Business 2.0 - Magazine Article - How to Get the Geeks and the Suits to
Play Nice









April 23, 2002

Bill Ernstrom never imagined that a hallway conversation could be so
expensive. While chatting with his chief engineer in their Westminster,
Colo., headquarters, the CEO of Voyant Technologies, a teleconferencing
equipment maker, discovered that a key customer wanted streaming media
built into ReadiVoice, the company's flagship product. Ernstrom thought the
idea sounded great, but four months and $200,000 later it sounded just awful.

That's when a product manager learned of the project and promptly produced
market research showing that most customers had little interest in
streaming anything.

The costly misstep underscored a disconnect that Ernstrom had ignored for
too long: His top engineers simply weren't listening to his product
managers -- and vice versa. "We got a long way down the road, built the
code, got the engineers excited," Ernstrom says. "Then we found out that
we'd sell about 10 units."

Ernstrom, an engineer himself, isn't the first high-tech exec to watch
valuable dollars and time vanish into the cultural gulf between computer
geeks and their more business-minded colleagues. It happens time and again:
In the early phases of projects, when it's crucial to get the technology
right, engineers hold sway. What they produce, however, is often elegant
technology that has no market, is too complicated, or doesn't match
customers' expectations. Think of Atari's Falcon or Apple's (AAPL) Newton
and G4 cube. "It is a very large problem that is confronted every day,"
says Robert S. Sullivan, dean of the University of North Carolina's
Kenan-Flagler Business School. "There are many companies who fail in the
process: They don't change fast enough, they don't reorganize fast enough,
so they fall in the hole."

Ernstrom tried and retried a slew of ideas intended to get his engineers
and product managers to collaborate -- everything from recruiting more
business people, to rearranging the floor plan, to restructuring
compensation. His case is instructive, not least because he did at last hit
on a strategy that works. While retaining all the members of its
engineering team, the company has increased sales 25 percent, added three
more products to the pipeline, improved time to market by 40 percent, and
reduced research and development costs by 20 percent.

Stung by the streaming-media fiasco, Ernstrom set out to beef up Voyant's
marketing expertise. He hired managers to lead each of his four product
lines. It soon became clear that the engineers viewed the new hires as
interlopers who knew little about the company's culture and less about
technology. "The product managers didn't have experience in the industry,
and they're talking to a technical director who'd been with the company for
years," Ernstrom says. Jeremy DuPont, one of the product managers, recalls
those days less than fondly. "It was a difficult transition," he says.

So Ernstrom created a new position -- chief product officer -- and
recruited John Guillaume from Level 3 Communications for the job in March
2001. Guillaume came with a deep background in telecom -- he could flap
with the best of engineers and still make sense to the less tech-savvy
product managers. And he had some fairly radical ideas about how to shake
up Voyant's balkanized culture. "If I'd known what he was going to do up
front, I would've been worried," Ernstrom says.

Guillaume's first move was noncontroversial: raise the profile of the
product managers by giving them visible tasks, such as writing product
definitions and presenting market research. Then, six weeks into his new
job, Guillaume silenced a lively meeting of the executive team with a
proposal: He wanted two of Voyant's top engineers, Warren Baxley and Randy
Schultz, to lead the product group. Guillaume reckoned that the star
engineers would give instant credibility to the product teams and get the
two sides working together in earnest. After a bit of cajoling, Baxley and
Schultz accepted the challenge.

As part of the reorganization, the Voyant executive team reconfigured
seating arrangements -- splintering hives of engineers and lumping them
together with their product managers and with Baxley and Schultz.

Then came the really hard work. Voyant introduced a series of strategic
hurdles meant to reduce the likelihood of another dead-end project like
streaming media. Now an employee who has an idea for a new product can
submit a proposal through a company intranet.

Engineers, product managers, and the executive team assess the proposal and
weigh its likely return against the investment required in effort and
money. "It's almost like an internal venture-capital process," says Dick
Schulte, chief marketing officer. If a project gets the green light,
managers determine what content will be delivered at what time and
engineers receive bonuses for meeting those goals. (Product managers
continue to be judged against revenue targets.) Any one of these changes
might have accomplished nothing, but together they've gone a long way
toward closing the divide. Drop in on a product meeting today and you might
have a hard time figuring out who the geeks are. A lead engineer sighs that
he wants the product manager's feedback on an important decision.

Meanwhile, the engineers sound like market research pros: "Who's our
customer base?" "Are we targeting people like that?" "We don't want to go
to customers and say we're not supporting a feature we used to have."

That's sweet music to Ernstrom, who firmly believes that his customers are
happier than ever before. Just as important, the cultural healing has
persisted, even through the departure of Guillaume, who parted amicably in
February to overhaul the product and marketing groups at ManagedStorage
International. Schultz, the star engineer turned product manager, has
helped assume Guillaume's role as bridge builder. It hasn't been easy, but
everyone at Voyant now agrees on the goal. As one engineer puts it, "We're
building stuff that people use."







Stephanie Clifford is a writer-reporter at Business 2.0.


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