The Next Step In My Personal Journey
You might not have noticed, but the last few weekends I have been writing more personal pieces on Medium, with immensely positive responses. So here are some thoughts on doing what you love, career choices, and the next step in my personal journey…
A year ago I got certified as a SAFe® 5 Product Owner & Product Manager…
From everything I learnt from Agile, there were three words which resonated with me on a deep level; Mastery, Autonomy and purpose.
When something resonates with us on a deep level, then we recognise it as truth, followed by a deep desire to implement this truth in our lives.
However, I would like to add a fourth element, belonging…
These four principles became my mantra, my guiding north star in terms of the perfect employment.
What does it mean to me?
Mastery is a deep aspiration to improve my craft, it motivates me to want to attain mastery for its own sake, and for no other reason.
Autonomy is about controlling what I do, when I do it, and with who…all within reason of course.
I have come to realise that time is the ultimate currency. And I need to be specific and discerning on what I spend my time on, this boils down to purpose.
Belonging is to have an affinity for a particular combination of three elements: people, place and situation.
One thing I keep on coming back to in my mind is wanting to work for a startup…I while back I read Malcolm Gladwell’s book titled, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants.
For starters, the book lends fresh insights into the age old story of David and Goliath.
Secondly, it talks about the concept of gaming the game, those are my words. 🙂
Thirdly, the book made me want to be part of the underdogs, and gave me a deep desire to battle giants.
To successfully battle giants, it needs to be by way of mastery, by enhancing and increasing the probability of otherwise improbable events.
Beating the odds, and doing so while belonging.
The avenue to this, is working with exceptional people, on a stellar product. A product that can scale effortlessly and can be easily leveraged for ever increasing users.
For me, the ideal role is combining two disciplines…
- Being a Customer Advocate and
- Product Evangelist
Whilst continuing to research and write on the Conversational AI landscape.
The inbound interest has been overwhelming and I’m truly grateful for all the potential opportunities.
I am also indebted to so many people for making time available and the engaging and interesting conversations I’ve had.
My goal is to join a company before the end of the year, and to remain in the area of Conversational AI in general and NLU in specific.
When I consider the recent Gartner report, it is evident that there will be immense focus on clustering and detecting semantic similarities from customer conversations.
A few months ago I coined the term “Intent Driven Design & Development” (IDD). The premise of IDD is that chatbot design and development must start with intents.
The process of using existing customer utterances and conversations to create clusters of semantically similar sentences. And I truly believe that we will see significant growth in this area.
As I have mentioned before…
As more complete end-to-end cloud based Conversational AI solutions are launched, the table stakes increase considerably. With low table stakes (existing market functionality and innovation) it is easy for companies to go to market and differentiate themselves. Hence the early entrants differentiates themselves with a lower level of functionality.
And as the market matures, new products will emerge servicing the Conversational AI market. Subsequently these vertical-focussed products will make for a next round of acquisitions, as a convenient avenue for larger players to differentiate their products and grow niche functionality.
