SaaS Entrepreneurship 101
Do you have just enough money too fail? As a SaaS entrepreneur the extent to which you leverage the patterns of born-in-the-cloud innovators in the SaaS space will be highly dependent on your business model, but there are a few core concepts that should permeate your organization if you are to be a successful service provider. These concepts should impact how you design, build, run, monetize, market, and promote your service. In this article I focus on those first three items, how you design, build, and run a SaaS platform, and one critical key to success.
Thanking Out Loud
Lets imagine how thinking about stakeholders with empathy might change Thanksgiving.
Design Thinking and Service Management
Has your IT team clashed with your Marketing team over SLA’s? Establishing a common, usable, sharable vocabulary for Service Management, including SLA’s is essential in a dynamic, high release cadence system.
The Search revolution
The idea of a “Searchable Index” page seems like it would be obvious, and a search field near the top of a page appears to be a rather ubiquitous design element on the Internet today.
It wasn’t always like this, and there are still many systems using a hierarchical menu landing page. Let’s discuss Search as a feature, and as a dashboard.
The Keys that Align
Every software team is working to establish an agile release cadence. What are some of the unintended consequences of success?
Cracking the LinkedIn algorithm
What’s the best way to help a friends LinkedIn post get more impressions?
The Loop that Drives
Working intentionally in a loop provides a convenient reminder to include continuous improvement activities. Close significant loops with meaningful retrospectives.
The Principles that Guide
The diversity of the team engaged in solving a problem is directly proportional to the innovation that team will produce. Learn how this is just one of the principles that guide Surround Sight’s work.
In this article I discuss the Design Thinking principles of
A focus on user outcomes
Restless reinvention
Diverse Empowered Teams
and share some insights about how these principles have impacted the work that I do and how they guide me in business.
Design Thinking and DevOps
In 2020 IBM posted a job that required 12 years of experience in Kubernetes. That’s a bit of a red flag. I would consider the job title of “DevOps Engineer” to be just as big a red flag. Learn why DevOps is not a job title, and how Design Thinking can help DevOps teams.
Design Thinking
As engineers it’s easy for us to get caught up in the latest tech and forget that humans are why we do what we do. Design Thinking gives us powerful design tools, founded in empathy, focused on meaningful outcomes for our users. In this article I discuss Design Thinking Workshops, and some of the more subtle human-centered benefits of the methodology.
Introducing Surround Sight Consulting
I’m starting Surround Sight Consulting to bring Design Thinking techniques and Microservice Architecture technologies into small to medium sized software engineering shops. These two advances can provide real business advantages that drive significant growth to the bottom line.
The open source revolution is over…
Spoiler, Open Source won and they did it in the cloud wars. Any discussion of the technology revolution represented by the rise of cloud computing would not be complete without paying tribute to the revolution that has been Open Source.
What is “Cloud Native” anyway
Cloud Native is one of those new buzz words that get’s thrown around a lot, but what does it really mean?