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There are some meetings that are so impactful that you never forget them, even twenty years later. And this throwaway meeting that Thomas and I had at Tellabs, a major telecommunications manufacturer, years ago definitely was one for the books.
Thomas was the most senior applications engineer in my organization, and I really enjoyed meeting customers with him. Thomas would do the heavy lifting of answering the detailed technical questions the customer might have, and then I could sit back, observe, and add in if necessary.
The thing I loved about working this way was I was free to listen intently to what a customer was saying without having to worry about managing the conversation. It’s a great way to work when you’re trying to get useful customer feedback for your products.
The Tellabs meeting, as I said earlier, was a throwaway. We were having the meeting as a favor to the sales organization. The Tellabs engineer had some sort of problem with our product that didn’t make any sense, so I wasn’t very hopeful that we would learn anything useful to define our next generation of products. And defining the next generation of products was our real reason for traveling.
