The team developing a set of portable SystemVerilog examples decided to organize the first event in Silicon Valley on Sunday, January 14 from 2PM till 5PM at Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, CA. If the first event is successful we are going to make it recurrent. You can register for the event on Meetup or LinkedIn.
The current directions of the group:
Title:
After sale IT support for American and Western Companies
Let’s have a case study.
A Russian IT company sells software to a western country like say America. And you are working as an application developer on the support side.
One day, there is a problem with the program, and the program has stopped working.
You must contact the company now to inform them that the program is off-line.
THE NEXT STEP YOU TAKE IS VERY IMPORTANT.
The way, the two cultures operate in a situation like this are very different and it will have everything to do with how easy your job goes for you.
…………
Russia : “we have a problem”
“What is wrong?”
“I don’t know”
“When can it be fixed?”
“I don’t know”
……………
USA: “i’m just giving you a real quick call to let you know that there is a problem with the program.
I’ve already put my team on it and we will have it up and running shortly.
I will let you know more by 3 o’clock today what is going on”
It’s not important how long you think it will take you, but I will always tell them a few hours from the time that you informed them of a problem.
I understand that you have no idea how deep the bug is and also whether it will affect any other systems.
But it is important to set a time window very close to when you inform them that you will bring them more information.
This also works very well if you don’t know something that they ask you.
Question:
“What can we do to fix this problem?”
Answer:
“I understand what you’re saying. I will look into it and get back to you in two hours. By 1 PM today.”
in this case, it’s important that you:
1. Take responsibility for yourself and your team.
2. Communicate that you understand this responsibility.
3. Gives strict timelines. (if it’s not possible, you can always say that there is a problem, but do it before the deadline.)
4. Use certain key language.
“ I understand you”
“ I understand what you were saying”
“ I wanted to inform you”
“ we are working on it right now”
This is one of the most important articles I’ve written.
In this article, I’m going to dive deep into one of the largest differences between Russia and America pertaining to sales and marketing.
1. You must use your name.
2. You must have a personal approach.
3. You must show that you are involved.
4. You must show that you care about the needs and desires of the client.
Recently, I was faced with an interesting problem. I was asked to call clients without making it personal.
So let’s go back to when I was in America, living and working as a sales person. The company I work for, was very large, and had multiple branches around the Washington DC area. They had offices in three states.
They put me through a sales training course.
The biggest “take away” from the course…..
You’re not selling the product/
you’re selling yourself.
It's important to use your charisma and your genuine caring for the customer to win them over. Once they understand that you're actually trying to help them, then they will seriously consider the item you are telling them about.
I also want to say, very clearly, that it's not a prideful approach. It should be a professional approach. You're responsible to tell the customer/ the client all the benefits of the item and how this item will help their business.
Everything above pertains to sales in America. So if you are approaching America as a sales manager this is how you should craft your approach.
Now I've spoken to my colleague,
Kristina Pashnina and we have agreed upon some stark differences to the Russian sales climate. Here she will begin to tell you how the Russians see sales.
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Once NFT royalties became a hot topic and gained popularity among artists and creators. Later, arguments were evolved to remove royalties that had swayed other NFT creators. DeGods, the popular Solana's NFT project, has moved its royalty model to 0%. However, creating a royalty-based NFT marketplace attracts many creators around the world. In this article, we will delve into the development process of NFT marketplace royalties and how it benefits enthusiastic artists from secondary sales.
My last article stirred up some definite comments and even questions about different things in business. I’m going to keep giving you as much information as I can so that you can continue to do business as IT professionals outside of Russia with other countries.
How do you design a website that will be viewed in the west and appreciated by the people there?
What are the most important elements
for, America and other western markets?
Information shared below is exactly how I work with my IT professionals who are going to be participating in pre-sales to America. I tell them exactly this, and it helps prepare them to successfully sell the the United States companies.
As developers and IT companies, we must sell our software.
What can give you an edge in this very competitive market place?
Please, if you would allow me to let me explain why this is important and how this can make your company more successful. There’s a certain type of thinking that is conducive to working as a software developer. This is a very practical mindset, but it goes beyond that. If you have the mindset of direct thinking.
Here are examples:
I see the target a target and I don’t see obstacles
Вижу цель, не вижу препятствий
This is an example of the practical mindset, how is approaches the problem of development. It makes people who have this mindset, the best developers in the world.
Example of mindset:
Problem……………… find a solution………… No problem.
