Posts for July, 2009

Tech vs. Biz Type Divide: Tackling the Number One Product Failure Driver Headfirst

July 3rd, 2009 by Greg Boutin

I am back after quite some time, my ability to blog being constrained by business requirements. I am indeed happy to report that Growthroute's activity is growing rapidly, with clients in the web 3.0 space in particular. I know, I know, I have not even published my thoughts about semtech yet. I was there for less than 2 days, but there were some interesting things I took away that I have not seen expressed anywhere yet, so I will blog briefly about that very soon.

In the meantime, I have just published the slides of a beta presentation I gave at Communitech, the innovation and entrepreneurship hub in the IT mecca that is Waterloo, Canada — and I believe it should be of particular interest to ventures in the semantic web and web 3.0, since it tackles the gap between techies and business people, discusses how that affects commercial success, and explores potential solutions. The post and slides can be found here. I welcome all constructive feedback, with few limitations on what constructive means.

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Slides of Communitech Presentation on Overcoming the Tech vs. Business Type Divide

July 2nd, 2009 by Greg Boutin

As previously announced, I was at Communitech last Friday to talk with their Product Management group about the key challenges to launching blockbuster tech products. I decided  to tackle the divide between Techies and Biz types, as this has consistently been one of the main hurdles I saw at the ventures I work with. I was a little worried as at first I expected possible controversies over some of the points I brought up, but to my surprise this resonated well and strongly with most people in the room. About half the room were techies and the other biz types, so the distribution was spread nicely in the middle. There were no punch exchanges, mud fights or even light food fights (or food light fights for that matter).

I posted my presentation on Slideshare, so you can find it below. I had two hours at Communitech so this is quite a long deck of 40 slides. It’s all there. For those who attended, note I revamped quite a bit of it and there are several slides I didn’t show during our discussion. So you  can take a fresh look at it.

Slideshare did a poor job with the graphics so, for example, the cover page I was so proud of is all scrambled. Time permitting, I am available to deliver this presentation at other forums and welcome invitations. Rest assured I have unscrambled slides to present.

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