Busy Last Week with a POC
Dec. 7th, 2021 12:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerLast week was a blur of activity. After we got home from a nice, 9 day vacation Sunday evening I was back to work by 7:30am Monday morning. I was starting a proof of concept (POC) project with a customer.
POCs are a common part of the enterprise sales process. We can do all the presentations and demos of our product, but before buying the customer almost always wants to see it work in their environment. It's to make sure we're not selling smoke and mirrors as well as for them to get a feel for what it'll be like to own and maintain the product.
Doing POCs used to be a huge part of my job. For several years I was doing about one a month. What changed since then is I've moved to companies that are slightly more mature. We're working on bigger enterprise deals, not smaller transactional deals. I'm called upon to deliver a POCs only a few times a year.
Another thing that's changed is travel. Years ago POCs were almost always done on-site— which raised the complexity and the risk. Not to mention, added lots of travel time to my schedule. On a week in the field I might be onsite with a customer for 3½ days but with travel that was a full, 5 day week. And by the time I was home Friday evening (sometimes in time for dinner, sometimes not) I'd be drained.
Last week was like that in some ways, in other ways not. POCs are always a complex, high stakes engagement in sales. This one I'd put a lot of planning effort into— as I always try to do— to contain the risks. But the pace of work was different. Instead of long, grueling days I had the work spaced out with just a few hours each day. Among other reasons that's a better cadence for remote work. And it's not just Coronavirus that's shifted this work to primarily remote. Even prior to 2 years ago companies were handling more and more such projects remotely, with increasingly distributed teams.
Saying it's just "a few hours a day" can be deceptive, though. It's just a few hours a day on a Zoom call with screen-sharing. After that there's homework. I've got to-do items such as looking up answers to questions I wasn't able to answer on the spot, checking with colleagues about bugs or problems I ran into, and communicating with all the stakeholders both internally & externally. It was a full-time job, and by Friday I was wiped. But by Friday I also was done.
Yes, all that hard work I put into planning and preparation paid off. I was prepared for this project to stretch to 2 weeks but I wrapped it in 5 days.
POCs are a common part of the enterprise sales process. We can do all the presentations and demos of our product, but before buying the customer almost always wants to see it work in their environment. It's to make sure we're not selling smoke and mirrors as well as for them to get a feel for what it'll be like to own and maintain the product.
Doing POCs used to be a huge part of my job. For several years I was doing about one a month. What changed since then is I've moved to companies that are slightly more mature. We're working on bigger enterprise deals, not smaller transactional deals. I'm called upon to deliver a POCs only a few times a year.
Another thing that's changed is travel. Years ago POCs were almost always done on-site— which raised the complexity and the risk. Not to mention, added lots of travel time to my schedule. On a week in the field I might be onsite with a customer for 3½ days but with travel that was a full, 5 day week. And by the time I was home Friday evening (sometimes in time for dinner, sometimes not) I'd be drained.
Last week was like that in some ways, in other ways not. POCs are always a complex, high stakes engagement in sales. This one I'd put a lot of planning effort into— as I always try to do— to contain the risks. But the pace of work was different. Instead of long, grueling days I had the work spaced out with just a few hours each day. Among other reasons that's a better cadence for remote work. And it's not just Coronavirus that's shifted this work to primarily remote. Even prior to 2 years ago companies were handling more and more such projects remotely, with increasingly distributed teams.
Saying it's just "a few hours a day" can be deceptive, though. It's just a few hours a day on a Zoom call with screen-sharing. After that there's homework. I've got to-do items such as looking up answers to questions I wasn't able to answer on the spot, checking with colleagues about bugs or problems I ran into, and communicating with all the stakeholders both internally & externally. It was a full-time job, and by Friday I was wiped. But by Friday I also was done.
Yes, all that hard work I put into planning and preparation paid off. I was prepared for this project to stretch to 2 weeks but I wrapped it in 5 days.
