Engineers need to have an awareness of the business model that allows their company to succeed. When a software company is going to market, the engineers need to work closely with the sales and marketing team to formulate a strategy for building and selling that product. This is especially true in highly technical products, such as database- or platform-as-a-service companies.

An engineer at a Hadoop-as-a-service product needs to work with the sales and marketing team to explain why a customer might want a data platform. An engineer at a SaaS company needs to understand how the cost to provide a service might scale, so that the sales team can decide on appropriate pricing.

Mitch Ferguson has been developing businesses at software companies since the 90s. He helped build out SpringSource and arrange the acquisition of SpringSource by VMWare–an acquisition that later enabled the creation of Pivotal Software. He then joined Hortonworks as an early member of the team bringing their Hadoop platform to market.

Today Mitch works as a co-founder of Accel G2M, an organization that helps bring technology companies to market–building out their sales, marketing, product, and organizational strategies.

Accel G2M

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