Cornell: Describe your greatest professional achievement and how you were able to add value to your organization.

MBAGamePlan.com

It was my first day at American Technologies Corporation (ATC). I was shown my allotted cubicle. It was barely eight-by-eight feet in size. I looked around. Similar-sized cubicles were everywhere. Dilbertism might not be a myth after all.

Within six months of joining ATC, I became one of the principal architects driving the development of the award-winning, state-of-the-art ATC's software platform. But it was not enough to bring ATC's flagship technology, neural network personalization, to mainstream. Studying the adoption of similar technologies, I concluded that we needed to connect with the "early adopters" of this technology.

I discussed my plan with colleagues in the marketing department. Despite sharing my enthusiasm, they were non-committal due to lack of resources. It was clear. If my proposal were to see the light of the day, I would have to go beyond the call of my duty. I decided to take the plunge.

Through an online forum, I started reaching out to the small community of "early adopters." From handholding the novice developers to answering the complex questions of the expert developers, I started a process of demystification of the technology. Slowly but surely, the online forum started to create a buzz in the developer community. Having understood the nuances of neural network personalization, the entrepreneurial developers started to discuss how it could be used to solve the intricate business problems. Business plans were developed and a lot of small ventures were floated.

The unexpected response to the online forum attracted the interest of our Marketing team. And this time they acted. The Marketing team soon became a regular to various trade shows and industry conferences. I was the technology expert at most of these sessions. The developer community grew rapidly and in no time boasted of 15,000+ developers from 25 different countries.

The online forum, which started out as a technology dissemination forum, established ATC as the leader driving the adoption of neural network personalization. It became the sales channel through which ATC got most of its enterprise customers. Today, these customers account for 15% of ATC's total revenue. The feedback that we gathered from the developers also helped streamline our Product Development process. There was a marked shift from "build and they will come" approach to a more customer-centric approach, which proved beneficial in the long run as lots of costly mistakes were avoided upfront.

My efforts in building this community were recognized in an influential book on neural network personalization. As the technology became ubiquitous, I felt proud that I had played my own small role in its commercialization. And what about my cubicle? Thanks to its three-and-a-half walls, which always defined my boundaries accurately so that I could continually scale those boundaries.

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