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The Fractional CTO

Proven Leadership for Today's Demanding Technology Environment

Proven Leadership for Today's Demanding Technology Environment

Experience to help you manage today's complex technology landscape.

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The Value of User Research in Product Development

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User research

You’ve been working on a new release for a while, the team is excited about the new features being added, and the release day comes. The marketing team has been pumping out information to current users and new prospects, and then…

…the negative feedback comes rolling in. 

Prospects that were on the verge of buying based on what was coming, are now a bit cold on the product. 

Why would this happen? You know your product, your team knows the product and people have been asking for these new features. So it’s back to the drawing board, collecting all the negative feedback and combing through it for suggestions.

And, if you’ve been there, you were probably wondering what happened. 

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How to Structure an Interview Process to get the Best Candidates

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interview process

A few years ago I was part of a team interviewing a candidate for a technology lead role. We were all clear on the interview process. The candidate had a great education, good communication & problem-solving skills, and interacted well with people.

When it came time for the decision, one of the most senior technology people in the company said, “No way are we hiring that person”. I stood there slack-jawed because it made no sense to me.

Digging a little further, that interviewer’s decision came down to one thing. The candidate did not give a great answer when asked to explain the async and await keywords in a particular language.

It’s scenarios like this that lead to hiring people with encyclopedic knowledge at the expense of communication and problem solving skills. Sure, such knowledge can come in handy if there’s little access to research tools. I remember going through Windows SDK manuals in the late 1980’s to learn as much as I could, because THAT was the modern research tool and it was faster than CompuServe on a dial-up modem*.

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Natural Language Processing with Python

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natural language processing

There’s a great resource available for those interested in Natural Language Processing with Python. It’s available for free here.

Here’s a little background on Natural Language Processing (NLP):

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Are You Making Software Development More Difficult?

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Software Development Team

I’ve seen some posts lately that lead off with tales of how difficult software development is. Fair enough — it’s already a tedious and difficult process. But 99% of the time, we needlessly make software development more difficult.

Sure, some may disagree. Maybe they work in a great place that has this all figured out. But for the others, I want to tell you how I’ve seen company after company, client after client, make software development harder than it needs to be.

In this post, I discuss common missteps that cause rework, missed deadlines, and disappointment. I also point out what to do to avoid those missteps.

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Online Probability and Statistics Class

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If you’re interested in Data Science and need a brush up on foundational knowledge, there’s a free online probability and statistics class available to Amazon Prime video subscribers.

The class includes basic concepts from Permutations and Combinations to Binomial and Poisson Distributions. I viewed a few of the courses over the weekend and the explanations are clear with plenty of examples and problem walkthroughs to help explain things.

Search Prime video for “Probability and Statistics tutor” and you’ll see several training videos by Jason Gibson. The only trouble is that there isn’t a course order indicated on Prime. I was able to get the order from Gibson’s book and have posted it below. I’ve also include links to each portion of the course.

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Team Performance is More Important than Location

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team performance with online meetings

With the COVID shelter-in-place order, many companies transitioned to a different type of workforce. A remote one. I met with a number of people via phone and web conference in the first few weeks of shelter-in-place and two questions were common:

  1. Does my team have everything they need to be effective working remotely?
  2. How do I know that we’re getting things done?

Even though I have worked with remote teams for a couple of decades, I remember asking these same questions myself. Especially with offshore teams that were several time zones removed. And I remember how uncertain I was that I would be able to successfully manage remote team performance.

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