Welcome to the first recording of our Product Momentum Podcast! In this episode, we introduce you to your hosts, Sean Flaherty, EVP of Innovation at ITX Corp., and Joe Hoffend, Director of Product Innovation at ITX Corp. Both Sean and Joe have dedicated the majority of their lives to solving complex technology problems for their clients and will discuss what it means for software products to have momentum in the world, and what it looks like when they do not. The concepts discussed in this episode will be recurring themes in episodes moving forward. We look forward to taking you along this journey of discovering all the possibilities in our digital world to better deliver for your clients.
Read the Transcript:
Sean: [00:00:00] Hi, welcome to the product momentum podcast – a podcast about how to use technology to solve challenging technology problems for your organization. We’ve analyzed thousands of projects and products over the last 20-some odd years and figured out this formula for what it takes to really build software products that have momentum, and we’re going to use this podcast as a forum for teaching people about what we’ve learned.
Sean: [00:00:22] I’m Sean Flaherty. I started innovating with software products at about 11 years old on an 8 bit Commodore VIC 20 computer and I’ve never really stopped. I joined the Navy after high school, studied aviation electronics, I worked on F-14 Tomcats while there, and I even built software for the Navy when I was there. I studied molecular genetics at the University of Rochester but even built software all throughout that career, earned an MBA from the Simon School of Business, and I started working with software professionally in the late ’90s, really during the beginning of the Internet when I figured out how to put the first databases on the web using a product called Microsoft ASP Technologies. Most of my experience, however has come from working in the trenches with my amazing clients, building innovative software products that move, touch, and inspire the world. I’m most fortunate to have the privilege of leading the team that is ITX. We have a passionate team of awesome technologists and artists that inspire me everyday with the magic they produce for our clients.
Joe: [00:01:19] And I’m Joe Hoffend. I’ve been building software for about 18 years. I started out when I was a kid just kind of browsing Angelfire and GeoCities, checking out some of those sites. And that evolved into some startup experience for myself, specifically in the video gaming space. And so I built that up over a number of years with some cofounders and then eventually transitioned to ITX. I’ve been here about 8 to 9 years now. I’ve been a project manager, a scrum master, a team manager, a manager overseeing several teams here, but most recently, I’m the director of product innovation and I have a team of product innovation leads that work with our clients to help them steer the product in terms of the vision, the roadmap, making sure it’s a success in every way. We’re talking to users and delivering ultimately what product users want. I’m the guy who’s walking around the world thinking about how a product can be made better standing at the pump at the gas station wondering what the conversion rate is for if you want a car wash or not, and so that’s just kind of how my mind works.
Joe: [00:02:20] So Sean, since this is a podcast about product momentum, can you just give us a brief introduction of what it is and why we use it?
Sean: [00:02:30] Sure. Well we learned about momentum in high school, right? So it’s part of Isaac Newton Newton’s laws of motion and I’ve found it actually to be an extremely useful analogy in business as well. So essentially, Newton says once things get rolling, they are hard to stop unless they’re acte...