Notice how this looks exactly like a line of code?
This is well-known around the world in places where you would like to sell your software, the United States, Germany, Belgium, and the Middle East.
Countries where people have this mindset have the best developers.
now let’s talk about your competition:
Americans: during the center process, “find a solution” Americans are overly concerned about responsibility. This slows them down in the decision making process.
i’m writing this series articles to spearhead the new marketing campaign for into the American market. I will be covering a wide range of topics that will allow us to position the company in the proper way so that is excepted as a provider of High-quality software in America.
The key to converting an American CEO or CFO is the trigger point for the American business culture. The trigger point for America is responsibility. This means in business you must be responsible. You also look for business partners that are responsible.
But let’s take this into the newest more powerful view that we need to have now.
The scene from the point of you of the CFO sitting at the head of the financial controls of a large hospital conglomerate. Put yourself in the mind of the CFO. What are they concerned about?
As an American CFO they will be very concerned about whether they are being responsible in their job and responsible to the hospital, staff, shareholders, patients and the management above them.
And this is how we get our foot in the door in this American niche market. If we present ourselves as offering something that “May” give an answer to specific problems that they know that they have, they must give us a chance to present a Presale. The reason is because they are responsible, and if there is a solution as an American Director you must explore that solution.
It would be irresponsible to not explore a potential solution.
Then it’s a simple case to actually give value in the presale meeting and convince them that we can deliver some thing that will benefit their business and profits.
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In our last article we covered the anatomy of a presale meeting gone wrong. In that article we posed some questions for everyone to think about. What exactly does an American company wanting to hire a Russian custom software development company, feel about this Russian company? What are they afraid of? What are their concerns?
In the end we came up with five concerns.
1. Is the company a fly by night company, is the company a one-day company?
2. Will they be professional in supporting or developing the software that they've sold to us?
3. Will they have proper data security?
And now the two new ones that are because of the mess the world is in now...
4. Will they be able to complete the project on time? This includes proper internet access an infrastructure to support IT.
5. Where is your team located? Are you still located in Russia?
Now we're going to look at the last 2, number four and five.
However let's look at number 5 first.
Many IT companies today if they want to work with the United States or even Europe they must not have their developers located inside of Russia. Matter of fact it goes so far that if a developer is located in Russia and they're using a VPN and somehow the VPN is breached the credentials are canceled for that developer to work on the project.
It's for this reason that Russian IT companies are opening offices around the world. Let's look at Armenia as an example.
Wait a minute I have to go back for a second...... We must discuss how countries look to America Canada and Western Europe. I basically give them a score based on questions that are brought up in the mind of the American company or European company.
Product management runs on choices. What to develop next, what to put on hold, and what to discard altogether. Getting these choices right steers products toward success. It's more than just a list; it's understanding needs, managing resources, and aligning with the company vision. Prioritization is, without a doubt, a major skill for any product manager.
For most of us, the daily challenge is juggling plenty of tasks, features, and stakeholder requests. But not all demands carry the same weight. It's easy to get swayed by the loudest voice in the room or the most recent email in the inbox, but these aren't necessarily what the product or the users need most urgently.
To get it right in product management, we need the right tools and approaches. Let's see what it takes to nail prioritization.
Key challenges in prioritization
As I noted before, in product management, facing various and often unpredictable challenges is part of the job. However, deciding which tasks to prioritize can be especially confusing, and here are a few factors to consider.
1. Changing customer demands: Customers are the heart of any product, and their needs and desires can evolve rapidly. One day, a feature might be all the rage; the next, it's old news. For instance, a messaging app might find its users clamoring for dark mode due to its increasing popularity across platforms. Adapting to these shifting demands requires constant observation and a readiness to pivot.
2. Evolving market trends: The broader market can influence product decisions as much as individual user feedback. If there's a sudden surge in voice-activated technologies, products that don't incorporate voice features might find themselves left behind. Staying attuned to the market means continuous research and the agility to tweak your product roadmap accordingly.
My name is Paul Karol and I work connecting Russian IT with their customers in the United States. Please find on Hbar my previous article for a complete explanation of my credentials.
Today we're going to look at a presale meeting that was not successful and we will explain exactly how the Russian company lost this business. Please take a look at this photograph.
Going into this presale meeting the client (large American chain store) had worked with the software for a little more than a month and we're pretty happy with the result. From all indications they were going to buy the software this day. The sales manager had a good relationship with the American managers of the company. There was lots of buying sign that was known to the Russian company prior to this presale meeting. Suffice to say that they believe that they would have an easy sale today.
