Phil McKinney

What Engineers Want From Marketers

If you’re a marketer, you already know what drives you nuts about engineers – and vice versa.

Usually, it festers around who calls the shots on new product development.

Marketers, and especially those with packaged goods experience, want earlier involvement.

Engineers usually hear this lament many months (or years) after they began writing densely technical, often inscrutable requirements. They want informed direction, sooner.

And then the wallop of “service velocity” hit. Gone is cable’s purgatory of “one new product every 18 months,” gated by legacy back office, conditional access, or guide issues. As Cox CTO Kevin Hart put it, during a CTAM Summit session last month: “Now, we’re doing 18 products in one year.”

The tech pieces accelerating product rollouts in cable are on a roll: Open standards, the migration to all-IP (Internet Protocol), and the prying open of back office components to remove proprietary hogties.

What’s on now is the workforce and cultural changes. And this is where you run into the lingo of “waterfall” vs. “agile” operations.

Primer: “Waterfall” means serial, step-by-step processes. Write a long requirements document. Get it into silicon. Test. Get it to device manufacturers. Test. Link into provisioning and billing systems. After all that, develop training, installation, customer care and – oh yes! – marketing plans.

“Agile” means working collaboratively, across departments, and in tandem. An “agile sprint” locks a small team into writing code that puts an existing feature into a companion service. Tech people call this “experience threading.” (My favorite example, for so many reasons: Voice mail that comes over as an email transcript.)

Cox, Comcast and others are already retuning the workforce for agility. Cox’s Hart meets all day on Tuesdays with the heads of marketing, product and operations — to review readiness checklists, prioritize resources, and liaison with call centers.

What do engineers want from marketers, these days? John Schanz, EVP of Network Engineering & Technical Operations for Comcast, seeks flexibility through the innovation process. “We need a give-and-take between the business, marketing and technology teams, even when you don’t really know exactly where the destination is.”

“Forge really tight partnerships across departments – that’s where the magic is,” said CableLabs CEO Phil McKinney.

This column originally appeared in the Platforms section of Multichannel News.

Preview: CTAM Summit, SCTE Cable-Tec Expo, Orlando

For someone passionate about making technology approachable to non-technical people, this week is a grand slam of cable conventions: CTAM Summit and the SCTE Cable Tec-Expo. Marketers and engineers, all in one place! Nirvana!

And hello again, Orlando. This location means one thing right off the bat: Brush up on your Full Service Network history (see Craig Leddy’s take on this here: http://www.multichannel.com/archive/orlando-revisited/139794), because you’ll likely hear more than a few nostalgic and/or instructive anecdotes about it.

For the tech-interested at CTAM Summit, check out self-professed gadget guru, author (“Beyond the Obvious: Killer Questions That Spark Game-Changing Innovation”) and new-ish CEO of CableLabs, Phil McKinney, who kicks off a “Products Consumers Crave” panel on Tuesday at 9.  The session features chief technologists from Comcast, Cox and Charter (full disclosure: moderated by yours truly.)

In the topic mix: What technologists want from marketers; the operational impact of “service velocity;” maneuvering a software-heavy workplace, and the parallel industrial shift to “agile” development; cable’s changing role in innovation.

That’s all on the front part of the week. Then, on Wednesday, the marketers pull out, and the techies pull in.

What to watch for, news-wise, at this year’s SCTE Cable Tec Expo: Lots of detail about the next chapter in cable modems, now officially named “DOCSIS 3.1.”

Why: A session added to the Thursday morning schedule (11-12:30) aims to go long on the constituent components of DOCSIS 3.1. It’s all about wringing more capacity out of existing hybrid fiber-coax (HFC) networks, by tweaking things like modulation and error correction. (Yes, you can expect a full translation in a future edition.)

One of the great things about Cable Tec-Expo: Session repetition. This year’s technical workshops look chewy, and many of them repeat throughout the three-day tech-fest. Even with the session repeats, though, the 2012 lineup makes one want a clone.

On my short-list: “Is Your Network Capable of Handling the Next Generation of Services?”, “Slaying the Bandwidth Consumption Monster,” “Fast Times: Speed Tiers and Their Impact on Your Network,” and “Take 5: HTML5 in Cable.”

Also hot-looking (as hot goes): “Advanced Encoding for an Untethered World,” “CCAP Trial: The Verdict,” and “Springing New Leaks: A Look at New Sources of Interference.”

If there was an award for best session title (because that’s what the industry needs! More awards! ;-), it’d have to go to “Bandwidth Hunger Games.” Best acronym overload: “EPON, EPoC, DPoE, RFoG, DOCSIS – Beyond the Alphabet Soup.” (A typo in the online agenda makes it all the better: “FRoG.”)

Hope to see you there!

This column originally appeared in the Platforms section of Multichannel News.