I def­i­nitely was born as an engineer.

If I look back at the early begin­ning of my career, I have to admit that I was def­i­nitely an engi­neer. My first assigne­ment back in 1991 was to write soft­ware for a pro­pri­etary ERP pack­age built on top of a Unix Sys­tem V box and one of the first rela­tional data­bases which I can­not even remember.

After that I went a lit­tle bit low level on those Unix boxes for the next cou­ple of years.

As an engi­neer you care much more on mak­ing stuff work rather than mak­ing things looks nice. I always left those kind of stuff to the Sales and Mar­ket­ing guys which I always con­sid­ered fancy people.

A few years later I moved to Prod­uct Mar­ket­ing and since then I have mostly been in Mar­ket­ing and, as you may know, I am now Prod­uct Devel­op­ment Man­ager for 3.

I def­i­nitely think that devel­op­ing a new prod­uct, being this a new mobile phone or a car does not mat­ter, is a chal­leng­ing task.

You will need to solve tech­ni­cal issues, man­age bud­get, costs and time to mar­ket but it is one of the most fas­ci­nat­ing job I could imag­ine to get.

When I first started this job I was look­ing at it with my engi­neer­ing glasses on. I was think­ing that the prod­uct had to work as expected when our cus­tomers brought it home from our shops.

Lucky me I had the oppor­tu­nity to have a fan­tas­tic team on my side. We have Indus­trial Design­ers, Graphic Design­ers, User Inter­face spe­cial­ists and User Expe­ri­ence experts as well.

These guys were able to open my mind and mak­ing me under­stant that a prod­uct does not have only to work from a tech­ni­cal stand­point. It has to work as a whole.

I have learnt from them how to look and indus­trial design and usabil­ity, how a user inter­face has great impact on the per­cep­tion of the prod­uct from the user, how dif­fer­ent mate­ri­als make a mobile phone dif­fer­ent and more cap­ti­vat­ing. I could never imag­ined that this could happen.

I would say that now I still have my sci­en­tific approach to Prod­uct Devel­op­ment, but, on the other side, I have gained a human­is­tic approach to the same sub­ject mak­ing me a more com­plete professional.

At the very same time I had the oppor­tu­nity to teach to these team of highly cre­ative peo­ple which are the tech­ni­cal hur­dles of imple­ment­ing some of their ideas on real devices, maybe help­ing them to be more com­plete professionals.

It has been a win-​win sit­u­a­tion for both of us and we have been able to deliver great prod­ucts in 2008.

I hope the same will hap­pen in 2009!

To all of my team: thank you for help­ing me.