There was some very specific things that the Russians did that cost them this business.
We will be using this as a case study and we will discuss exactly everything that they did as a mistake and how to not do these same mistakes for your company.
First we must do some brain work. A thought experiment, if you will. What do you believe are the concerns of an American company doing business with Russian IT developers today. The current situation between the countries does make it more difficult but the same exact concerns are still there from before maybe slightly more amplified and there may be one more concern that wasn't there prior to the difficulties in Ukraine.
Today, many companies are transferring their development processes to Agile frameworks. In this article, I discuss how the concept of a Project and the position of classic Project Manager are transferred in accordance with the Agile paradigm.
Russian speaking IT presales and passing interviews to the West
I'm Paul Karol an American and I've been living in Russia and working internationally with businesses for the last 10 years. My first client was a Gazprom high level director and we worked on international communication and connections with the West and China.
I am the keynote speaker in many events and also give companywide training for companies that interact with other countries. I have been working deeply with The IT community of Russia for 6 years. My job is to make them pass their project interviews. Also I work with the presales and make sure that the company gets the projects that they want.
I'm the expert on Russia, Chinese and the Western cultural relations.
First: if your company is just beginning to approach the Western market including America you want to have success in the beginning. If you're successful at passing the first few presale meetings or project interviews your reputation will be established. If you fail a few interviews or presales then you start to develop a reputation.
Brainstorming is a popular working method which is commonly used by UX design teams. It involves a group of designers meeting (whether offline or via video call) and generating as many ideas as possible to find the best solution to a specific problem or come up with creative design ideas. Brainstorming sessions are usually held at the start of a UX project so that designers could use the ideas they think are the best later in the process of product creation. These sessions can vary in duration and form depending on which problems need to be solved, how many people participate and how many ideas need to be generated.
Multidisciplinary project emerges when multiple teams with different expertise areas join to create a product. Despite the fact the product development is not something happining merely my a wish, product leads often perceive it as an easy walk. Usually this easy walk becomes a crash course. Let's uncover what leads to crash and what is necessary to succeed.
- Continuous Improvement is also a Project, a meta-Project, a maintenance that usually lasts longer than the main development project.
- If you can fit into the Sprint boundaries with your development cycle, then the concept of Retrospective as it is formulated in SCRUM may also suit you. But if you are bigger and not oriented on CI/CD, then be ready to make a hybrid of SCRUM with classical Project Management – thanks God SCRUM is good embeddable (proven by SAFe) !
- What is left out in when we run retrospectives quarterly? – Plan and Check. The placeholder of classical SCRUM Retrospective is quite suitable for that purpose, surrounded, of course, by some additional groomings, providing required action plans and decompositions up to sprint-length steps.
I am a Project Manager. 14 years of project management, 5 years in agile framework, last 4 years in product companies, last 3 years in ABBYY, mobile technologies. I would like to share my practical experience, how we have organized the planning in ABYY Mobile Technologies having SCRUM development.
“SCRUM — you get too little, and you need to add the missing.” The story about how we adjusted the Planning procedure for yearly roadmapping and budgeting, how we have organized the SCRUM‑planning for the feature‑driven development with product development cycle 2–3 months and more.
This article describes the new Nginx Unit web server. In it you can learn more about the web server itself, its installation and configuration: how to use listeners, routing, how to install TLS certificates. The article will show how easy it is to work with it and that huge configs are slowly becoming a thing of the past.
CTO: Balancing Leadership and Architecture.
As a CTO, effective leadership goes beyond technical architecture. Conducting regular performance reviews is a crucial part of managing teams.
Note: The performance review schedule may vary depending on the specific
company's policies and guidelines.
For early-stage startups, lacking CTO expertise in conducting performance reviews is common. In my experience, I've tailored grades to encompass all aspects of professional iOS development, keeping project-specific needs in mind. Being the first in the team can offer significant growth opportunities. However, acknowledging any lack of people management skills and compensating through continuous growth is essential.
I've compiled my insights on structuring the iOS development department, conducting performance reviews, and most importantly, emphasizing the significant distinctions between developers' levels based on well-defined criteria.
Against the backdrop of a sharp decline in venture investments in various traditional industries (this is clearly related to the global economic situation), but against the backdrop of certain upheavals in the crypto industry, the question arises of a driver that can become one of the «pillars» of the development of a decentralized industry.
