Author Archives: Sheryl K.

Best Laid Plans

I’ll get the door, Mama.

Yesterday was supposed to be a productive day.

I had a plan.

On Sunday night, I got ready. I wrote a blog post for Monday, packed my lunch for the week, packed babyDiva’s lunch for the week, cleaned out my personal email inbox, and cleaned out my work email inbox. I wanted to be ready for Monday morning.

Top of my list for Monday was to work on some new messaging in preparation for our big tradeshow, VMworld. I also owed some collateral to our Demand Gen Director for last week’s webinars. Finally, I had planned a meeting with Alan to talk about some changes to the website.

That plan imploded at 8:40.

At 8:40, I was emerging from the Kendall T stop, steeling my willpower against the bakeries on my walk to work. The phone rings. It’s babyDiva’s day care. It’s clearly one of two things. One, I forgot her lunch/diapers/jacket/sunblock. Two, she’s sick and needed to be picked up.

You guessed it, it was “two.”

mrDiva was traveling for work, so back on the T I went, back to the bus I went, back to daycare I went, and off to the doctor.

It was the first time I had to miss work for a sick kid. My day was filled with “itsy bitsy spider” instead of messaging, board books instead of collateral, and a walk to the library instead of work on the website.

It’s taken me a long time to adjust to being a mom. For some women it seems to come naturally, for me it didn’t. Mostly, I had a hard time adjusting to a new set of responsibilities where I didn’t feel competent. I wasn’t used to someone relying on me entirely. Like, entirely.

But yesterday I was in full-on Mom-mode. Snack, bath toys, sippy cups, sticky fingers (how are they sticky ALL THE TIME?), and Goodnight Moon.

Today I’m back to work.

Forming, storming, norming, storming, norming….

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Lately, I’ve been thinking about Bruce Tuckman’s model of how groups develop:

Forming
Storming
Norming
Performing

The idea is that first groups form. Forming is when everyone gets to know each other and starts to understand the capabilities, goals, and gaps.

Then they storm. Storming is the natural friction that arises as a team is coming together and people bring all their previous preferences, skills, and styles into the group and drop them in a big, messy pile.

After that, teams norm. That is, the members figure out how they will work together to get things done, and learn how to communicate.

Only after those stages can a team perform.

It’s a cool model, and one that I think holds up pretty well even 50+ years later. I definitely saw it in practice at Dell. Once when I built a team from scratch, hiring quickly, and again when I returned from maternity leave to a team that had doubled in size.

What’s funny about it at a startup, though, is that it can feel like we’re in the “Storming” and “Norming” stages repeatedly. It’s not that we’re not performing – we are! – but the team composition changes so quickly that we need to keep evolving how we work together.

When I joined Infinio, it was about the same time as a Director of Demand Generation joined. We’ve all been focused together in Marketing to get a working model of how we do things.

Fast forward two months, and Scott Davis joins as our CTO. Not an official member of Marketing, but a huge influence on the company and the messaging. OK, so we figure that out.
Fast forward a few more weeks, and Matt joins my team. Here we go again

At a startup it’s just all happening too fast to ever really “norm” – “norming” just has to include adjusting for new members and configurations on a constant basis, rather than having that trigger the entire process all over again.

Cornucopia of social media

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Over at I Tech Therefore I Am, Matt talks about how he decides where to post what kind of content. It’s an interesting analysis of how to manage a single human being through the lens of different audiences.

On a micro(blogging) scale, I’ve been thinking about the same things – when do I post something on Twitter, when Facebook, and when LinkedIn.

Originally, it was simple. I put things related to work on Twitter and things related to my personal life on Facebook. I didn’t post anything to LinkedIn, save an ill-conceived week when I copied my Twitter feed to LinkedIn.

Then I started sharing more of my personality on Twitter – articles I thought were interesting, pictures of babyDiva, other items that rounded out @storageDiva to be more personal.

When I started to look for a job, I wanted to be more active on LinkedIn, so many of the items I posted on Twitter I also posted on LinkedIn. I didn’t post totally personal things on LinkedIn – like photos – but I did post articles of technical interest.

