Life in the Machinery
Every once in a while during this journey something causes me to take a breath and reflect on how far we’ve come in such a short time. The most recent of these moments was in a meeting yesterday. There I was, listening to Mike explain something important about metrics, and behind him was a diagram left over from an earlier engineering discussion.
In a flash, I was transported back to October 2005 when my office was still in Gillette Stadium. I could almost feel the pen in my hand, laying to paper the functional flow chart of various components for a generalized media personalization system. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but on the whiteboard behind Mike was a diagram strikingly similar to what I proposed to the Krafts over two years ago.
It was a similar sense of “this is really working” I felt early in ‘06. At that time, I’d fleshed out the basic building blocks of how the components of the system would interact. As the functional elements took shape, the terminology (and their acronyms) annotating the charts began to grow organically with the models. After all, when you come up with something new you have to name it.
The reflection point came in a meeting in March with Jim (by this time I’d brought him on board) and a room full of PhDs and other clever folk we’d contracted. During the discussion, I realized everyone had thoroughly adopted the nomenclature I’d created and were actively engaged in the details. Perhaps it’s silly, but upon hearing the terms used by others, I knew we were on the right track. The discussion just seemed to flow effortlessly within this new sea of acronyms.
Over the past couple years, many (double plus good) changes have been made to my original idea. After all, it’s one thing to say to Jim, “See this stacked box? That’s indicative of the plug-in architecture we’d need to generalize this component.” It’s quite another for him (and his team of insanely dedicated architects and engineers) to make something like it actually function in the real world.
Not the least of the additions to the original course is that of an actual business model (nod to Mike and the rest of the biz team). Without their vision who knows what whacky course we’d be charting now. It’s relatively easy for me to come up with an innovative concept (after all, that’s what I do), but it takes a much broader understanding across many disciplines to turn it into a functional solution and profitable business.
Along with the many changes over the past two years, there’s also been a continual shift in nomenclature. Every once in a while I’ll encounter an underlying system that still carries my original terminology and acronyms. It was seeing these terms in active diagrams behind Mike that made me again reflect to myself, “This is really working.”
