In the first half of 2021, ITX was named a top Rochester NY workplace and we have our employees to thank.
March 25, 2021 Rochester, NY – ITX was honored to be named to a Top Workplace, ranking #28, by the Democrat and Chronicle.
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Great ideas can come from anywhere. It is the job of product leaders to seek out these ideas by taking educated risks, by thinking (and working) outside the box. In this episode of the Product Momentum Podcast, Sean and Paul are joined by Aaron Cooper, the Enterprise User Experience Leader for Navigation and Sensors at …
Why Treating Every Client As #1 Gets Us In Trouble
Clarifying Our Vision Through Strategic Stakeholder Prioritization
In any thriving business, possessing a clear, mutually understood vision of whom your organization serves stands as the hallmark of robust strategy and compelling leadership. This understanding becomes particularly critical as organizations expand, necessitating that leadership teams grasp and effectively communicate the complexities of stakeholder hierarchies. These hierarchies guide more informed, effective decision-making that aligns with the organization’s long-term objectives.
However, misconceptions or misalignments within these hierarchies can lead to significant strategic missteps, often manifesting as widespread confusion about the primary focus of service. This blog proposes a structured approach to dissecting and prioritizing stakeholders to ensure targeted, impactful engagements.
Several years ago, I collaborated with a major corporation grappling with a technology crisis. To make a long story short, market criticisms about security vulnerabilities within their key software precipitated a hasty decision to overhaul and re-platform the application. Driven by a reactive concern for market perceptions – primarily focused on stock price impact – the corporation’s leadership mandated a rapid redevelopment cycle. This rush sidelined potential incremental improvements, aiming instead for feature parity with the legacy system.
Upon release, the new version (while technically superior) failed to meet user expectations. This led to market backlash and a tarnished brand reputation. While totally understandable, this scenario exemplifies a breakdown in understanding service hierarchies, where the focus skewed too heavily toward investor concerns at the expense of user satisfaction.
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As a product leader, it can be hard to work within a multitude of constraints: profits, product-market fit, time, customers’ needs; the list goes on. Giff Constable tackles the tough questions and elaborates on the product leader’s job as “chief synthesizer.” In this episode of the Product Momentum Podcast, Sean and Paul welcome Giff Constable, …
Consider the recent weather-related tragedies in Texas. Most seem ready to pin the blame on Texas’ near-total isolation from the rest of the U.S. power grid. And they’d be right – but only in part. The Lone Star State’s grid independence actually got its start nearly 100 years ago as a way to avoid federal regulators.
Still, that piece of trivia ignores what many are calling leaders’ longstanding indifference to IT infrastructure problems that, when examined critically, could bear responsibility for the widespread power outages, extensive property damage, and tragic loss of life throughout Texas.
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We often talk about product living at the intersection of technology, business, and UX. And that makes sense in a limited, Venn diagram way of thinking: Product as the place where these things converge. But as we have discovered, using a 3-piece diagram to explain what product is all about is a gross oversimplification. Nina …
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If you’ve never done product before, the journey can be super-scary. So many questions: Do I have what it takes? Is this the career I want for myself? What type of PM do I want to be? Where am I in my career product life cycle? Worry no more, because in this episode of ITX’s …
A well-run organization, with highly motivated and aligned people, is a powerful form of high art. It includes the performance art of your people delivering services and coordinating activities at scale and it has artifacts, symbols, and physical art that have the potential to leave a profound impression on the people it touches. The art manifests in and through all of the layers of the organization’s culture.
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Without mental shortcuts to help, there’s no way product managers could process the daily waves of information coming at us. We apply these shortcuts, called cognitive biases, to drive efficiency in how we perceive and respond to the world around us. But when we’re unaware of, or not sensitive to, cognitive bias (that exists …
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Whether discussing onboarding, the challenges we product managers confront in today’s upside-down world, or the benefits of being a “lazy” product manager, all problems boil down to people problems in this episode of the Product Momentum Podcast with Christian Idiodi. As a leader in the product world from the beginning, Christian Idiodi of the Silicon …