My name is Jeff Bower and I’ve been called a lot of things during my career, but one of my favorites is a “seasoned professional.” Sometimes that seasoning is salty, bitter, or spicy - but it’s often exactly what your organization needs to complete their recipe. My specialty is filling in the gaps and finding a unique niche well beyond any job description. Some organizations are engineering heavy and don’t recognize the importance of sales and marketing. Others have a customer-focused product house but fail to comprehend the need to validate assumptions and pass information to other groups in a coherent fashion. Others have a great idea, but lack the technical skills to build what they need.

However, the most commonly overlooked function is operations. It’s not sexy, it’s not revenue generating, but it’s necessary. This is where I truly shine, enabling data to flow between disparate systems and organizations and aggregating it in a meaningful way. Without a data warehouse to connect feedback from the multitude of third party systems present in nearly all companies there is no way to correlate a marketing campaign with a change in the sales close rate or the introduction of a new feature into the platform with revenue generation. Pulling all of this data into a common core location and generating automated dashboards is often the key to link the various functions together so they can work in synergy to make the company successful.