The most important takeaway here is that the customer is willing to negotiate timing and scope. The 12wk plan was actually 1yr and the author is still around to write this.
If your colleagues claim the sky is falling because a software development timeline was wrong, they're not cut out for software development.
My favorite fight search tool was hipmunk. Their 'agony' sort was my favorite feature in any software ever. SAP bought them, and I was so hopeful that Concur would bake this into their god awful app that I had to use for work. No luck. RIP Hipmunk.
Usually I determine the money range required to live the lifestyle I want. Once competing offers hit that threshold, then I take money off the table as a evaluation criteria.
Usually it comes down to a single question for me. How likely is it that this job ruins a family vacation? I've had that too many times, and I'm not doing that anymore. If I catch at least a hint of that likelihood, I'm out. Quality of life outside of work is the most important for me right now.
Worked at a company that had a business line offering a professional service to saas firms. We got into the saas game ourselves and leaned on our existing customers to analyze their calls. I was the 'machine' in our machine learning lol.
One on my major takeaways from the calls was how many people were visibly sick yet still working and getting on calls. WFH has really destroyed the concept of stay home and get some rest.
It basically refers to data in salesforce being complete, accurate and input in a consistent way. It's a term used around software apps that drive decision making and are useless without the criteria I mentioned.
At companies that are very customer centric, often times the calls are shared with customer success and implementation teams ensuring your goals as expressed during the buying phase are aligned with the implementation. This allows shorter implementation timeframes and higher likelihood of you achieving your goals and having a positive impact on your company. However, I'm sure that the majority of time the recordings sit in cloud cold storage until they expire and are deleted, never to be heard again.
This is a good question. Regarding letting customers talk, the teams that were most successful had great salesforce hygiene, and teams with great salesforce hygiene were required to fill in certain data points. This means that there are commonly asking questions and listening more than talking. Likely they were evaluated as sales representatives based on the quality of the data that they provided in salesforce as well as quota attainment. Overall I think the act of listening and asking questions versus delivering a script means you're qualifying your leads more appropriately and they're just better candidates for purchase.
The rockyou.com insight was new to me. I hadn't heard of this breach somehow. I was wondering how they had 32m users and read some more on Wikipedia and they had Facebook apps and some MySpace plugins.
From Wikipedia
> In December 2009, RockYou experienced a data breach resulting in the exposure of over 32 million user accounts. This resulted from storing user data in an unencrypted database (including user passwords in plain text instead of using a cryptographic hash) and not patching a ten-year-old SQL vulnerability. RockYou failed to provide a notification of the breach to users and miscommunicated the extent of the breach
Worked for the company that made this game many many years after they got out of gaming. For years we got calls about it. Sometimes licenced it to other developers for nothing. We had some cool Japanese packaging and artwork from that era. The guy that did the sound turned into a great .net dev and we built several cool products together that ran for 15 years without maintenance.
OP here, yes with a big team with established processes and a backlog that hundreds might be in love with, proceed with caution. And honestly, this is only to protect other people's sentimental value with the content. The lost time spent on backlogs with reviewing, reporting out, re-evaluating, migrating, reading between the lines, and other grooming, far out ways the handful of times you leverage it. This is an extension of the 'build trap' I feel, where we're convinced that we need to coddle the things that we might build.
In my experience, the things that get built that actually have impact are always recent realizations, not things that have been sitting in a backlog for a year.
I only recently restarted a blog after a decade hiatus. For me there's two reasons:
1. Catharsis. Work and life is often excruciating and it's calming to organize your thoughts about a subject.
2. To see if people relate. Sometimes your journey is lonely and painful and seems unique to oneself. By posting blogs on this site, I've discovered that I'm not even close to being alone. The Internet is a wonderful place.
This is 100% true. The bigger the deal value, the less delegation there is. Often times, if it's like a top 10 account, the CEO shows up and is heavily involved in the presentation layer.