While talking to product peers, most indicate that our execution is bad. Engineering folks tend to think that the vision and strategy especially around Workspace is fragile.
What according to you needs corrections - strategy or execution?
6 replies (most recent on top)
Right. And engineering leadership should know ‘engineering’ and not just be program managers. Having engineering manager become POs and SMs of scrum team is not going to help with engineering. Find engineering leaders who can lead good design, architecture, frameworks and don’t act as ‘process’ managers.
100% agree "companies need a PRODUCT CEO", but also companies need PM executives that understand UI/UX, simplicity, etc. Upper management needs to understand and build products that customers want to use.
Marketing is a huge problem. Not only many marketing folks don't understand Citrix technology or have solid daily hands-on experiences, but they also promote vision as if it is already done and shipped. This creates enormous pressure on product and eng to deliver in a rush which leads to poor quality and fails to meet inflated customers expectations. But marketing just keeps churning out press releases and moves on. That group must be restrained and made to get a really check every time before firing away with faked demos
Won’t matter. None of the products today offer any reasonable long-term customer value. Even citrix cloud is just facade that just leads to same old outdated legacy use-cases. Anything that arguably does offer any value to the modern enterprise is unlikely to replace the levels of revenue seen in past. There’s as much a fundamental technology shift challenge as much as a marketing challenge in re-imagining the legacy lipsticked pig.
Company needs a PRODUCT CEO (the likes of Musk, Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc)! Had a Marketing CEO, Finance CEO and look where it is now..
Next, unify all products to become a true digital workspace! Strategy lacks the execution as mentioned earlier. Every acquisition or OEM'd is managed and sold in isolation, if not dumped to blackhole (eg. Sanbolic). Invest more in engineering, support, product innovation, elegant UI/UX and stop rationalizing it needs more sales folks! People buy THE VALUE of products, not sellers! Lay off management and senior exec fat that doesn't contribute and worse causes hindrance to any product strategy!
Then, simplify and make products super reliable, especially Citrix Cloud! Company now wants to improve and simplify how customers and partners do business with it.. how about FIRST improve and simplify how the products work so it's easier to be convinced to buy it!
Mostly execution. Many features delivered for Workspace lacked acceptable reliability, performance, usability bars. Many customers were upbeat of the vision and tried the solution only to get disappointed. Lost conversions due to poor quality of the product.