Category: Product
25 Sep, 2019
Integrated Project Teams – 10 steps to building your company’s capabilities
Using consultants to address challenging technology problems gives you short-term acceleration. Integrating consultants with your tech team provides for continuous knowledge transfer, builds capabilities and maintains velocity after the consulting engagement. This approach avoids the consulting hangover that happens when your tech team does not retain the capabilities that...
18 Sep, 2019
Vertical Value
One of the issues I see a lot out in software product land are teams trying to plan and jam big features or capabilities through their development cycles. Often these are discussed on the order of many weeks or months with multiple, complex, and interrelated projects to complete before...
11 Apr, 2019
Who’s Really in Control of Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
Today, if you are building and operating cloud-based or cloud-native applications, the concentration of the source for TCO comes from one place. Your development team. That’s right, the developers essentially control your TCO and neither the business or the developers probably even know it. How is this possible? It...
13 Mar, 2018
Aligning Product Management and Sales to Win
While it may not seem evident in day to day business, there is quite a bit of symmetry between product management and sales teams. In fact, both teams want the same thing: products that customers love and want to buy. So why then, is there often friction between product management...
19 Jan, 2017
You say you want a Website… (Part 1)
Well, you know, we all want to change the world. One of the first tasks people tackle when starting a new business is to set up a web presence, but this is just one of many efforts, like writing a business plan, developing your branding, and networking to get...
08 Nov, 2016
6 Out of Scope Ways to Add Value to your Company and Clients
It seems to go without saying that adding value is important. As consultants, we add value through our work; otherwise, our clients wouldn’t hire us. Every day, we try to maximize our delivery according to the Statement of Work (SOW) we have in place and the business needs of our client. Value...
04 Oct, 2016
Running Successful Technology Assessments
These days, almost every business relies on technology products and platforms to run daily operations and meet its goals. Unfortunately, your business needs and the functionality and performance of your supporting technology frequently fall out of alignment. A technology assessment is a good way to baseline where you are: what works,...
21 Jul, 2016
Congratulations! Your Company Is Now a Scaleup
It’s late on a Friday afternoon in the summertime, and, as the CEO of a hot startup, you should be feeling pretty good. The key metrics on your monthly dashboard are all glowingly positive. Revenues have passed $400K per month and are accelerating. The Company just turned cash flow...
01 Jun, 2016
The Gettysburg Address and Developing the Right Product
Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address is a perfect product. In under 300 words, Lincoln synthesized all of the arguments for why we were fighting the Civil War.1 Anything more would have muddied the message, and anything less would have sold the cause short. What people forget is that the Gettysburg...
10 May, 2016
Sales v. Product Management: Why Can’t We All Just Get Along
In a growing tech company, sales needs product management and vice versa, but, too often, these two functions don’t get along. The result can be disastrous: Misaligned products, missed sales goals, lots of finger pointing, and too much employee turnover. As you think about scaling your company, you should...