(And I’ll pause here for a second to say that if it weren’t for Buffer none of this would work. They make it so easy to manage all of this!! In fact, in their live #bufferchat I shared my favorite productivity apps:

Every morning, I get my news from Feedly, I syndicate things I think are interesting through Buffer, and I save longer reads for later with Pocket.)

Anyway, back to my strategy. When I was at Dell, I was maniacal about keeping Facebook private – I didn’t friend my friends at work, and I didn’t post much about Dell. Now I feel a little different about that, and I syndicate this blog on all three platforms. Plus, I’m tiring a little of Facebook – too many ads, and too much curation of my News Feed.

All of this is to say, it feels good to have a system and a strategy. And I think I am figuring out what the right stuff is to put where. I hit the Buffer button, and for each article, picture, etc., choose which social networks it belongs on. This blog, however, has been challenging for exactly this reason. I do send it to all three channels, although the people I know through each channel are very different audiences.

Facebook is everyone from high school acquaintances and camp friends I barely remember to cousins and my mother.
LinkedIn is people I know professionally.
Twitter is a weird mix of those two, plus people I meet randomly in the twittersphere, and the only place where I know some people online before I know them in real life. It’s where I post most Infinio stuff, too.

So “know your audience” is not helpful – I do know it, and it’s too broad to find a lot of what I post relevant. I feel good about the tweets and articles I put through these three channels, but I know it’s not working as well for this blog.

Girl on a Bus

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Last week I was on the #43 bus headed home and a friendly woman sat down next to me.

“Oh, that’s a great book. Are you liking it?”

None of that is remarkable, except that I was reading The Lean Startup and she worked in sales for a software startup. So we had a lot in common.

“I do like it,” I said. “Coming from a big company, I’m finding it really helpful to understand why we sometimes make certain decisions.”

She started to rattle off several other books she really liked, all of which I need to add to my business reading list.

Decisive (which she described as a book that helped you learn how to make good long-term decisions)

Switch

Great by Choice

She shared a concept from the last book that I really liked – that Jim Collins explains that before shooting a cannonball, gunners would shoot a bullet. It’s less expensive than a cannonball but tells you you are looking in the right direction. You can do that in business too, release a limited version of your product, or release to a limited audience, so you can calibrate if you are in the right place.

I’m almost done with Lean Startup (which I’ll review here soon) and that cannonball concept seemed like a cool extension of the ideas from that book.

This woman’s stop came up before mine, and we didn’t exchange cards, but maybe we’ll have a chance to talk again on the #43 bus.

Figuring it out myself in my head in a dark room alone.

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When I was in grad school (nearly 10 years ago now), one of my courses was called “Learning to Lead.” It was a practical course on leadership and management that spanned throughout the entire 18-month program alongside more traditional courses on product development, finance, and engineering methodologies.

In Learning to Lead I and II, students learn the basic concepts about leadership, management and teamwork. The uniqueness of this course is within the teaching methodology, which has been developed to accelerate the advancement of self-awareness and interpersonal competencies. Specific topics covered in Learning to Lead 1 include: personality types (Myers-Briggs type indicator assessment), best practices in forming and maintaining team performance, giving and receiving feedback, individual and team creativity, communicating to inspire and influencing without authority. Topics in Learning to Lead II include systems thinking, team decision making, communication across cultures, shared visions and organizational change.

We often took assessments to determine our styles and preferences, because that self-awareness is central to leading well. One of the assessments we took was about learning styles, through the Center for Creative Leadership. This assessment evaluated what tactics I used when I was learning something new.

Accessing other people
Taking Action
Thinking

Center for Creative Leadership model of Learning Tactics. Taken from Amazon book preview.

I thought of these as: Asking for help, Figuring it out hands-on, Figuring it out myself in my head in a dark room alone.

And as it turned out, I never, ever, asked for help. I occasionally tried to figure it out out hands-on, and I nearly always tried to figure it out myself in my head in a dark room alone. In retrospect, it wasn’t super-surprising: being trained as a mathematician, it’s often about just sitting in a room and figuring it out.

