Tag: Corporate Life
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Product Management Internships
An engineering internship program typically runs 6 to 12 weeks, often as a group exercise. Interns join scrums, 2-5 interns (generally 3), where there was a known deliverable on a topic of interest. They would experience the corporate version of their classes: understanding problems, sprinting to solutions, and presenting to…
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Scripts for Adulting
I’ve found that writing little scripts like that really helped my kids with their adulting conversations as they went through high school and into college. My daughter was very upset about the class, but it wasn’t relevant to her major so there was no point in discussing how or why…
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Everything I know about the IT business is from Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla
Which movie is this? There’s a few, so it’s important to disambiguate! Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla Not to be confused with Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (which I can only recommend to the fevered or otherwise hallucinating) or even Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II (pretty fun, but not a sufficient scaffold for understanding an…
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Product Sales Metrics
So you’ve launched a product… Is the product selling? How’s ASP (Average Sales Price) after discounting, and is the discount larger than you expected? Deal size? Cost of sales? Are there measurable predictors for lost opportunities exiting the pipeline at each stage? Are there ways to accelerate the wins through…
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Working with a Coach
Executive coaching and mentorship is an interesting part of modern business, and sometimes people are not prepared for taking advantage of it. Here are some notes on the purpose and value. So you’re working with a coach to get better at execution… what are you going to say? As a…
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Team Scars
You know those signs in every shared kitchen? “Please rinse your dishes and put them in the dishwasher”, “please don’t leave food in the fridge over the weekend”, &c? They happen because people were piling dishes in the sink and letting food rot. Something had to be done, and the…
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Changing the Company
I’ve written a bit about mishandled change attempts — everyone loves a little schadenfreude, and failure is easier to spot than success. This does not mean I think it’s wrong to change: you can’t keep selling buggy whips or spellcheckers when the market for them disappears. Let’s set aside the…
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How to manage a Proof of Concept
POCs as a concept are a response to customers getting oversold. As a vendor we’d rather skip the whole thing and trust our sales team to scope properly. As a customer we’d rather not spend time testing instead of doing. Sometimes they have to be done though, and it’s best…
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Conflicts at Work
Work conflicts aren’t fun, but they come with the territory. Here’s a quick field guide for recognizing the type of conflict being observed. conflict level 4: we disagree on a tactical implementation approach. I think we should write this in language foo and you think language bar. I think the…
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Growing the Company
Recent conversations on going public have reminded me that some assume taking a company public is inherently, completely good, necessary to being Important in the Industry. Here’s a few reasons why that is not always true, noting that I am not a financial professional. Posit that the natural course of…
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