smart developers are afterall hired for their skills and not to be told what to do by someone less competent in that area. Mark also advocates for companies to always pay skilled developers fair compensation, since developers are the very people who will be coding the technical infrastructure.

On his opinion on what a post COVID-19 world would look like, Mark pointed out that changes will happen regardless of whether a company intends to push ahead with digital transformation or not. Against this context, he posits that successful digital transformation is still possible, and that the company has to put it as a priority.

All in all, it was a pleasure having Mark with us because he has such a big heart for developers! We are also looking forward to the development of developer talents in the Southeast Asian region, and are excited for the things to come!