Nerd/Noir, a boutique consultancy that works with software development teams to boost productivity, recently added long-time IT executive Anne Steiner to its team. She will lead the firm’s business development and strategic consulting efforts. Steiner was previously the CEO of IT services provider Cprime, which she led through a $360 million sale to Everstone Capital and Goldman Sachs in late 2022.

Boardroom Insight caught up with Steiner to get the inside story on the news. During the interview, we also got a look at a few of the challenges and priorities with which large software engineering organizations are turning to their external consulting partners. Steiner says don’t expect AI product managers anytime soon and makes the case for measuring developer productivity based on impact rather than speed. Speed, as it turns out, is a much trickier concept to define in the software world than it may seem at first. 

Boardroom Insight: Thanks for chatting with us and congrats on the new role. By way of introduction, can you walk us through the capabilities Nerd/Noir brings to the table for consulting clients and your responsibilities within the team? I understand you had a chance to work with the leadership team before.

Anne Steiner: Nerd/Noir is a consultancy focused on helping “full-stack” product teams. In some cases this means helping more traditional orgs transition to working a product model. In some cases it means helping to modernize their technology practices so that their tech stacks and engineering practices fuel application resiliency, and in some cases it means helping strong teams get stronger or refreshing some skills that may not have been leveraged lately.

My role will be a bit more focused on the product leader side. Standing up product management organizations in traditional companies and helping to guide collaboration between product and tech so that we work and collaborate as one.

Yes, I have worked with Dave and Alex, the Nerd/Noir founders, for many years. We’ve done a lot of collaboration together over the past 6-7 years, and I’m really looking forward to this next chapter. 

Boardroom Insight: GitHub Copilot. Looking beyond the industry headlines, what role is gen AI playing in the real world for product org leaders?

Anne Steiner: I’m not fully sure. I can imagine some good things and bad things. I think some folks think AI could replace us product managers and engineers. I don’t. We’ll always need people to listen to the market and to innovate. I do think it will help us to collect data and validate faster. Whether it is in the code or being able to quickly get a wider swath of analytics, that will be quite valuable to us as an industry.

Boardroom Insight: Developer experience is a phrase you often meet in tooling vendors’ marketing materials – what about consultant-led productivity boosting programs? From the consultant’s perspective, how is that element prioritized in projects like coaching initiatives?

Anne Steiner: I don’t think the two things can really be separated. DevEx is one of our passions at Nerd/Noir. We help clients leverage tools like DX to see where they are now, identify their goals (which often are different team by team), and then help them achieve those goals. Where I’d like to see us go next is to think about “experience” across all roles throughout the Product Development LIfecycle (PDLC). We spend a lot of time as an industry optimizing on the developer, but other roles need helping, tooling, and more efficiencies to aid in doing their job. 

Boardroom Insight: Development velocity is not the only priority for product leaders – there’s cybersecurity plus the obvious cost considerations. I’m hoping you can give us a glimpse into how large dev teams manage that balancing act at scale, and whether trends like shift left are starting to simplify things.

Anne Steiner: Development velocity in general is a horrible metric. It just tells us how fast we are going (kind of). Impact is king. I believe that we need to balance what we measure in at least three buckets – progress (like velocity or other ways too like flow), resilience (this is where things like the product being secure, scalable, and maintainable come in), and impact we are having for users, buyers, and the market. We could have all the velocity in the world but if resilience sucks and the impact isn’t there, the product won’t be valuable and it won’t bring in revenue.

When we talk about shift left and priorities, we need to take accountability in Product Management too. As PMs we must care about the resilience and DORA type metrics too. We must invest in our infrastructure and tech; however, we also have to deliver value. It is a huge dance and a dance that we all dance together. I see some orgs that say that product management owns impact, dev owns resilience, and project management owns progress. That doesn’t work because then we are all pulling against each other.

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