Rise of Windows & Enterprise Licensed Products The first wave of enterprise products built for mass adoption by office workers were built largely on top of the desktop computing platform of Windows (which of course Microsoft was able to build because of IBM’s decision to let them own the OS). Windows allowed developers to build products for the entire enterprise market regardless of the hardware they purchased. Developers could build for one platform and have a major market immediately open up to them. Domain expert products covered areas like computer aided design (AutoCAD), graphic design (Adobe), and financial analysis (Peachtree, etc…). ...

This post covers two axis in product positioning - product vs platform and licensed vs service. My goal is to help product leaders and companies think about where their offering really competes and what it means to win there. Horizontal Axis: Product vs Platform Products are discrete offerings where the key relationship is between the provider and the customer. Think Dropbox, Gmail, Excel. Innovation: Products win through profound understanding of the end-user persona (I just want all files to sync without ever thinking about it) and building the most seamless user experience for them. Products build moats around their existing user base, via data network effects or skill-set (e.g Excel as first spreadsheet reliant on GUI and a mouse) Distribution Channel: Products are distributed by a platform - Operating System, browser, app stores, public cloud. This is how users will discover and sign-up for the product. Deciding which platforms to support is key to balance distribution with trade-offs in customer relationship, cost, user experience. Platforms are distribution channels where the economic value generated by participants in the ecosystem is higher than the value generated by the owner of the platform. Platforms enable partners to build entire business atop of them, only taking a tax. Think AWS, iOS, Browsers. ...

Becoming a first-time manager at a startup is hard. Given the intense pace and growth, you are often promoted with limited training and expected to manage people who used to be peers. You are asked to continue to deliver on individual contributor responsibilities – write code, support customers, or sell, while also managing a team. After going through this transition myself, and helping coach dozens of other managers through it, I wanted to put together a curated summary of the best advice I’ve gotten. Let me know what you think: ...

If a demo is going well, your audience will pepper you with questions. This is a great sign of an engaged audience. It gives them the chance to focus on their key topics. Unfortunately, given the open-ended nature, many new demo’ers find answering questions to be particularly challenging. This blog post will give specific advice on how to handle questions. Rule 0: DO NOT CUT THE PROSPECT OFF This is so fundamental it is both rule 0 and written in caps. No one likes to be interrupted. When you interrupt a prospect it comes across as arrogant, or worse, dismissive. Remember, you are talking for most of the demo. The prospect wants to feel heard and understood. ...

“If I had had more time, I would have written a shorter letter" Blaise Pascal 1 As Pascal notes, it’s hard to be concise. This is especially true when demo’ing a complex enterprise application. Unfortunately, our audience has trouble following a complex idea along on a longwinded feature focused demo. This makes it our task, as demo’ers, to break each key point into a short digestible story. I call these vignettes. ...

This post will be the first in a series on effective enterprise technology demos. I will share tips, tricks, and lessons I have learned over 5 years giving demos to everyone from analysts to C-Levels execs. Each post will contain a specific and actionable way to improve your demos immediately. Today, we will talk about how to use the first 2 sentences to capture the audience’s attention. The Problem: Like it or not, these days every person walking into a meeting can easily zone you out (with computer/tablet/phone) to do work they deem more important than listen to you. This is especially tempting when dealing with a vendor. This means you need to prove to them that listening to you is worth their time. ...

Recently I found myself planning a bachelor party. I was aiming to rent a house for 19 friends strewn across the northeastern United States. I wanted to pick a a central location easy for everyone to get to. So, like any normal person (at least one who works in analytics), I wanted to quantitatively determine the most fair location. “In the Middle” Very often, when you want to meet someone who lives elsewhere, we pick a point halfway between. This intuitively makes sense when a couple in New York and another in Washington, DC, decides to meet in Philadelphia. This is tidy enough when you have two groups, but what if you have more? ...