My First Job at Cisco

Bangalore June, 2001

Summary:

This job would teach me:

• How to Excite the Market
• How to Simplify Communication that out to the field
• Basics of human skills (which I wld have to improve upon during my next job)

Slow Start on the Job:

I joined as a Software Engineer for a product called Service Selection Gateway (SSG). We were working on integrating it with Cisco IOS and it was at a design phase

We would have endless meetings within the team: discussing design criteria and ways to achieve them. The discussions would get hot (read: really long) at times. Amit used to attend every one of them (I liked that fact)

About the team:

On the meetings, you could instantly feel:

• Coolness that T S Ajai would bring during those heated discussions. His words would almost be final - he had that uni-directional shield around him - heat would not come in and the information would only flow out
• Excitement that Murthy would bring in. You knew something is up when he would start with "Boss!"
• Experience that Gpr would bring in and you could feel the hard work he can do

You would also note others like Ranjan Sahoo (excitement), Rajan Dhinakaran and Navneet Aggarwal (experience). Your first impression about Vinodh, Ashoka, K S Srinivas, Vivek Achar would not be a whole lot until you worked with them

One thing that I can not forget to mention: Everyone including Amit liked the fact that Ajai and Murthy knew the whole code by heart - which to my young developing mind was a big thing! It gave me a goal

First Phase:

I would fix some bugs and minor things here and there in the first couple of months. It was a great time to learn the code and follow the foot-steps of Ajai and Murthy. I would play with Cisco equipment and learn the different technolgies

Our product was going through the EFT (Early Field Trial) now and everyone was asked to contribute to make it successful. Ajai and Murthy with their experience would be the folks to contribute the most to it. The product then moved into the deployement phase

Early on, I would just listen to what most other folks are commenting on the customer support alias. Slowly, I picked on some email threads during the night time - so I would help resolve issues when no-one was around to help. Everyone would praise this effort. And hence would start the beginning of a role similar to Technical Marketing Engineer

Second Phase:

At the time, I was working on every issue that would ever flood the Customer Support alias for the SSG. It was a combination of queries from presales effort and postsales issues. Both of these efforts (pre and post sales) were different and I learnt from both of these activities

Since we owned the product, we were most excited about it success. The revenues were not enough for this product to have a dedicated Product Manager

Lessons Learnt:

Presales effort taught me:

• "Simplicity in Communication": Sales is a complex operation with Customers, Competition, FUDs etc. And I as part of "marketing" the product, needs to simplify the communication - the more we simplify, the faster the adoption of the technology in the field and the better chance we have of winning the deal!
• "Exciting the Market": Sales team and Customers both need excitement in the market. We chose innovation as the path and we drove innovation in multiple dimensions. (1) expanding the role from dsl segment to broadband wireless, metro-ethernet, cable, pwlan et all. (2) addition of new requirements (we were known as feature factory): if we heard anything from the customer or sales team that we felt might prove important for other customers, we would add it! And we have to keep that momentum to excite the field

Postsales effort taught me:

• Feedback Mechanism: Postsales support is one of the strengths of Cisco - kudos to Cisco TAC team! For us, to be almost flawless, we had to form a feedback loop for our product. And so it was!

Last Phase:

There was enough momentum to dedicate full time Product Manager and the different market segments (Broadband Wireline and Wireless) had some form of Product Manager attention to it. The management at Central Development Organization (CDO) decided that it was the time for the Next-Gen product. And it was a time for me to move on!