“There comes a time in everyone’s life when past recedes and future opens. It’s that moment when you turn to face unknown. Some will turn back to what they already know and some will walk straight ahead to the uncertainty.I can’t tell you which one is right but I can tell you which one is more fun. “and then he goes on to talk about how they did marketing but the marketing was the product itself in his quote –
“Now we understand that the most important thing we do is market the product. We’ve come around to saying that Nike is a marketing-oriented company, and the product is our most important marketing tool.”At Ambee we believe when we look at a problem, we see it by virtue of our user. During this time, we do not think about revenue or cost or profit or being cool. They should be achieved as a result perhaps, but when we are solving a problem we do not want anything else but pure focus and commitment to solving it. Many companies have a Web app or a mobile app or both. Then they have to think about scaling an infrastructure as users scale. However, at Ambee we have Hardware, with it comes device design, components design and selection, circuit design, firmware, tooling, then connectivity, then we have Android and IOS apps, we have a data layer, computational layer, we have AI, ML along with the usual backend and frontend or in other words full stack. Its the most complex engineering one can imagine when you take into account the time and resources we have to achieve something like this. When we are building a company or a team we often focus on building a product. But that’s not all it is to build a great product. A piece of software or an app gets better iteratively. That is: We build them, test them, show it to people, take feedback and improve it, repeating this over a period of time and many iterations after we would have built a stable version. All of the focus from everyone is around this process of building a product or a service and assume it will be great after iterations, but clearly, there is more to engineering element than the only iterations. How about thinking or doing something about improving the company itself? But as people of Ambee we often ask ourselves the following: What would it take a company to be great at doing something? (Clarity)
How are we going to be sustainable, profitable? How can we make sure? – do we want to be making money (bootstrapped) or taking the money and spending money (investment)? – Although the latter is easy we would not be spending or enjoy spending(Business Focus)
How can I build a culture so that work actually happens at work?(Culture Focus)
How can I (leader) help everyone on the team? (People focus)
Seek opinions, thoughts, ideas, views etc., listen (Feedback) The greatness of any team is by virtue of its people and then by its products. It is then we are en route building a great product. And that’s what we believe. Please watch this space for more inside stories on Engineering Ambee.
