Anyone who has spent any time in the software industry, or really anything remotely related, has encountered the tech vs. biz divide. “I’m on the tech side, and I don’t do [pick your favorite non-technical task].” “She is on the business side. She isn’t very technical”. “This is a technical role.” And those are only the reasonably nice ones.

Let’s be honest with ourselves. What does that even mean? How does one qualify to be “technical”? Or to be “business”? In the best case, it is highly confusing, and at worst, it is an excuse to indulge exclusionary behavior and…

With the arrival of new-fangled consumer product ideas (like Product Led Marketing) to the enterprise software space, is it time to rethink the long-in-the-tooth divide between product strategy, product marketing, and demand generation? Is there space for a new C-Level executive with even more infinity stones at their disposal? I think so.

Boulevard of Broken Dreams

“I’m walking down the line
That divides me somewhere in my mind
On the borderline
Of the edge, and where I walk alone” — Green Day, “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”

After many years in product management and product marketing, I am well acquainted with the middle child syndrome…

The pandemic has been a turning point for many, if not most, of us. It was a time for reflection and reconsideration of priorities. When the Apocalypse comes a-knockin', it is prudent to consider one’s place in the world. So, like so many other families we decided to move back closer to home — to Asheville, NC. As a graduate of Watauga High School and Appalachian State in Boone, NC, Asheville was a familiar place. My wife is from South Carolina — just next door.

I have seen many articles about Austin this, or Austin that. Or why Miami is…

In this episode of Masters of Data, I speak with Harvard Business School professors Marco Iansiti and Karim Lakhani. We discuss AI and its increasingly important role in business and the economy. After studying digital transformation for the last ten years, Marco and Karim noticed a distinct change in the way the economy works and found similar themes emerging in their research. …

In this episode of the Masters of Data podcast, I speak with Stacy Stephens, Executive Vice President and Chief Client Officer at Knightscope. Stacy and his co-founder created Knightscope with a mission of making the United States a safer place. We talk about how Stacy is achieving these goals through the creation of robots.
To start, Stacy shares his background leading up to where he is today. Stacy has had a long journey, starting with a passion for aviation, then aerospace engineering, and finally finding himself in the world of finance. 10 years after his work in finance, Stacy realized his…

In this episode of the Masters of Data podcast, I speak with Jorge Lozano, leader of the data science team at Steelcase. We discuss the application of data in the real world and how data science is adapting to the needs of the businesses it serves. Steelcase is a hundred-year-old company, the largest office furniture manufacturer in the world, and now a great example of a business utilizing data science.

Jorge first shares his background and where he started. He gained a bachelor’s degree in economics and started his career in business consulting, but decided he wanted a more quantitative…

In this episode of the Masters of Data podcast, I speak with Ian Murphy, a journalist, editor, and analyst with 30 years of experience. Ian is currently an Editor at Enterprise Times and shares his varied and fascinating experience, how critical it is to have diversity on security teams, and his passion for working with veterans. As attacks begin to leverage social engineering to gain entry to organizations, there’s an increased need for security professionals from all walks of life that can identify the vectors across countries, cultures and age groups. Ian talks about the groups of people that can…

In this episode of the Masters of Data podcast, I speak with another expert in the world of data whose brand uses data to help fuel the fire of innovation and technology growth. In this episode, I sit down with Jeremy Kaufmann, Principal at Scale Venture Partners. Scale Venture Partners is a venture capital firm that invests primarily in technology companies that are starting to bring in revenue, and who focuses on companies who are doing business on the Internet, in the cloud, on mobile, and delivering their product as a service, commonly known as SaaS. …