

#Define ivory tower how to#
“ How To Define Your Product” January 2003 “ Inside the Mind of the Consumer” January 2014 Here are a few related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years. Sometimes a box of croutons is just a box of croutons. All the marketing babble justification that went into a packaging redesign, new product feature, or campaign language evaporates the moment a consumer doesn’t get it. quicker than a conversation with an actual consumer.
#Define ivory tower free#
I found that it was free market research (and nothing gets people to stop more than having cute kids at the table with you), but more importantly, it helped me avoid the marketing ivory tower trap. In the early days, I used to do some of our own in-store sampling myself (occasionally with help from my family). I gave a talk last week to a global marketing team for a pharmaceutical company, and dug out a 10-year old photo from when I was helping launch the method brand in the UK. Go for the coding architect.- Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs Order Now What's your preference? Mine is clear, and rather harsh. Ideally the coding architect joins teams to help setup their application and get up to speed when starting a new project. The architecture is also taught to the teams in sessions which allows them to get answers to things being unclear. The architecture doesn't just consist of some documentation, but is supplemented with reference applications. Besides the self validating, he checks parts of his architecture with the peers being expert in the specific topic.

A coding architect doesn't just define the architecture but can also validate the architecture himself. The architects that I believe have the best solutions and are trusted the most are coding architects. On the other hand, it doesn't harm to validate a solution with one or two peers.

The guys with the loudest voice will most likely get the most attention for their solutions, which of course has a chance to be the best. Just to be honest not everybody has the same experience and can think in broader solutions, yet. This will never create the best architecture. I call the resulting architecture Polder model architecture, named after the Dutch polder model (consensus decision-making). Or even worse he might ask everyone in the team to come up with a solution. The architect doesn't make any decision by himself, for everything to decide he wants the team "to vote" for the best option. Another thing which happens sometimes, is an architect who wants to be friends with everybody or something like that. Okay, it's clear to everyone I don't like architects that are directing from their ivory tower without any mud on their shoes. You say, those architects are ignored? Yes they are! And because the implemented solution is seldom validated against the architecture nobody cares, as long as there's a working solution. But being agile they resolve those mistakes as well. They figure the architecture out themselves, making some mistakes on the path to a working solution. How on earth can this go right? Happily teams ignore those architects completely. They define the architecture in a Word document and will handout some bound copies of the architecture to the team. They have heard a bit on the cloud, but don't understand the differences between IaaS and PaaS.
#Define ivory tower software#
So they are very far from the mud on the ground-floor where actually software is build. Quite often they have their own office on a different floor, maybe even with a view. And because architecture tends to be technology agnostic, they never updated their knowledge. They built their knowledge as a developer in technologies that have since disappeared. The architects living in the ivory tower, got there years, sometimes even decades ago. After which they got promoted to the architecture role. Experience they gained in the early 2000s. We see architects that have quite some development experience behind their belt. Quite often the development teams dislike the disconnect of the architecture to real practical world. Should we define architecture from the ivory tower? April 29th, 2019 Software Architecture 'Ivory Tower at St John''s College, Cambridge' by Connor Wang on UnsplashĮvery now and then I encounter architecture defined from an ivory tower.
