Back into stealth mode...
Jan. 4th, 2007 12:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jducoeurAnnnnd there we go. As of today, our Board has officially approved refocusing the company on a new product line that we've been designing for a while now. For most intents and purposes, we're rebooting the company as a fresh startup: entirely new product, new development practices, probably a new company name as soon as we find one easier to spell than "Convoq".
This should be fun. After four years of pushing the rope of agile development at management, I seem to have won the argument. The fine details are still being evolved, but there's a good consensus that we're going to move to a much more agile, much less waterfall-ish approach to how we write the software. That ought to be good for my blood pressure.
The new product is clever, and suits us remarkably well. It's one of the first times I've seen one of these silly company-analysis exercises actually work. Our new CEO spent several weeks asking everyone what we thought the company's "core competencies" were, and talking about it and thinking about it -- and then managed to come up with an entirely new product idea that matches those competencies perfectly. And the market research is bearing the idea out: not only are the potential partners intrigued, some of them are positively jumping at it.
So we're back into stealth mode, at least for the short term. With any luck, it won't be terribly long before I can start to talk about what we're doing: the schedule is aggressive, but plausible. And we're still looking for one or two kickass programmers, if you know someone who might be interested. (Medium-level engineers with really strong OO skills, good at working in a tight-knit team, and excited about the startup environment. Drop me a note if you know someone, and I'll dig out the full posting.)
This should be fun. After four years of pushing the rope of agile development at management, I seem to have won the argument. The fine details are still being evolved, but there's a good consensus that we're going to move to a much more agile, much less waterfall-ish approach to how we write the software. That ought to be good for my blood pressure.
The new product is clever, and suits us remarkably well. It's one of the first times I've seen one of these silly company-analysis exercises actually work. Our new CEO spent several weeks asking everyone what we thought the company's "core competencies" were, and talking about it and thinking about it -- and then managed to come up with an entirely new product idea that matches those competencies perfectly. And the market research is bearing the idea out: not only are the potential partners intrigued, some of them are positively jumping at it.
So we're back into stealth mode, at least for the short term. With any luck, it won't be terribly long before I can start to talk about what we're doing: the schedule is aggressive, but plausible. And we're still looking for one or two kickass programmers, if you know someone who might be interested. (Medium-level engineers with really strong OO skills, good at working in a tight-knit team, and excited about the startup environment. Drop me a note if you know someone, and I'll dig out the full posting.)