Sweet Home Chicago. After 20 years in Silicon Valley

I’ve identified myself with Datalogics for decades.  It’s where I got my start as a software developer just out of school, just starting a new product line for the PDP-11, where we grew the business to a $17M annual revenue company until we were acquired by Frame as SGML experts, and then a long journey to California, Adobe, eBooks, PDF and server software.  I’ve been working with Datalogics as a consultant since the summer of 2012, and just signed on as Director of Product Management to bring some new business ideas to market, as well as refining the product process. I started back there on a full-time basis on July 29.

I picked the title “Sweet Home Chicago” for this post, little realizing the subtleties. In 1995, my theme song was Burt Bacharach’s “Do you know the way to San Jose,” as much as I dislike Burt. Coming back now, while still living in California, made me think of “Sweet Home Chicago” as popularized by the Blues Brothers.  A quick read of Wikipedia shows the tension between California and Chicago, with the lines
“But I’m cryin’ hey baby, Honey don’t you want to go
Back to the land of California, To my sweet home Chicago.”

I’m back, looking to apply agile methodologies, to the extent that they make sense, and the best of product and customer understanding, to make new ideas and profitable ventures blossom at Datalogics. And, even though I’ve “done agile” at multiple places in the past, beginning with Adobe, this will be my first time bringing it in (along with engineering) rather than having it imposed. I’ll be blogging about my experiences and sharing pearls of wisdom from others with the team as we go down this agile journey together.

This blog has been sitting around in a semi-finished state since November of last year. It’s not perfect now, but I’ll work to make it better over the coming weeks. At some point, you just need to get it out there, and this agile product management thread seems like the best reason for this.