Are You Empowering Your Development Team Enough?

Bridging Business Goals with Technical Execution as a CTO

Alex Olivier, Product Lead at Cerbos

How do CTOs and Development Leads align the diverging worlds of business strategy and technical development? In today's complex business environment, your role as a CTO transcends simple code management; you are tasked with selecting the proper tools and methodologies, enhancing Developer Experience (DX) - a concept focusing on the ease with which developers can work with tools or platforms, and ensuring that the technical roadmap complements business objectives.

Here are a few things to consider to ensure a successful alignment between the technological landscape and the business goals.

Align Development with Business Goals

The first step in ensuring seamless collaboration between business and development is identifying and understanding the common goals. One of the most illustrative examples of this collaboration is the process of implementing authorization in an application. In this case, the rules, policies, and controls defined in business terms must be translated into application code, requiring solid tooling to cover all scenarios and edge cases.

The translation from prose to application logic is more than a technical exercise; it fosters a streamlined process that aligns with business goals. This alignment becomes critical in complex areas like authorization, where understanding who can do what under which conditions needs to be abstracted from the core application and presented in a format mirroring the business language. Ideally, this allows non-technical stakeholders to comprehend these policies, bridging the gap between the business and engineering sides.

Choose the Right Tools for the Job

Development teams must be equipped not only with the right tools to translate their tasks into action but also with the means to align their work with the overarching goals of the business. Policy-rather-than-Code workflows play an essential role in this alignment, creating a seamless collaboration between business and development. These tools don't just facilitate development; they bridge the gap between technical execution and business strategy by keeping business logic separate from application code meaning in a format that doesn’t require understanding the language a system is written in.

A good example of this is defining authorization logic as policy rather than hardcoding it into the codebase. These policies are easier to read than complex if-else/case-switch style application code and can easily model the translated business requirements through a clear schema and structure.

The success of this alignment doesn't stop at just this abstraction layer. Any processes implemented should be embedded into the full software development lifecycle and include tooling, which guarantees the integrity and effectiveness of the development process. Automated Testing Frameworks emulate various principles to verify processes such as authorization decisions align with expectations, much like CI/CD pipeline models, which consist of Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment.

These practices automate the merging, testing, and deployment of code, ensuring frequent and reliable delivery. Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) further support this alignment by providing developers with feedback and autocomplete functionality for configuration files, policies, and tests, thus enhancing developer confidence and speeding up logic iteration. These tools form a comprehensive toolkit that ensures continuous alignment with business needs, demonstrating that the right tools are not just about doing the job; they're about creating a cohesive language and standard across the business.

Balance the Learning Curve with Long-term Benefits

With all configuration-over-code approaches - such as authorization policy - and automated testing, there is a learning curve. However, robust support and tutorials are vital. The initial ramp-up may be challenging, but the long-term benefits are substantial. Shifting to a policy-based authorization workflow, supported by solid testing and tooling, will pay off as changes in authorization rules or application architecture are inevitable. The investment in learning these methods and tools will prove worthwhile, enhancing overall DX and ensuring applications' resilience and adaptability.

Ensuring that your development team is equipped with the right tools is a strategic decision that requires a profound understanding of both the technical and business landscapes. By adopting methods like configuration-over-code approaches and automated testing and considering the learning curve against long-term benefits, CTOs and Development Leads can bridge the gap between business and technology. The result is a more cohesive, agile, and responsive development process that resonates with the company's overarching objectives, ensuring applications are adaptable in today's fast-moving product development lifecycles. The future belongs to those who can speak the common language of business and technology, using the right tools to turn visions into realities.