I love my job.
I was in Beijing, China a couple weeks ago talking with an incredibly fast-growing internet ad network, YoYi Media. These guys are doing great things; they'll succeed whether we end up partnering with them or not. While on-site, I got a chance to talk with Liya Wang, who was helping us "on loan" for a couple days from her main responsibilities at an Oak company I've had nothing to do with until now: Shenzhen State Micro Technology Co, SMiT.
Liya is a finance person working on primarily financial issues with SMiT, and as such, she needs to explain to bankers and investors what SMIT does; understandably, people kind of want to know what you do prior to signing the check. As a start, she tried to get me to understand what they did. Fortunately, given my background, it wasn't too hard. But I could appreciate her trouble. The company essentially makes complicated chips that do complicated things that help make digital TV better. It is difficult to even start talking about what SMIT does without plunging into acronyms that are no more understandable when spelled out.
This is exactly the point at which ... the CTO should jump in and solve the problem!
... Wait, wait, don't you mean the fluffy, slick marketing people? Don't you mean the branding people? How can you possibly mean the CTO, who is the leader of the nerds who create the communication problem in the first place?! I mean, the CTO is the head of the incomprehensibility crowd, the lead creator of obscure acronyms, the guy who says things like "if I tried to explain it, it would just scramble your brain."
The CTO you should have, the CTO you should aspire to be, is exactly the right person to explain the problem, because he is the one who is most likely to actually understand the technology that needs to be explained! It's that simple.
Liya and I took a first pass at coming up with a way of explaining what SMIT does that does not involve scrambling of brains or twisting of tongues. She personally used Powerpoint to take a first cut at putting it into slides. I thought she did a great job, so I'm going to embarass her by taking some of images from the builds of just one of her slides that explains the core idea quite nicely. (I'm sure it can be improved, but this is a quick turn-around first cut!)
Starting, of course, with the problem: here's the confused user who would like to watch cable or satellite TV, but instead of just a TV and a remote, has an extra box, wires, things to hook up and several remotes.
So what SMiT do about this messy problem? The cable/satellite box disappears and there is a little card.
Then you see the card moving so that it's inserted in the TV -- in fact, it can be pre-inserted.
Once the card is in the TV, all the wires are gone, and you see the multiple remote controls turn into just one control that enables you to do everything:
The user of course is happy about this, and so gets a nice green check mark. But for the verbal learners in the crowd, it's worth spelling out the benefits:
This simple sequence of animations shows anyone what SMiT does and why it's good. Thanks, Liya!
Sequences like this are usually painfully obvious once they've been created -- it seems like they've always existed. But having been around many times when there is no such simple way of conveying the essence of a complex technology, I know how hard it is to do, and how important it is to get it right: to be simple without being simplistic.
While this is not in the typical CTO job description, it is actually one of the most important things a CTO can do, and no one does it better than the best CTO's.
If you're a CTO or on the path to be one, I suggest that this is an incredibly important exercise to undertake. It actually helps you to get perspective about what you're doing (and why you're doing it!) to be "forced" to explain it to non-technical people. It gets you "outside" of yourself in a way that is often useful.
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