Connecting Technical Know-How With Customer Needs

John Cook observes that connecting technical know-how with customer needs requires skills outside of mathematics.

Connecting Technical Know-How With Customer Needs

John Cook routinely offers great insights on his blog, “The Endeavor.” He was interviewed by Vincent Tan in the March 2011 issue [PDF] of Singularity Magazine; here are three very interesting remarks by Cook from the interview.

John Cook: Actually applying math is hard work. It requires knowing the limits of your abstractions. It may require writing software or writing English prose. It requires skills outside of mathematics in order to connect the mathematics to the problem. It’s messy and it’s fascinating.

John Cook on his most unusual job

Vincent Tang: What’s the most unusual problem you had to solve?

John Cook: One unusual job I had was working as a consultant for computer chip manufacturer Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). At the time, AMD was involved in a lawsuit with Intel over the rights to the microcode for the 486 chip. I was part of a “clean room” effort to reproduce the microcode. I worked on the algorithms the math co-processor uses to compute trig functions, exponentials, and logarithms. (By the way, contrary to popular belief, these chips do not just use Taylor series approximations. It’s much more complicated than that.)

AMD wanted to develop its own microcode in case it was not able to prevail in its legal battle. To do this, AMD had to be very careful to isolate the development team and prove that none of us had any knowledge of the Intel code. It may be the only job I’ve had where ignorance was a requirement. (Sometimes ignorance helps, but this time it was absolutely necessary!) The team worked off-site and had no interaction with other AMD personnel. The work was very confidential at the time, though now it’s ancient history

Closing remark

John Cook: My graduate adviser told me that he thought there would be a lot of opportunity for someone who could combine theoretical math and computation. I believe he was right. Most of my career has been in that overlap and I’ve had the opportunity to do some interesting things.

SKMurphy Take

I think Cook’s remarks neatly summarizes one of the key challenges at most technology startups:  connecting technical know-how (in Cook’s case, mathematics) to the customer needs. I think the connection comes from listening to their stories and telling a few of our own.  In particular,  I think it’s very important to explain who you are and why the particular problem you have chosen to address is important for you to solve. Finally you have to make sure that the “limits of your abstraction” are close enough to representing the customer’s problem that you can address it with your technology.

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