Five little words. “That feature doesn’t sell products“. Seems innocuous enough, but it is the death of product development when uttered by engineering. Product Management is tasked with defining what a product should do, what features are needed, and how to compare/differentiate vis-a-vis with the competitors. We write requirements, and guide them into and through the development process. All to...
A general whine here today, but a while back, probably 2009 or so, the rage was laptops with eSATA ports, for faster external storage. USB3 was a glimmer, and FW800 seemed to be relegated to the Mac world. My new (at the time) Dell Latitude had this eSATA port, and I was running a lot of VMs on VMWare Workstation, and more bandwidth was desirable. So I bought a high performance Seagate eSATA...
One core aspect of the product and marketing role is to get insight on the competitive landscape. Apart from what you can find from their websites, you will want to dig deeper, and gain understanding of their business. Fortunately, there are several sources to go to. Some of these are free, and some are not, but if you can get access to these, I highly recommend taking full advantage. Dunn and...
It is not a well hidden fact that I have a degree in Physics. But during my studies at San Jose State University, I had a few amazing semesters, really knocked it out of the park. That earned me an invitation to join the honor society, Sigma-Pi-Sigma. At the time, 1988 or so, I thought nothing of it, and forgot about it. Then around 2009, they “found” me. Apparently, you never are...
With my new gig, I was issued a sparkly new Lenovo Thinkpad T450 (must have gotten the tail end of the run, as it was revved to T460 shortly after I started) with a reasonable sized SSD, 8G ram, a decent screen, and the expected accouterments. About the same time, my employer began rolling out Windows 10 on the desktop, so I am part of that world now. Prior to this, I had been using Windows 7...
One thing I get tired of reading is the abuse piled on the Obama Administration by the Republicans (really, more specifically the Tea Party wing) about how the DoE loan guarantee extended to alternative energy companies was wasteful, and little more than political fluffery to reward a loyal demographic. Alas, this story has been debunked over and over, yet the response “What about Solyndra...
As I research the Innovation process in preparation for a potential training program around Innovation Management, there are several thoughts that are swirling in my head. Being a long time technical marketer, I am familiar with many of the “Chasmista’s” methodologies (loosely the body of thought inspired by Geoffrey Moore and his seminal work “Crossing the Chasm”)...
As part of my assignment, I have been researching a couple of hot roles in the digitization or digital transformation sphere, that of Data Engineer and Data Scientist. This fascinating trek down the rabbit hole has been quite illuminating. One of the backbones of the digital transformation is the advent, and rise of this little thing called “Big Data”. With Software taking over the...
As I have been focused on the various roles of digital transformation, researching how it affects individuals across the organization, I stumbled on an interesting article in the NY Times that embodied the phenomenon in a way that hadn’t occurred to me. This article was around the ground game of the coming election (2016 US Presidential) in Las Vegas Nevada. Shadowing a doorbell ringer, a...
Customer success. When you hear it, what does it call to mind? Your customers winning in the market? The warm thought that you have helped them achieve their goals? That your technology is delivering quantifiable benefits to your customer’s bottom line? Yes. To all of this. However, there is a more formal definition that is gaining currency. But, before we get to that, let’s digress a...