Student Blogs - Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley - Carnegie Mellon University

Student Blogs

MS Software Management Blog

Wondering if a Carnegie Mellon degree is right for you? Read along as our students chronicle their journey through the MS in Software Management program.

Amin is a second year grad student in the MS Software Management program, a former Software Design Engineer from Microsoft and a current Software Engineer at Adify, a Silicon Valley startup. He is passionate about entrepreneurship, software and traveling. He would love to start a software company someday.
Vineet is a second year part-time software management student, currently working @NetApp also nominated as the best place to work in North America recently. His area of expertise is Oracle ERP solutions. Other professional areas of interest are SaaS markets both technologically and business wise. @CMU he wants to grow his knowledge to manage software products and businesses. He is interested in work on start up ideas. On the personal side he loves to spend time with his family and travel.
Rene is a recent alum, a manager of operations and program manager in Cisco's software development organization, the mother of two daughters and a performing arts fan.

Monday, December 17, 2007

Product Marketing and Human-Computer Interaction Courses


Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

We concluded our course on Product marketing this week with a little get-together for the local students after the final presentation at the plenary session. Students from India, North Carolina, Washington, and Southern California missed a lively conversation and some excellent food and drinks.

But that was all they missed. This semester was exciting and the students, regardless of their location, shared in these experiences. This was our semester to choose an elective course. The reasons for choosing the electives ranged from wanting to learn a new subject area to improving in an area that would have an immediate impact on their career. However, whatever the reason for their choice of elective, they were unanimous in their feedback – they learned new ways of looking at problems and challenges when dealing with a product requirement, product design, or business strategy and launch.

The Product Marketing course and the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) course together provided a foundation for successful design and launch of products and the critical process we need to follow and controls we have to keep in place. The course challenged us to bring our focus back to customer needs and to design and deliver a solution to the customer problem. Too many a times as engineers we get engrossed in our view of the world and completely miss the voice of the customer in our products and then in the delivery of these products.

We had some excellent guest speakers for the product marketing session which provided us a pragmatic view of customer-focused marketing and a perspective from sales, product management, marketing operations, marketing communication, product launch, and strategy functions. They reinforced the customer as the most critical cog of the business. This augmented the learning from the excellent mandatory reading and optional reading assignments.

I can summarize this course as well as the learning so far – “Its all about the customer”.

We have a three-week break before the start of the next semester. I am really looking forward to spending some quality time with my family. The next semester will have to wait.

A piece of advice for the season based on a personal experience, I highly recommend you test for carbon monoxide detectors in your homes or install new ones in case they are not working. Please have a safe holiday season.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all of you … I will see all of you on the bright side of year 2008.

posted by Chandra @ 2:05 PM  0 comments

Friday, December 7, 2007

It's paying off already!


Well it’s been some time since I’ve written. A lot has gone on! Though my coursework in Metrics has kept me quite busy, it’s sure paid off at work. In only 14 weeks, I’ve already been promoted and asked to be on an enterprise-wide committee. It hasn’t come really, from people hearing about me being in a master’s program, so much as it’s come from the skills I’ve been learning being turned right around and used at work to gain some very valuable visibility.

I’ve often heard it said that the measure of a man is not measured in the length of his knowledge, but the width of his actions. I’ve certainly found that to be true, especially at Carnegie Mellon West. A lot of masters degrees I think, are geared towards knowledge collection, be it preparation for a PhD or more of an intellectual pursuit of sorts. But Carnegie Mellon West in contrast is very much geared towards knowledge through application. One does become a great academic, going through some interesting material, but it’s all things that can be directly applied to your work the next day! This isn’t a masters where you can read a book and call it a day, oh no my friend, much is expected and in turn a whole lot is learned.

This isn’t ground school you might say, it’s more like the actual flight lessons. “Learn by doing” is no doubt an unofficial motto, because I’ve seen it throughout the program so far. A lot of my classmates have become friends as well, which naturally comes from spending 5-10 hrs a week in sessions with 3-4 people. I have no doubt these connections will last me far beyond the program, and getting this kind of insight has been great as well. I very much look forward to seeing what the final presentations look like, and how my classmates take what they’re learning in the work force and apply to the material we’ve been given. It’ll not only give me an insight into the minds people at companies like Yahoo, and Google but will also help me hone my own skills here at Boeing.

Until next time,

Daniel Maycock

posted by Dan Maycock @ 10:37 AM  1 comments

Previous Posts Archives