Alan Bushell, a South African gentleman who was sitting next to me and is a veteran of the technology world, piped up and said exactly what needed to be said. To paraphrase: In his experience, the way you work with inventive people is to make space around them, break all the rules for them, and let go of any notions of corralling them with suffocating processes. I was thinking, “Hmm, sounds like how the pharma industry manages to get blockbuster drugs out of their people.” If a chemist rolls up to work at 2PM every day wearing sweats and swigging gin, but can come up with a Lipitor or a Viagra, you turn a blind eye. As it happens, Bushell has spent a fair amount of time working in pharmaceuticals, too.
Listen up folks, especially if you are a CxO…
The above is equally applicable to field-engineers – people who solve customer integration issues, people who seal up the unsightly functional gaps between products in a deployment – as it does apply to more traditional product engineering.
Cherish your field engineers.
They make your product engineers’ products, work.
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