Dryza with a Bone

Sometimes I don't know whether to laugh or cry when I think about the people who've been proposed and trialled to fill that missing functionality hole that I identified a long time ago when MadDog just wasn't doing it for me. Now that Dryza is back on board, I thought that all of my desires had been fulfilled, but now FO is claiming that she's a temporary measure to act as an internal consultant and gather enough material to be able to present the company in a better light. This, of course, means that we'll lose that link to reality when her period of consultancy ends, and we're back to square one.
Anyway, FO's grand scheme was to have Dryza do a round of interviews with the folk within the organisation, expand to the Board, and then on to key customers and overseas representatives, and perhaps beyond that to potentials, gathering information about how we work, and then presenting that to each successive group, and finding how that relates ot what they're looking for in a development partner, or whatever relationship is most appropriate.
Dryza hadn't been desk-placed, because I've got Roddy sitting at that desk I used to reserve for the likes of Dryza, so she was stopping by irregularly, chatting to FO, Arkel, or myself, and then flitting away again, while she sorted out her marketing commitments elsewhere. Then, one day, FO suddenly looked excited about the prospect of her getting underway - she'd given him a proposal, and he was unhappy with it, but she could start work anyway. He asked if I'd like to be interviewed, and listed key personnel who would be - the exec, most of the VPs, and Axis, because of the work he does. No problem.
Early next morning, I got a meeting request, and I responded without much thought. No clash, no thought. I noted that Dryza had been in on the previous afternoon - the lipstick-marked coffee cup in the sink. I thought no more about it until FO came around and asked for a few minutes of my time.
"You know that interview this morning?"
"This morning? Bugger - I thought it was tomorrow!"
"Well, it's in - 10 minutes. I just want to give you some background, but I'm not allowed to show you this," and he waved the questionnaire about like a flag of truce. "I'm not exactly happy about what she's come up with, and I want your feedback on whether you think it will be worthwhile continuing with her services, or just cut our losses."
"... and lose the only one we've got with these skills."
"Yeah, well, better than waste money."
FO and I have some very different ideas. He thinks it's a waste of money to hire people, but it's nothing to offer rewards to those we have for working excessively, in the extreme, or hiring consultants and contractors short-term. As long as it doesn't affect the long-term costs. I believe that the right people make the business viable. Having too few people will kill us. Keeping the wrong people will kill us.

So, there is twa, I was about to be interviewed for my take on product and company direction and how it should be presented to the big wide world. I got a new glass of water.
The interview was a slow process, as it should be - you should never rush these things. And it did need some refining. Other people were supposed to be put on the rack for an hour. I got three. I'm not complaining, because I had to sort out a lot of misundersatdnings.
When FO gets talking, he goes off on his own little tangent. If you weren't with him at the start point, you've lost him. Dryza, coming in from the outside, had been overloaded with FO-concepts that were misrepresented, misinterpreted, and generally missed.
A good example is "I want you to draw a bubble-map of each product, breaking it down into components, so that we can see if there's value in what we have."
This is so overladen with assumptions, that I spent nearly half and hour deconstructing the question.
If the company is service-oriented, then product is next to irrelevant. What the hell is a bubble-map? Is it something that non-technical people draw when they have no formal training of how to represent a concept? How do you draw it? What are you allowed to put in it? Who is its target audience? What is its purpose? Componentise in what dimension? Who said it could be done at all? What is value? To whom?
I ended up not drawing anything myself, but allowed Dryza to draw two diagrams - one showing the service that we provide, and how that can be componentised into marketing advantages, and another breaking down the product, showing how that related to potential new services. I guess from a marketing point of view, a service is product.
To me, if you can see it, it's product, if you can't, it's service. Call me an engineer at heart.

The interviews went on. I saw Axis and Polo have their turn, and then I had to laugh - she'd hit Bubble. I've got to find out what she makes of him. I don't think she's spoken to him before. I could tell that she was concentrating really hard on what he was saying, which is different to me, when she was either trying to clarify a point, or else was busy writing things down.
When I first heard about this interview, I jokingly asked FO if he wanted me to be honest. It didn't really come up, because we spent three hours on product, so I had no opportunity to talk about management issues and company go-forward. Maybe I'll leave that for a chat over coffee.