In conjunction with the Wireless Networking and Communications Group at the University of Texas, the Austin Wireless Alliance hosted its annual Texas Wireless Summit last month, featuring a raft of great speakers. Mark Louison, president of Nokia Inc., John Donovan, chief technology officer of AT&T, Tony Lewis, VP of open development at Verizon Wireless, and other industry leaders discussed “open” platforms, “open” business models, and “open” spectrum and networks.

The more than 200 attendees, representing all sectors of the wireless industry around the world, helped drive the momentum of the two-day event with insightful questions and calls for more “openess.” The opportunities in the vast wireless space are countless. It may be a market that’s more than 20 years old—remember that incredible bag phone of yesteryear?—but it’s still wide open.

Your next project no doubt will support this fast growing, enormous, open market of more than 3.6 billion subscribers, which is expected to grow to more than 4.6 billion by 2010*. But when it comes to making decisions on that cool new product or service, avoid the Field of Dreams development approach—“If you build it, he will come.”

It was a great movie. As a product development approach, it sometimes works. It’s a real rush when it does, too. In fact, many successful companies can point to doing that—once. But for most companies, it’s a bad bet. Your development cycle, which should be a well-thought stage gate process with key milestones and deadlines, needs to start with your best answers to several key questions:

• •Who is your customer?
• •What’s the compelling customer need?
• •What are the alternative solutions? (Hint: It may be your competitor. It may be a completely different approach. Slate, abacus, slide rule, and calculator come to mind.)
• •How much is it worth to the customer?
• •What exactly will we build? Can we build it? Can we build it at a profit?
• •What’s the market window (see below)? Can we hit it?

What’s your market window? This could be the most important question of the lot. Here’s a hint—it’s not open. It’s definitely not “when we open it.” It may be narrow. It may be weeks or months. But it’s not infinite, and you are losing money every day past that window.

Even with the coolest, newest, most leading- or bleeding-edge solution, if you dawdle on your delivery window by making the solution overly elegant, or worse, didn’t know what the delivery window needed to be, your (potential) customer will find another way to solve its problem, even a problem it didn’t know it had.

One of the most difficult decisions you may ever make is when you figure out that events, maybe some beyond your control, have conspired to delay you. You also realize you have missed the market window and should stop throwing good money (read: engineering hours) after bad. It’s time to move to the next great idea and answer the questions above better than the last time.

Here’s a call-to-action for all the developers, service providers, and everyone in between. Make sure that the customer is your true north—the center of your universe, your raison d’etre. Know your customer. Push the limit on what the science and your engineering can do, and leverage your networks for every penny you can. Keep the customer in your heart. Make good decisions at the outset of your product development. Everything else will fall into place.

Lastly, here’s a shout-out to Mrs. Louison, Mark’s mom…

Ma’am, your son Mark asked me to corroborate his story that he has a real job. As we say in Texas, you should be real proud. He and the rest of the august panel of speakers did a really fine job at the conference and all deserve our heartfelt thanks for their time and their passion.

* ABI Research estimates 3.67 billion subscribers by the end of the second quarter of 2008 and forecasts 4.66 billion subscribers by the end of 2010.

Karen Hanley and Associates supports CXOs, boards, and leadership teams with marketing consulting in growth markets, including global market development, product launches, brand development, communications strategy, positioning, and organizational development. Formerly the senior director of the Wi-Fi Alliance and head of corporate marketing at Motorola/Freescale, Karen began her career in engineering and marketing at Texas Instruments in a scrappy startup business.

The Austin Wireless Alliance, and its parent organization, the Austin Technology Council, are member-driven associations working to promote the growth of the Texas technology sector.

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