The Epiphany

"I just had an epiphany!" remarked a friend of mine yesterday. What a great way to start the day. She had my attention. "Now I know what happened..."

Connie is a product marketing manager at a media company. Her job is to develop and bring to market media-based solutions for her specialty segment. She's incredibly bright, talented, hard-working and great to work with. Her colleagues are amazed at what she can get accomplished. But recently, she ran into challenges that seemed insurmountable.

Her last project was a the launch of a new technology product into a market segment where her company, a leader in the industry in general, has been trailing behind the leader of this segment, with a third of the leader's market share. Her hope was that this new technology product would launch the business forward to seriously cut into the market share gap she was facing. This product had the chance to be a blockbuster, a game-changer. And everyone knew it -- her president, her colleagues and even some of her competitors that got wind of the project. So, a lot was riding on this new product launch, and she was laser focused on its success.

Her company had committed to her that a new technology platform would be available for her new product, and that platform would have key features that distinguish it from the competition. Furthermore, she and her division president sat on the steering committee for this platform as it was being developed, to ensure that her product's needs would be reflected in the platform.

That was nearly two years ago. Recently, she sat frustrated at how things had played out with her high-profile project that was now struggling.

"Tell me about your epiphany," I said.

"Marketing and Engineering are like oil and water. I thought everyone was working together on the same team for the same goals. We had all of these great steering committee meetings, and they listened to all of my requirements for my new product. But when it came down to delivering what I needed into the market, they just couldn't do it. Their bosses were asking them to do things that were not aligned with my mission. It was like the whole world worked differently for them -- all the rules of what made the project successful for me seemed no longer to apply to them. And the frustration I am feeling right now is that our paths seem to have separated -- like oil and water."

I sat and listed to Connie's story, and I thought back to how many of them I have heard like this. But not just from the marketing people like Connie. I've also heard them from engineers like Mark.

"I thought this was a strategic initiative. I thought we had buy-in from the executives. I thought the business people had figured out where this thing was supposed to go and they had to be there as soon as possible. But now I can't get them to stick to a decision on any of the features of this platform. We were fine going into the final checkpoint, and now they're throwing everything up in the air again. We have 500 pages of requirements -- with their signatures signing off on them -- that we spent months hammering out. And now they're telling me that they can't launch with the features we have. It's maddening. I want to quit, and so does my team."

Oil and water. Sound familiar? It does to me. As someone who has been a product manager and an engineering manager and an executive and investor in new technology initiatives, I have lived in this oil-and-water world for several years. I have had my own epiphany, which is why I have started this blog.

My epiphany is that this situation is entirely predictable, and it is at the heart of most new ventures and new initiatives. Some learn to navigate it and some get smacked in the face by it. I'd like to explore what's going on, why it happens and what managers facing these kinds of challenges can do about them.

I've got to run. The morning commute beckons.