Hitting Hadoop Out of the Park
April 23, 2015 — I recently had the opportunity to use our sell-design-build method with the hottest thing in data storage, Hadoop. Splice Machine, the Hadoop RDBMS (Relational Database Management System), was able to acquire customers with our process prior to launching its 1.0 product in late 2014. Why is this a big... Read More
Personas are a good start
July 1, 2013 — When I coach product teams, I often meet a ‘persona fan’. This is typically someone who has read the Cooper book (“The Inmates are Running the Asylum” – 2004) and advocates using personas to guide product development. This is a good sign for the team, since personas create focus. Instead... Read More
Your core team is a ‘jury’
April 1, 2013 — Anyone who works in a technology company will say “sure, we talk to our customers”. But peel back this statement and ask yourself: Who is present at the meeting, both from our side and the customer side? Where does it take place? What customer engagement model do we follow? If your customer meetings... Read More
Find and fix bad news early
March 1, 2013 — In our training work with technology companies, we find that product development and customer development are often only connected through a “handoff”. We call this “Asynchronous Development” and it often results in product failures. The alternative we provide is Synchronous Development (or... Read More