Three Types of Technology Leaders

Technology leaders have many different focus areas and motivations. On today’s show, we’ll discuss three common types of leaders - Visionaries, Maintainers and Resume-Builders.

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SHOW NOTES:

• Three types of product leaders (via @shreyas)
• Pioneers, Settlers and Town Planners (from Geek Whisperers)

THREE TYPES OF TECHNOLOGY LEADERS

VISIONARIES | TRANSFORMERS

• Speak in stories, painting big pictures.
• Truly understand the overall business, the broader markets, and the potentially changing landscapes ahead over both the near-term and long-term
• Understand the timing of the markets and when change is needed vs. nice-to-have
• Understand the breadth of competitive threats to the business
• Understand both opportunities and opportunity costs 

MAINTAINERS | PROTECTORS 

• Would like to be a visionary, but always default back to focusing on re-optimizing legacy investments
• Tend to believe that all decisions are build vs. buy. Aren’t focused on creating longer-term partnerships
• Run long RFI processes vs. creating a mindset of incremental experimental scenarios.
• Have a protectionist mindset (“avoid vendor lock-in”) with new opportunities, but don’t release that with sunk costs. 

RESUME BUILDERS

• Recognize that the world is moving fast (lots of new technologies, business models), but aren’t in an optimal starting position.
• Establish a big, audacious goal that portrays a visionary mindset. 
• Establish an “everything” or “all-inclusive” policy, even when it doesn’t make economic sense. 
• The old 5yrs of building an ERP system is now the 2yrs of transforming to the cloud. Springboard to build the resume without finishing the project. 

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