Raj Karamchedu, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Silicon Image, spoke at the March 2, 2005 meeting of the SVPMA. Mr. Karamchedu presented on the The Craft of Thinking: Crossing the Divide Between Engineering and Marketing. The speaker started with a simple premise that "most execution failures occur due to a breakdown in marketing vs. engineering interaction" and that the breakdown is due to a failure in thinking. He then explored how thinking is a "craft" that is not intuitive and must be learned.

The goal of marketing is to define the right product, get a design win, and deliver the product on time. Most companies are set-up around a linear process to achieve this goal: define the PRD, divide the work into tasks, track budget and progress, verify product, and enter production. Conflict occurs when the market changes during design and development and, the market is always changing. Being able to adapt to change is critical. Further, within the semiconductor industry in which the speaker works, delays to market means loss of pricing power and margin.

There is also a difference between a marketer's and engineer's view of cost. One cost for the marketer means reducing the opportunity cost for the customer to choose his or her product over competitors. Thus adding a feature to one's product is good, because it reduces the cost that the customer must forgo if they were to select another company's offering. In contrast, for the engineer, cost is purely budgetary and measurable. To the engineer, adding features increases the cost and is, therefore, bad.

So what is a marketer to do? First off, educate the engineering team on the market. Share with engineering the value chain and who gets what margin. This way engineering understands the market value being created, not just how good the product is. Then repeat yourself many times. You are delivering to the engineering team real outside info. Through this, you gain trust and credibility. Further, you must be able to write in multiple contexts to relate to those around you. In particular, you must focus your language around Technological Context, Customer System Context, and Economic Context. Further, execution manifests itself in the forward movement between the three preceding contexts. Most importantly, everyone must understand the big picture.

In closing, Mr. Karamchedu stated that you must ask yourself: "What actions can initiate the forward movement?" and relate those actions to the contexts of the company.

You can view and download Raj Karamchedu's presentation from http://www.svpma.org/etc/rkaramchedu.pdf

About the Speaker
Raj Karamchedu is a Senior Product Marketing manager at Silicon Image, Inc., a pioneer and the world’s leading supplier of HDMI chips. His book, “It’s Not About the Technology: Developing the Craft of Thinking for a High Technology Corporation” was recently published by Springer. Raj also runs Slowread - a site for India entrepreneurial opportunities. His previous companies include Systemonic, Inc., a wireless LAN chip startup acquired by Philips Semiconductors, Chameleon Systems, a reconfigurable processor startup and before that, a startup of his own. Raj started his career at Cadence Design Systems in 1994, where he worked as a wireless and communication system level design engineer and project manager

Raj earned his MSEE in computer engineering from Michigan Technological University.