When Technology IS the Business

As Senior Advisor to the CEO, Dave focuses on key projects important to PMI’s mission and community. Prior to that, as Chief Strategy & Growth Officer for PMI, Dave collaboratively defined and drove the execution of the Institute's strategy to create exponential growth in relevance and impact. Working globally, across the organization to define, test, and deliver "new products that matter," which will deliver dramatic increases in value to our customers.

  Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned  

LinkedIn is one of the more successful social networking sites on the Web. The site is not just the face of the company--it's everything. The technical challenges involved with this sort of system are certainly daunting, but even more difficult are the social challenges of getting people to use the system. We recently spoke with Allen Blue, V.P. of Product at LinkedIn, to get his perspective on what is important when trying to get people to use a new system. Here's a quick snapshot of the challenges you face when you're the one on point to make it all happen.

gantthead: How do the business side of LinkedIn and the technical side of the house work together? Are they partners in design? Perhaps you could walk us through an example of how they work together

Allen Blue: Absolutely we are partners in design. We use a breed of extreme programming as the core of our development process, so product development is highly interactive and based on value delivered to the end user.

As an example: We were working on designs which allowed more natural and familiar ways to allow two people to interact. Part of that was integration with Outlook, part of it understanding how to make sure that users had complete control over who could contact them. It was our VP of Engineering who proposed a data architecture which allowed us to fully separate the two actors in …

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