It's Not About the Technology: Developing the Craft of Thinking for a High Technology Corporation Book

It?s Not about the Technology centers on one of the most difficult challenges for any high-tech executive: how to manage the interaction between marketers and engineers. Amply thought provoking, full of real-life examples, its goal is to bridge the gap between marketers and engineers in a high technology company. And it achieves that goal very well. In most high technology companies, an often-seen problem is that engineers do not relate to marketing people. "Yeah, marketing is important, but what exactly do you guys do?" is a typical reaction from the engineering group. In such an environment, terms such as "differentiation," "time-to-market," and "competitive advantage" are simply words that have no place in the "real-world" of engineers. This book starts with the proposition that most execution failures occur due to this breakdown of marketing vs. engineering communication and offers comprehensive and easy-to-read insights that will help the reader to bridge this communication gap. The author is an engineer-turned-marketer in the high technology field. Using his experience in software and semiconductor product management, he builds a "contextual experience" framework in order to deliver his message. For a marketer or an engineer, the ability to see the other group's view point is crucial to the execution success. This other group's view point is what the author terms as "contextual experience." From this context framework viewpoint, according to the author, a high technology company itself is a big context, consisting of a host of mini sub-contexts, popping up and disappearing almost on a daily basis, with the decisions as trigger points. For a high technology company to thrive, three specific contexts, i.e., the technological, the customer and the economic, must drive whatever the individual employees create, build and deploy in the market. Each such sub-contexts has a peculiar tendency of forward movement. For a high tech professional, to be equipped with the successful mindset is to know this forward movement. Execution is nothing but the fundamental force that transforms the company from one context to another context, in this forward movement. Thus, the technological context must be set in motion in a forward movement into a customer system context. The customer system context in turn is set in motion, via a design win execution task, into an economic context! . This is how a high technology company evolves. With the basics of the thinking laid out in the first part, the book then plunges into the depths of each context space. The second half of the book is really a comprehensive guide to high technology product management, and discusses the practical, the day-to-day product management by using a semiconductor company as a baseline. This book is thought-provoking, practical and offers a few new ways to think about what it means to work in a high technology.Read More