In honor of my professional life lasting as long as K-12 schooling, here is the most important lesson I learned in each year of work thus far. 2011: Software Engineer –> Designing a Data Warehouse is a technical and usability challenge. Ideal to have a single very wide table at lowest level of granularity (view or physical depending on database). Everyone mess up joins. Avoid duplicates. Pick descriptive and long column names....
Transitioning from startup to larger companies can be a huge shift in mindset. I made the shift from a 250 person startup (I had worked at from 30 → 250) acquired for $500m to Slack in 2018. Slack was then a pre-IPO company with 1200 employees (grew to 2000 in 18 months). I struggled! It was significantly different and harder than I expected. In personal conversation with startup friends transitioning to larger companies I’ve given advice on how to handle this better than I did....
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....
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....
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....
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....
“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....