Chirag Mehta
Technology, Design, and Innovation strategist at the Office of the CEO, SAP, focusing on technology and architecture strategy and strategic operational, product, and management innovation. Adjunct faculty at Santa Clara University and San Jose State University with the department of computer engineering teaching graduate classes. Frequent speaker at conferences, special events, Chirag blogs at Cloud Computing.
Disconnect To Reconnect
All journeys, no matter how fruitful, come to an end. After a little over nine and half years I decided to leave SAP last week. What a journey this has been! Making Design Thinking real I was hired into a multidisciplinary corporate strategy team, set up by Hasso Plattner, the chairman of SAP’s supervisory board, […]
"Trying to be nice" Becomes Less Important For Developers As They Gain Experience
No, I didn’t say this, but 56,033 developers in 173 countries who responded to recent Stack Overflow’s developer survey did. I have always enjoyed going through these surveys to validate my several hypotheses and learn new things. I would strongly encourage you to go through the results from the most recent survey here. Here are some interesting […]
What Makes You A Good Product Marketing Manager?
I am a big fan of Bill Walsh and his management philosophy. Following is an excerpt from his book The Score Takes Care Of Itself. To promote sales of season tickets, I came up with an ambitious (and time-consuming) plan called “Pick-a-Seat Day” in which we put bright red ribbons on all available season ticket […]
The Discriminatory Dark Side Of Big Data
It has happened again. Researchers have discovered that Google’s ad-targeting system is discriminatory. Male web users were more likely to be shown high paying executive ads compared to female visitors. The researchers have published a paper which was presented at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium in Philadelphia. I had blogged about the dark side of […]
The Art Of Delegation – My Ten Principles For Healthy Team Culture
“Delegate almost to the point of abdication” – Warren Buffet I have worked with numerous leaders at all levels and have seen the best and worst practices in how they delegate or they don’t. Here are my 10 principles of delegation that I practice and advocate based on the lessons I have learned by being […]
Chasing Unknown Unknown, The Spirit Of Silicon Valley
A framework that I use to think about problems disruptive technology could help solve is based on what Donald Rumsfeld wrote in his memoir, Known and Unknown: Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We […]
Did SAP Overpay For Concur?
Since SAP announced to acquire Concur and eventually closed the acquisition for $8.3B many people have reached out to me asking whether SAP overpaid for Concur. I avoid writing about SAP on this blog even though I work for SAP because this is my personal blog. In this case, I decided to write this post because […]
Disruptive Enterprise Platform Sales: Why Buy Anything, Buy Mine, Buy Now – Part III
This is the third and the last post in the three-post series on challenges associated with sales of disruptive platforms such as Big Data and how you can effectively work with your prospects and others to mitigate them. If you missed the previous posts the first post was about “why buy anything” and the second […]
Focus On Your Customers And Not Competitors
A lorry is a symbol of Indian logistics and the person who is posing against it is about to rethink infrastructure and logistics in India. Jeff Bezos is enjoying his trip to India charting Amazon’s growth plan where competitors like Flipkart have been aggressively growing and have satisfied customer base. This is not the first […]
Disruptive Enterprise Platform Sales: Why Buy Anything, Buy Mine, Buy Now – Part II
This is the second post in the three-post series on challenges associated with sales of disruptive platforms such as Big Data and how you can effectively work with your prospects and others to mitigate them. If you missed the first post in the series it was about “why buy anything.” This post is about “why […]
Disruptive Enterprise Platform Sales: Why Buy Anything, Buy Mine, Buy Now – Part I
I think of enterprise software into two broad categories – products or solutions and platform. The simplest definition of platform is you use that to make a solution that you need. While largely I have been a product person I have had significant exposure to enterprise platform sales process. I have worked with many sales […]
Inability Of Organizations To Manage "The Flow" Of Talent Management
The flow, a concept developed by one of my favorite psychologists, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, matches the popular performance versus potential matrix that many managers use to evaluate and calibrate their employees. For people to be in the flow they need to be somewhere in the middle moving diagonally up. Ideally, this is how employees should progress […]
Chasing Qualitative Signal In Quantitative Big Data Noise
Joey Votto is one of the best hitters in the MLB who plays for Cincinnati Reds. Lately he has received a lot of criticism for not swinging on strikes when there are runners on base. Five Thirty Eight decided to analyze this criticism with the help of data. They found this criticism to be true; […]
Optimizing Data Centers Through Machine Learning
Google has published a paper outlining their approach on using machine learning, a neural network to be specific, to reduce energy consumption in their data centers. Joe Kava, VP, Data Centers at Google also has a blog post explaining the backfround and their approach. Google has one of the best data center designs in the industry […]
Product Vision: Make A Trailer And Not A Movie
I have worked with many product managers on a product vision exercise. In my observation the place where the product managers get hung up the most is when they confuse product vision for product definition. To use an analogy, product vision is a trailer and product definition is a movie. When you’re watching a movie […]