But when I learned this, the moment I had was “OMG, everyone else is working together and asking each other for help, and here I am trying to whack through everything alone. I’m missing out!” In fact, I remember thinking that everyone else had this advantage toward their succeeding that I was ignoring: relying on each other. Mathematician or not, how did I miss this in school?

And thus began a change in how I tried to approach problems and learning. I started asking people at work for help, for their opinion, to explain things to me. And it was great! My colleagues didn’t even seem to notice that I was any different, and I was getting more help. But it was always deliberate. I had to think hard about reaching out to collaborate with people.

Fast forward to my start at Infinio. New environment, new tasks, lots to learn. In some areas, it’s felt very natural to ask for help. In other areas, specifically content creation, it’s been harder to access others. There’ve been a few projects where I’ve shown Alan some of my work, and just 20 minutes with him has made it twice as good as when I started. I don’t know why that’s so hard to do every time.

It’s not that I don’t want the feedback. Part of it may be that I have the idea that having the level of experience I have means that my work should be pretty complete when I do it on my own. Which of course is ridiculous – even the greatest authors have great editors.

I think it boils down to the fact that I’m neither inclined nor trained to access others and I will always need to work to ensure that I’m doing it.

Heading right out of my comfort zone

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Kenny Loggins’ Danger Zone is in my head today, except the words are changed:

Heading right out of my comfort zone

Heading right out of my comfort zone

A few weeks ago I was at a party explaining to people how I knew the host, a professional singer. One of the things I explained was that when she was studying for her masters in vocal pedagogy, I was her “sample student.” I went into her class and demonstrated techniques and a vocal piece she had taught me.

“Weren’t you nervous?”

“Not really, I don’t really get nervous.”

And I don’t. Not usually. I sang a cappella in college which is pretty much the best way to develop a thick skin around public speaking. Since then my career has often involved speaking at conferences and webinars, so I’m pretty used to it.

I’m also pretty used to demoing things. When I sold EqualLogic, I’d drive around with one in my trunk, and the sales process involved hauling it out onto a conference table at customer sites and demonstrating how quick and easy it was to initialize and configure. Over time, I also demoed different software packages that came with EqualLogic.

Three months into my time at Infinio I am starting to demo our product, Accelerator. Twice last week I demoed the interface, and today I did a multi-customer demo of the installation too.

And yikes. I was nervous. I think it’s the tools that trip me up. To do this demo I needed:

VDI Client
VPN Client (to practice at home)
Remote Desktop
VMware vCenter
Workload Generator
GoToMeeting
Already-running version of Infinio

I don’t use these every day. For the life of me I couldn’t even figure out how to delete a virtual machine, which is a basic operation. (For the record, it’s more hidden in the Web Client, which I was using.)

I wasn’t nervous about the demo itself, or speaking on the demo/webcast, but I was really nervous about getting everything else to work together, including switching between applications on my Mac when all my muscle memory is for Windows.

This is me out of my comfort zone. Messaging docs, sales enablement, market research, herding cats, pitch decks, whitepapers, webinars, seminars. That’s my comfort zone. This stuff, not so much.

And you know what happened on the live demo? A major technical glitch that totally messed me up! Something that made me have to re-unzip a file live and swizzle the order of the webinar to accommodate how long that took. The sky didn’t fall down, customers didn’t hang up on me, and I made it through to the other side.

“Do one thing every day that scares you,” said Eleanor Roosevelt. Check.

It’s Complicated

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“So is this for BDRs who can’t reach registrants who didn’t attend? Or for SRs who can’t reach attendees who did attend?”

It’s complicated.

I’ve never worked at a startup before, but I think this is the beginning of a phase where we are scaling some things and noticing how that breaks other things. It’s like when you are 12 and your legs grow but the rest of you hasn’t caught up yet.

I saw three examples of that in the past few days.

1. Our followup email templates

When I was hired, a Director of Demand Generation was also hired. She’s taken our programs by storm! One of her first achievements was to execute a successful webinar series starting this month.

The quote at the beginning of this post is from an email I wrote to our marketing team – I was providing text for a “standard” email, and I didn’t know if the text was for people who registered and didn’t attend, or who actually did attend.

