Blog de Joe Freeman

I worked for a vendor at a bank in the early 2000s. We raised the issue of how many programs and projects were off-course in an already-planned meeting with a CIO. The CIO said we were off base and that  We have 320 software projects in flight - 315 on time - 5 will be early The reality was that everything went to production in Q4. The next year's Q1 was filled with production fixes. I'm pretty sure the real story was Real-time information radiators have given a different impression Question Did the executive know what was happening but was defending their teams? Was the true health hidden from the executive? Did the company not have accurate metrics? Does anyone believe that all their software projects were on time or early? Maybe they just keep adjusting dates until they are accurate. It was not a feature driven agile shop that delivered incrementally Were bonuses the primary drivers for this viewpoint? Revision History Created 2023 06 

It is hard for many to remember when Amazon and AWS weren't really enterprise-ready.  AWS wasn't really AWS in the beginning. It was really a scalable data center. The company restricted its employees to locations where the Amazon store  collected sales tax  which really ended in 2016.  Amazon pivoted to PaaS with the introduction of  S3 and EC2 in 2012 .  This is when AWS started moving from being a data center to the internet's operating system   Amazon Called and I had no idea what they were thinking An Amazon cloud engineer called me in the early 2010s wanting to know if I was interested in a Field Engineering position with AWS. I had worked for a few vendors by this point and was pretty interested.  There were only two  field/cloud/customer engineers  covering the entire USA , and possibly the planet. I don't remember if they had anything outside the USA.   Both engineers worked in Seattle.  We discussed how they work...

What should customers hear when you give a long explanation in response a question that can be answered with a yes or no?  I believe that they are usually hearing  no  when they get a long explanation . Short answers usually mean the responder understands the question and is comfortable with the answer.  Long answers are a way of applying conditions to the response.  Long answers are often an attempt to steer the question in a different direction.   By yes  I mean a positive outcome and not necessarily the word yes. Ask Questions to Drive the Conversation Ask questions until you can give a short answer as long as you don't drag it out or frustrate the other party. I worked with a great sales representative that always seemed dense in meetings.  He asked questions that made him look bad.  Later he told me that it gave the customer the opportunity to in struct and flesh out their needs. More than sales situations Asking expl...

One of the hardest things for technical people to understand is how to adjust answers taking into account context and where the questioner is in their evaluation process.  The blue line describes how evaluators eliminating as many options as possible as early as possible. They do this so they can dig deeper into the few options that are left. Evaluators may use in-house analysis or leverage professional research companies .  The red line conveys the idea that decision makers learn as they go along. Note that the mass elimination often happens  before they truely understand the scope of what they need to know. The customer works to reduce their problem space to something manageable. They start with a  Vendor Elimination  phase where they try to learn as much as possible while eliminating as many vendors as soon as possible. They ask all kinds of questions to learn more and to eliminate many options quickly.  A  straight up "no" answer that me...

Enterprise level sales representatives are a whole other breed of person from their pre-sales engineer. Enterprise sales representatives execute and help formulate corporate sales strategies and programs.  They must be extremely self-confident sometimes carrying entire companies on their backs. Sales representatives performance directly impact the job stability of everyone else in the company. Pre Sales Engineers do best when they understand the personalities and styles of their partner representatives.  Two major personality types are hunters  and farmers. Most people are a mix of the two but some are hard core hunter or farmer. A Note on the Danger of Stereotypes Hunters and Farmers are descriptive stereotypes.  You rarely run into someone who is completely anything.  Think of this as you would any other personality classifications. It is a useful way of reminding yourself that you may need different approaches with different people in the same jobs. ...

We communicate ideas and attempt to drive decisions with messages, meetings and conversation. We try to sell things, push ideas and get cooperation from others and “make things happen” by driving people to a common understanding. It is tempting to think that “our way” is obvious to people and that they “just don’t get it” when they don’t agree. We should instead put ourselves in the other person's position to see if we really understood the other party’s drivers and decision points. There is only way … to get anybody to do anything. … Yes, just one way. And that is by making the other person want to do it.  Dale Carnegie  How to Win Friends and Influence People I went to a meeting a long time a go with Max . Max created a sheet for every major player that we filled out from that person’s point of view. The sheet had two columns, What’s in it For Me (WiFM) and Does it Threaten Me (DiTM) . You can use “Pros” and “Cons” if WiFM and DiTM make you uncomfortable even tho...

My family told me that they don't know what I do for work.  This was kind of surprising since everyone tells me that I never shut up about what I'm working on. This post is an attempt to explain what I do/did as a "Pre-Sales Engineer".  I've played this part while working for software or hardware companies that sold "technical" products.  These ranged from Logic Analyzers and Embedded development tools to development and application platforms to Internet support products like web and mail servers. Note:  I'll probably use "Field Engineer", "Sales Engineer" and "Pre-sales Engineer" interchangeably throughout this document. You Got Mad Skills A Pre-Sales Engineer has the rare skill of being comfortable with technology and with people.   Pre-sales technical resources explain technology to techies, implement a solution, map the benefits of technology to business problems and interact with business users and manager...