Going Independent — Again

After a challenging but rewarding three year stint in product management at Dialogic, I am now independent again early in 2018. Four years back, I ran my consulting business for a year and gained some additional training before re-joining Dialogic. In this post, I’ll talk about some new and different approaches I took in my role with the company during the past three years that produced positive results.

1. Using Agile to Manage and Change Priorities – In 2014, I took a course in SCRUM at Quality and Productivity Solutions and got certified by SCRUMStudy as a SCRUM Product Owner.  At Dialogic, I wore many hats and had frequent changes in priorities. By creating SCRUM Epics and Stories, I updated my priorities weekly and was able to make fast changes when needed in reaction to market changes, new projects or other internal factors.
2. Building and Managing Teams – In earlier Product Management roles, I mostly focused on the product in areas such as managing the roadmap, setting pricing and training Sales. During the past three years, I reached out to the other departments and convened cross functional meetings about once every two weeks. In other words, I managed the products as programs.  This way, our departments worked together to drive success for our products and the results were very positive for both startup products and more mature product lines. For example, we identified customer pain points and then the team created solutions to deal with them.
3. Going Virtual – My products varied over the three years, but included a mix of hardware and software, or were purely software.  A trend which cut across several of the product lines was the need to run the software on Virtual Machines, notably in the VMware and Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) environments. For example, by running in a virtual environment, customers got to use their own choice of servers for routine management tasks. For our virtual load balancer product, Dialogic® Powerville™ LB, we took it a step further and could run all of the software on VMware or other virtual environments and included sophisticated features such as built-in redundancy.
4. Marketing via Effective Content Management – In the past year, I worked with the Dialogic marketing team to devise a marketing plan for the Dialogic IMG 2020 Integrated Media Gateway and revise our content management to help drive more leads.  We wrote several new white papers on important use cases such as SIP Trunking, Transcoding and SS7 to SIP interworking.  We also promoted recent design wins and market leadership via press releases and conducted webinars which tied into all of these marketing themes. The net result was to bring more attention to these products, improve our SEO rankings for related product searches and reinforce our position as a market leader in the low density trunking media gateway market.

These four approaches are examples of ways we were able to innovate.  They enabled me to both be a product-focused individual contributor and lead broader team efforts that produced lasting results. If you’ve had similar needs or experiences, I’d love to hear your feedback.

I’ll write more about my recent experiences in Product Management, Marketing and Communications Technology, plus thoughts on the year ahead within upcoming posts.

 

 

 

Need to Manage a Career Change? Try SCRUM

One of the major challenges of a career change is to manage all of the details. Whether you are looking for a new full time position or would prefer consulting assignments, you’ll need to have a clear direction and an execution strategy. Some of the tasks are to identify prospective companies and potential roles, make networking contacts within the companies, apply for positions, conduct company research and prepare for interviews.  And the list of potential activities goes on.

I found my local career center was a great resource for learning the “how to’s” for a job search in 2014, but that managing and executing the activities was a full time job in itself. A few months ago, I took training courses in two of the leading project management methodologies: PMP and SCRUM. PMP reviews the classic methodology for managing large complex projects and includes up to 49 different processes in the latest (5th) Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK). It’s very thorough and well regarded, but is really best for truly complex projects with lots of interactions between the steps. I also took a course in SCRUM, which is one of the Agile methodologies for managing projects. What’s the difference? SCRUM is much more lightweight, has fewer processes and is designed to enable very rapid responses to change.

A few weeks after taking the courses, I decide to put these skills to work. I looked at what I needed to do in my job search and decided that SCRUM was probably a better fit for the task than PMP. Why did I choose SCRUM?  First, I liked it’s lightweight approach. I already had a pretty clear idea on my goal — looking for a full-time position which used my product management, marketing or project management skills. I also had lots of potential tasks every week — identifying companies, networking, creating cover letters and tweaked resumes, making followup contacts and so on. Plus, depending upon what happened from week to week, I might need to change the emphasis — for example, to do company research for upcoming interviews and reduce the amount of prospecting for new companies. SCRUM also is useful for promoting action. I wanted to track my activities and be able to monitor progress with some visible metrics. With SCRUM, you can assess progress day by day and week by week.

If you’re in the process of making a change in your career, what approaches are you taking? Have you considered using project management methodologies such as SCRUM or PMP?  In my next post, I’ll talk about the steps I took to put SCRUM to work to help manage my job search.