Tech Strategy Archives - Glenn Stovall

Name Your Next Product With This Exercise

How do you come up with a product name? or a business name? Naming products is a hard but learnable skill. There are agencies that provide names-as-a-service. ZinZin’s existence corroborates the idea that naming can be distilled into a repeatable process. When you’re feeling stuck, it helps to have a process. Prolific creation is the […]

Birds Aren’t Real: The Lies of Tech Twitter

This entry is part 2 of 2 in the blogchain Deep Forest Tech

Social media can give developers a false sense of the tech landscape, especially if they are newer and don’t have as much real-world experience. understanding why requires understand what drives tech content. The new drives social media Social content is propelled by novelty. Publishing content about new and experimental technology generates interest and has less […]

Exploring Tech’s Deep Forest

This entry is part 1 of 2 in the blogchain Deep Forest Tech

Most software is invisible, and most tech companies aren’t noteworthy. I call these and the people that run them the deep forest of software

SaaS Under The Surface

Building a Software-as-a-service(SaaS) is much more complicated than it looks on the surface. Creating a piece of software that you charge other people money for means that you have added an order of magnitude more complex than an application used for internal purposes.

Move Fast, Break Things, Slow Down

This entry is part 3 of 3 in the blogchain Tech Tempo

Facebook started with a saying: “Move fast and break things.” Later on, they updated it to say: “Move Fast with stable infrastructure.” Why did Zuck change his tune? First, we need to understand why he had the initial statement. The phrase is common in startups, although they read it differently. On a small scale, the […]

Scrum: Tempo Codified

This entry is part 2 of 3 in the blogchain Tech Tempo

I can’t think of a more clear example of rhythms in software than Scrum. Scrum is an attempt to codify tempo and wield it as a project management tool. Scrum sets the rhythm with recurring ceremonies: planning meetings, daily scrums, sprint reviews, and sprint retrospectives.

Thinking In Tempo

This entry is part 1 of 3 in the blogchain Tech Tempo

A mental model of tempo can help in your sensemaking when joining new teams and starting new projects. Though out this blogchain, I’ll be exploring the concepts of tempo and how they are realized in software development.

How to decide when to build software vs. when to buy

All software choices fall somewhere on the build-buy spectrum, & all companies fall somewhere on the ‘tech company’ spectrum. A piece of technology’s ubiquity, price, and proximity to a company’s core competency all play a factor in where it fits on this spectrum. In this article, you’ll learn about what factors go into a build […]

How do You Make Technology Stack Choices?

It’s something we all do from time to time, but I’ve never thought about codifying how to do it effectively. I get irked by articles like “React vs. Angular vs. Vue.” It’s not a competition. There is no “right” answer. There is only the best choice given the context and constraints of the decisions. What’s […]