Business on Brave New Geek

Digitally Transformed: Becoming a Technology Product Company

Wed, 05 Feb 2020 09:46:47 -0600

More and more established businesses are attempting to reinvent themselves as technology companies. At the heart of this is the digital transformation, a journey many organizations are undertaking in order to better compete and serve their customers. As a result, companies are pouring tons of cash into digital transformation strategies. For some, this means broader adoption of agile or DevOps practices. For others, it’s modernizing product offerings or moving to the cloud. Regardless of the changes, many are struggling to find success transforming themselves due to low throughput, quality issues, or failing to deliver the right thing at the right time. In a few cases, digital transformation has ended in outright disaster.

Planting Perennials Next to Potholes

Fri, 26 Apr 2019 14:35:24 -0500

Silos, bikesheds, and focusing on what matters

If you’ve ever flown into Des Moines then you’ve had the privilege of driving on what might be the most decrepit major road in the metro area. An important artery, Fleur Drive is the only way to get to and from the airport, and the pavement is marginally better than that of a dirt road. Cars weave back and forth to dodge potholes and massive cracks in the asphalt as people race to catch their flights. There always appears to be some kind of construction going on somewhere along the six mile stretch of road, and yet, it never seems to actually improve. The road is also located in a major floodplain, so sometimes the city just closes it when the nearby river rises too much. It’s basically what you’d get if you agiled your way through urban planning.

Multi-Cloud Is a Trap

Fri, 14 Sep 2018 11:16:09 -0500

It comes up in a lot of conversations with clients. We want to be cloud-agnostic. We need to avoid vendor lock-in. We want to be able to shift workloads seamlessly between cloud providers. Let me say it again: multi-cloud is a trap. Outside of appeasing a few major retailers who might not be too keen on stuff running in Amazon data centers, I can think of few reasons why multi-cloud should be a priority for organizations of any scale.

Plant Trees Before You Need the Shade

Mon, 29 Jan 2018 11:12:18 -0600

Like humans, companies go through phases. There’s the early seed and development phase. Founders are so preoccupied with a problem they go crazy. They consider solutions and the feasibility of a business. There’s the startup phase, when a business is actually born, and it stumbles towards product/market fit. There’s the growth and scaling phase, as we try to close more and more deals while, at the same time, hiring the right people. If we’re lucky, we reach the later stages. There’s the expansion phase, as we attempt to land and expand or attack new verticals or geographies. This is when things get really interesting—and hard. Who are the right people to hire? What are the right products to build? The formula that got us here almost certainly won’t get us there. Lastly, there’s maturity, which is when the business has really hit its stride. Maybe there’s an exit, and very likely there’s new leadership involved.

The Sharing Economy: A Race to the Bottom

Thu, 28 Aug 2014 17:37:39 -0600

Last year, Airbnb hosted more than four million guests around the world. ((https://www.airbnb.com/annual)) A million rides were shared on Lyft just over a year after it launched in 2012 ((http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/08/lyft-1m-dc)). These data points alone seem impressive, but the growth of this phenomenon is staggering. The “sharing economy”—as it’s being called—enables just about anyone to become their own micro-entrepreneur. New companies like Uber, TaskRabbit, and Airbnb are popping up at a remarkable rate, and they’re disrupting traditional businesses in astonishing fashion. An entire conference dedicated to this new socio-economic system occurred just a few months ago, but the truth is the sharing economy is little more than marketing sleight of hand.