Recently, I’ve been really fortunate to have met so many amazing people, that I can just learn from through osmosis, merely by just hanging around them (the converse is also true, which is why I am careful to stay way from people I don’t want to model myself after). Two days ago, I attended a San Diego Software Industry Council (SDSIC) event on Product Management where a real world case study was presented by Alan Kiraly, CEO of Enterprise Informatics.
When I last took Rod Whitson‘s class on product management at UCSD, I particularly liked the real world case studies that we went over. It was definitely a plus that Rod actually had real world experience to draw from. Likewise with Alan, who is also an industry veteran. The other thing I like about an actual face-to-face event is the people interaction, the stuff that you learn that nobody will actually write in a book.
Here’s a couple of things I picked up from Alan’s presentation.
A solidified and well defined business processes can be quite the competitive advantage. Alan talked about how Enterprise Informatics use their own product for their SOWs “lifecycle” management (eating your own dogfood == awesome!). What I particularly liked about this really manages decision making. Once an SOW is defined, if the time is not right, it can be thrown out in the “parking lot”. At a later time, if the opportunity arrises, the SOW can be picked up, dusted off a little, tweaked and be reused by putting it on the development cycle train.
The obvious value here is in saving time and resource in planning. Planning and strategizing stuff takes time and .. well, brain power! Too many times have I figured a whole plan for something, shelved it, and then later when I want to revisit it, I have to redefine the entire plan from scratch again.
Transparency is good. Ok, so nothing really ground shattering here, but it’s nice to hear about real world problems when transparency is not advocated. In a global and diverse organization, with people working across various continents and different timezones, synchronizing work and expectations can be a challenge. I can surely relate to that–my team at work, consist of folks in California, Australia, Israel, China, France, and the UK.
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We had about 17-18 software + hardware folks (and one reporter! we have no idea how that happened). The venue was perfect, people brought snacks, drinks, lawn chairs, and we ordered pizza. Most of the attendees are not surprisingly, from the San Diego Hacker News meetup.
