Strategy & Innovation Articles

We’re curious people by nature. And we love to teach others what we’ve learned. So explore our blog to gain fresh insights from our expertise in areas ranging from culture to AI.

SEP Wins TechPoint’s 2024 Innovation Service Partner of the Year Mira Award

SEP Recognized as Indiana’s Top Innovation Service Partner, Winning TechPoint’s Prestigious Mira Award Westfield, Indiana - SEP has been named the Innovation Service Partner of the Year by TechPoint at the 25th annual Mira Awards. The Mira Awards, Indiana’s largest…
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Five Strategies for a Happy and Healthy Software Maintenance Team

Software Maintenance Teams provide a broad array of services, customized to the industries they support. As a software development consultancy, our portfolio includes industries like energy, aerospace, healthcare, medical devices, precision agriculture, and others. The products we build live on Desktop, Embedded, Mobile, Web, and Cloud platforms. With such a diversity of industries and platforms, […]
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SEP's Software Discovery Methods Wall

How Product Discovery Maximizes Your Chances of Success

Savvy companies use product discovery to bring focus to new projects and during projects to shape upcoming releases. This helps design software for the three needs of effective products: Functionality: The software has the requested features, is well built, and maintainable. Business: The software is designed to accomplish specific business objectives. User: The software has […]
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Chris Shinkle Presenting at SEPTalks

In Product Strategy, Ideas Are Important, but Execution is Critical

Ideas are important, but executing them is even more so! I had the opportunity to present at our recent SEPTalks event about how companies can close the gap between idea and delivery. We touched on the North Star Framework, what barriers get in the way of trying to achieve these goals, and a mental model […]
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Industry: The Product Conference

Before I jump into my experience with Industry: The Product Conference this year, let me set the stage— On Father’s Day a few years ago, I didn’t have anything planned. I figured I would ‘wing’ the day and not feel constrained to some schedule (these are rare moments in my life). So my wife suggested […]
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Focus your Perspective

Focus Your Product Perspective

Have you ever tried to work with someone with the best of intentions, but it ends in a shouting match? Or walking away with the same or more problems than you started? A colleague was dealing with helping their client with upcoming milestones, and it felt like a similar situation was inevitable. He wanted to […]
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Diagram of outcome, opportunity, and solutions

Planning Features with Opportunity Solution Trees

New software projects often come with a long list of potential features. How do you evaluate these ideas before investing costly resources into development? At SEP, we’ve been mapping potential features with opportunity solution trees. They are a way to visualize the relationships between ideas and their desired outcomes, and to manage the gaps in […]
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10 Things I Learned in My First 10 Episodes of Podcasting

I’ve had the opportunity to interview talented, driven and successful leaders in Indy tech. We often don’t get to hear how software products get built and what it took to make them a reality. These stories of success and challenge have been encouraging for me to hear so I summarized some of my biggest lessons […]
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One Lead’s Journey to Successfully Improving My Software Forecasting With Monte Carlo Simulation

What is this? Forecasting is not a skill I use frequently, which means it takes me time to remember each of the steps and the small details I’ve forgotten. There’s a lot of great information out there, but reading it and refreshing my memory takes longer than I’d like it to. My goal here is […]
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A Pandemic Isn’t a Reason to Stop Researching (but… It Might Be a Good Reason to Start)

When it comes to doing user research, I’m always going to recommend learning with someone in their own space. Seeing someone use your product in their environment will always add more context to your investigation. Generally, research falls into these categories: exploratory/generative research (looking to understand problems, needs, goals, etc.) evaluative research (benchmarking your understanding, […]
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