A new day

Today was a quiet day compared to the first three days of the Manos Accelerator. We had two mentors visit today and meet with us.

Tony Lopez is the Director of Site Management, Worldwide Online Stores at Apple. He specializes in product management and strategy for the Apple Store’s online presence worldwide. Tony has more than 10 years’ experience in product management and user experience for digital industries, such as Macromedia and Looksmart.

Each team had an one-on-one conversation to ask him questions and understand how he can help us succeed.

Mahesh Bhatia is a managing director at Evalueserve: an industry pioneer in global delivery of technology-enriched research and analytics services. He also gave our teams his time to get valuable insight in how we should shape our businesses.

One interesting thing Mahesh invited our group to do with him was for one team to sit in on another team’s meeting. While this felt awkward at the same time exciting to see what what another company is talking about, I found this kinda cool. With this system, you can learn quite a bit about what the struggles another team is experiencing. In fact, they can and actually are our struggles as well. So technically, Mahesh helped two teams at once. And the teams don’t have to be in the same industry for this method to work.

This afternoon I discovered one of the awesome things about this accelerator. Someone might come over and strike up a conversation, maybe asking how our meetings with the mentors went. It is a great way to talk about a frustration or something that you might not understand. Because of the diversity of our group, we can bring a totally different perspective to the problem. And since we aren’t so close to and emotionally involved in the product another team is working on, it can be a big breath of fresh air getting another point of view.

This isn’t earth-shattering…in a way it is…but there are so many people here to walk up to and get advice. Have something you need reviewed for conciseness? Edward, Sylvia, Clara, and David are always willing to sit down and chat. Have a question on how something is supposed to work? Just ask.