SXSW 2017: How Good Engineers Make Bad Business Decisions

Mar 30th, 2017 3:00pm by Joab Jackson

Almost every engineer we know has a few good ideas stored away about making an innovative product or service. Unfortunately, those who set out to build a business from a product rarely succeed. Why is that? We aim to find out in this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, recorded live at SXSW 2017.

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One of the most popular talks at SXSW this year was “Why Engineers Suck at Building Great Products,” given by Vinit Patil — co-founder of Skue, a wholesale marketplace for indie designers — and Weidong Yang, CEO at Kineviz, a pioneer at 3-D visualizations. Both have much experience in bringing new technologies to market. All too often, engineers focus too much on making a perfect product, the two advise us in an interview following the talk, rather than getting it out the door, or pivoting to make the technology more applicable for users.

Topics

3:41: What’s up with engineers who have great ideas but fail at productizing them.
6:03: why starting with the need first doesn’t always happen.
7:00: Ways of getting around perfectionism.
8:12: All about minimum viable product.
9:40: Whether or not to worry about scalability.
13:06: When to bring on additional people.

Check out some highlights from Capital One House for #SXSW Thanks to sponsor @CapitalOne #API #opensource https://t.co/NHLCqt4Tz2

— The New Stack (@thenewstack) March 13, 2017

Capital One sponsored this podcast.

Joab Jackson is Editor-in-Chief for The New Stack, assuring that the TNS website gets a fresh batch of cloud native news, tutorials and perspectives each day. He has reported on infrastructure IT for over 25 years, including stints at IDG...