This is going to be second nature in a few months. In a few months, we’ll have a template, a system, an agreed-upon way of following up with customers after webcasts. But for now we’re in “let’s have some great webcasts and experiment with what works best for people and process around followup.”

2. Our website

We’re in the middle of some updates for our website. We’re doing some short term triage with a plan for a more thorough overhaul later this summer. I’ve only been on the periphery of the mechanics of the update (with the exception of the actual content) but from what I can tell, there’s a current platform, a staging area, and integration with Hubspot, our marketing automation platform. When a new page needs to be set up, there’s a lot of different places it can go and people who may need to be involved to get it done.

Complex.

This, too, will simplify itself. We’ll have a single platform with automation and a clear idea of where landing pages go. But for now, we’re still figuring that out.

3. Demo lab equipment

I gave my first demo this week on a webinar. I also gave my second demo this week, that one for an analyst. But when I went to get the IP and login to the system, Matt and I determined that the system wasn’t working. And in fact, it took Matt a good day to get our double-nested ESX environment with workload generation back up and running.

It turns out that someone else thought they were using that equipment for a set of storage lab tests that we need to do. And then someone else needed the same equipment for some application performance testing. We’re big enough that there’s not one person who knows all the testing we’re doing any more.

So I was directed to our “longevity” installation – where we run our product for a long, long time as a casual part of our QA process. Except that version of the software isn’t running the current version, it’s running a future version.

So for next week, I’ll be demoing on our support cluster. Unless someone else needs that for something. 🙂

It’s complicated.

It wasn’t, now it is, then it won’t be again. Then, I’m going to guess, eventually, it will be again.

What do I do all day

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There’s a hashtag I’ve seen a few times that looks like this: #whatsysadminsdo or #whatdbasdo. If you’re not fluent in twitter, it’s basically “what <<job title>> do”. (Like #whatlawyersdo or #whatdoctorsdo.)

I think that many of you who read this blog have no idea #whatdoessheryldo.

Some of you in my industry are familiar with technical marketing; also I have gotten some notes on Facebook from people who work in different industries and appreciate this blog. But for every one of those is someone who sees me socially and says “Your blog makes me feel dumb. I have no idea what you are talking about.”

My sister, drDiva, doesn’t get it either. When I was a sales engineer, she could understand that I was the technical person who worked with the salesperson to explain the technology during a sale. (Quite a distillation of SE-ing, but useful for the Thanksgiving table.) But as a product marketer, I befuddle her. I explain what I do, and she understands the “launch” function (that is, creating documents and noise when we have a new product), but wonders how there enough work to do to keep me employed after launch.

(For the record, I have no idea what drDiva does. I mean, she’s an anaesthesiologist so I know she administers drugs to put people under, but other than that, no idea.)

Last week was a great week – the kind of week you hope is what your job always feels like. So, here’s a crack at #whatProductMarketersDo or at least #whatDoesSherylDo

Presented a webcast with one of our founders, sharing the results from a recent lab test of our product. Our product showed significant performance benefits with typical enterprise environments. 70 people attended.
Met with the sales team to introduce a new framework for how we talk about performance and results. This involves setting expectations with a customer before they evaluate what the entire spectrum of performance results looks like and where they might fall.
Took the performance/results framework and began to update our evaluation guide to reflect this new model.
Met with our VP of Sales to present the newest version of our “pitch” deck and competitive sales resources.
Wrote a draft of a paper that discusses our product’s architectural advantages.
Wrote my blog post for this week. (I blog here and on Infinite I/O.)
Participated in a call with an analyst firm who is working on a paper about us. Provided the basic pitch and joined in discussion on structuring the paper.

Whew – what a week! Good thing it ended in a 3-day weekend. I love my job these days but that is a lot of brain power. And now you know #whatdoessheryldo.

IT and the cosmos

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Folks, this industry is BIG.

IT is a $3.8T (that’s T – for Trillion) industry.
Datacenter technologies and software are a $450B industry.
Storage is a $35B industry.

That’s big. Ginormous.

It’s hard to remember sometimes. I’ve been at Infinio for 2 ½ months and have tried to be really really focused on our part of the industry. For starters, server-side cache, SSDs, software-defined storage, flash arrays, hybrid arrays, and vSAN. Then also virtualization, including VDI. Not to mention performance testing tools and benchmarks.

Sounds like a lot, right?

But it’s kind of like the first episode of Cosmos. (Have you been watching? It’s awesome.) Neil deGrasse Tyson does this thing where he explains the scale of the universe, and it blew my mind. We’re on a single planet in a single solar system in a single galaxy, and there are bajillions of all of those things.

VISTA stares deep into the cosmos, courtesy of esoastronomy. Head explodes.

And our industry feels like that sometimes. Earlier this week, Tim, a former colleague of mine, was in town and we had a chance to catch up. A few years ago, we were selling Dell’s enterprise product line together, exposed to the same technologies: servers, storage, networking, and racks, power, and cooling.

A few years go by, and I’m in my corner of the industry, while Tim is selling Dell’s thin client technology to OEMs. It was funny to orient each other to what we each did. I felt a little tentative understanding exactly what he was doing. Seemingly there was no overlap in our work. And yet, I’d say we’re in the same industry – IT – and maybe even the same part of the industry – infrastructure.

The same thing happened at Citrix Synergy a few weeks back. I figured I was going to a tradeshow in my own industry and that I’d generally understand the themes and announcements and be able to talk to the customers. I attended the keynote and I felt like it was a different language being spoken. (Hello, Google!)

At the booth I was amazed at how much the customers cared about their users’ experiences with virtual desktops, and how little they knew about their infrastructure. It’s not that the attendees were ignorant or lazy – on the contrary, I just learned there was a massive part of the industry with far more complexity and expertise than I knew existed.

The industry is big. There’s a lot of opportunity, a lot of innovation, and a lot to learn.

Are we marketing a product or a solution?

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Rubik's Cube Solution by Patricio Cuscito

One solution to a Rubik’s Cube

At work, we’re overhauling our website, and in a meeting someone asked, “do we call ourselves a product or a solution”?

“Solution – of course!” part of me answered. Solutions signify value!

“Really?” said the other part. I’m not so sure we have a solution. We have a product. And it can solve problems.

When I was at Dell, I worked in a team called “Solutions Marketing.” It’s kind of funny because at Dell there were dozens of teams with that moniker.

Some marketed solutions that were Dell products coupled with other vendors’ products.
Some marketed solutions that were Dell products angled towards a specific use case.
Some marketed solutions that were Dell products angled towards a specific vertical market.
Some were doing the technical marketing work in a lab to support these efforts.

It was trendy to be in “Solutions Marketing.”

We talked about what it meant to offer a customer a “solution” versus a “product.” How it more directly addressed their needs and aligned better with their their requirements. “People don’t buy products,” we’d say, “people buy solutions.”

Fast forward, and here I am at Infinio. We have one (awesome) product. It gets deployed in one way, where it’s either on or off. It solves (hard) problems. Are we marketing a product or a solution?

Does it matter?

Let’s look at some examples from my consumer life.

1. Keurig coffee maker. I’d say this is a solution. I have a problem – I like coffee and I hate to wash coffee pot parts. The Keurig solved this for me.

2. Soft corners to babyproof furniture. This purports to be a solution, but really it’s just a product. And it doesn’t work too well – given the overhangs and shelves on our furniture, they keep falling off when we open something. (Thankfully, babyDiva is made of steel.)

3. Donuts. Every Friday, Alan brings in donuts for the team. They’re fantastic. They light up our day. And they are definitely just a product.

IT people are sharp. If they have a problem, they’re going to look for a solution, and whether we call it a solution or call it a product, they’ll find it. It’s not 1999. People have access to so many more online resources to research technology. What we call it is probably not too relevant.

Sure, a “product” has more of the reputation of being something the customer has to do more work to implement. But again, it’s 2014. IT people are going to read up on what it takes to make something work no matter what we call it. (And really, are donuts that much work?)

I think we can help people find us by showing them how we can work in their industry (financials), in their environment (e.g., with NFS), with their application (e.g., virtual desktops).

But I don’t know if that means we call it a solution.