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Business is a team sport, and it’s nice to have the camaraderie of laughing, grinding toward deadlines, and even gossiping with your teammates. But when youre the boss, youre not just one of the creweven if youd like the easy camaraderie shared among people who arent calling the shots. What happens when layoffs are approaching, or the company is facing budget cuts? You may feel lonelyyou know whats coming but lack peers to confide in or commiserate with. Then there are the everyday stressors that come with leadership, like giving feedback or telling someone they won’t be getting the promotion. It can be lonely at the top. If you miss being part of the team, here are some actions you can take. Accept your position and the restrictions that come with it As a leader, there are many things you wont be able to share with the folks on your teamand thats just the way it is. For example, you may feel jealousy when you see them laughing and having a good time while youre stuck doing the budgeting. Dont fight these feelings; acknowledge them. Accept the reality that youre the leader, and that many times youll have to stand alone. Find a trusted adviser Even though youre the boss, you still need someone to bounce ideas off of: you cant live in a silo. Find a person who shares your philosophies regarding business, leadership, and people. Establish a consistent cadence and routine for working with your adviser outside of your company. Note that this should be a reciprocal relationship; offer your ideas and opinions to your adviser when asked. Be someone in whom they can confide. Find appropriate times to pop in Just because youre the boss doesn’t mean you cant have any part of the day-to-day team operations. Find instances where you can pop in and be part of the team. Be judicious about thisfor example, you probably dont want to hop in on a meeting the team can handle on their own. An appropriate time to join the team may be when everyone is working toward a deadline and the load is intense. Otherwise, be present, but not overbearing. You have a new team group Even though youre the boss, youre not completely alone. You have new peersother managers, or the executive leadership team. Everything evolves and changes; you can have fun with this new group, too. Look for opportunities to connect, even if you miss your old team. You will evolve as a leader. Being the boss can be a great new opportunity, even if you miss the camaraderie that came without that title. Instead of longing for what was, make the most of your position and forge new relationships among your peers in leadership.
Category:
E-Commerce
By now youve probably heard of vibe coding: creating software from scratch by prompting AI to generate the source code for you, instead of writing it yourself. The promise of spinning up real working apps from nothing but mushy human language is tantalizingand companies such as Lovable and Replit have already ridden it to billion-dollar valuations. Theres just one catch. For a wide swath of businesses with straightforward but mission-critical needs, vibe coding doesnt actually work. AI still hallucinates, which means the code it generates is often sloppy and occasionally downright malicious. It cant be trusted to be secure or consistent. No wonder that according to one major survey, 72% of professional software developers dont use vibe coding tools on the job. A New York-based startup called Aboard is pursuing a different approach. Call it vibe product management. Instead of using AI to jump right into generating code (and holding on for dear life), business leaders can work with solution engineers at Aboard who use AI to turbocharge the planning and discovery phases of enterprise software developmentthe lumbering, unsexy, but essential work of deciding what components to code and how to assemble them reliably. If vibe coding is like asking a robot architect for a summer house and watching it start to pour concrete for a pool you may never have asked for, Aboards approach is all about making the robot focus on drawing up the blueprints first. Its still faster, but also saner. No AI code allowed Aboards founders think that their plan-first, code-later approach is the future of AI-augmented software development, and theyre not alone: Amazons new coding tool, Kiro, is based on a similar concept. Its all about coming to terms with a cruel fact: You can freestyle a little widget or a to-do app, but you cant freestyle large-scale software, says Aboard CEO Rich Ziade. His co-founder (and the companys president) Paul Fordwho happens to be an internet-famous tech writerputs it more bluntly: Youre not going to get JPMorgan Chase to vibe code the next version of its banking app. Ford and Ziade would know. For most of the past decade, they ran a successful agency creating software for large companies such as Time Inc. and Goldman Sachs. What people [in those organizations] want is safety and stability, Ford saysnot exactly AIs strong suit. But after selling their agency in 2022 and watching AI capabilities accelerate in 2023 and 2024, Ford and Ziade wanted to find a way to make the bots work on their clients terms. After one false start (with a consumer-facing app that was sort of like a ChatGPT-powered Pinterest boardwe lost our minds for a little bit, Ziade says), Aboard officially launched earlier this summer at NY Tech Week. Like Lovable and Replit, Aboard greets you with a text box and some snappy copy that invites you to type in a description of the business app you want the AI to build. (I asked it for a customer relationship management systemor CRM, in biz-speakfor my freelance writing business.) From there, a large language model-powered dialogue ensues, followed by several minutes of AI thinking, depending on what you asked for. Then a working preview of the app you asked for appears. So far, so vibe code-y. Except it isnt: We do not let AI near the code, Ford says. And what you receive isnt a preview eitherthe result is a live working web app with a shareable URL, no broken buttons or missing features, and a real back end thats prepopulated with placeholder data. When I gave them a similar prompt, neither Replit nor Lovable hit all those marks without throwing errors, running out of starter credits, or asking me for upsells. Snapping the code into place Granted, what I got from Aboard wasnt exactly the Mona Lisa of CRMs. But its noncoding AI built a free, simple first draft business app that was markedly better than the ones I got from leading unicorn AI app-builders. How? Under Aboards hood are dozens of specialized AI agents, just like the ones the vibe coding apps have. The difference is that instead of coding, Aboards bots whir away on assembling what the company calls a Blueprint: a strict, proprietary template that AI can use to plan what goes into an app. Ziade likens this process to filling out Mad Libsinstead of giving the AI a pencil and a blank sheet of paper and saying go, it only gets a set of prestructured blanks to fill in. But by narrowing what the AI can do, he says, were left with a much more predictable output thats far, far more accurate and reliable than just letting it code. And the code itself? It’s pre-built and human-written, waiting for Aboards AI agents to click into place like Lego blocks according to the blueprint (using another proprietary process). That might sound like cheating, but for Ziade and Ford, its the whole point. Were not making video games with this thingwere focusing on enterprise or productivity software, Ziade says. And most of that software is based on pretty much the same building blocks. Those blocksFord says there are about 200cover everything that a business web app needs to run on its own, from UI elements to database schemas. Its one integrated app, not a bunch of bits, he says. Mine included a dashboard for displaying key metrics, a data-entry table for storing new leads, a kanban board for managing them, and a Slack-like sidebar for navigating it all. This is why my first-draft CRM app worked right away: Aboard isnt out to reinvent any wheels in the actual programming process. At least, not yet. The client connection Of course, if I were a 50-person company in the market for a bona fide enterprise application (instead of just one guy at a keyboard), the competent little CRM that Aboards website spun up for free wouldnt really cut it. And Aboard doesnt expect it to. Those insta-built appsare just a tease for what Ziade and Ford are actually selling: not a DIY vibe coding platform, but a new kind of software agency that combines the speed of AI with the bespoke service and reliable results of a human product team. Potential clients see the demo app and are, like, Okay, this is promising, Ziade explains. Then we say, Hey, look what we did in a few minutes. Imagine if we had some real time to work together. Once that relationship is established, Aboards product managers (or in their parlance, solution engineers) work directly with the business to generate more sophisticated versions of the software they actually need, using the AI blueprints to plan and assemble the first drafts and human engineers to polish and deliver the final product. (The company currently has around 30 employees.) But instead of funding the development process with large up-front feesthe usual business model for software agencies, including the one that Ford and Ziade used to runAboard charges a license fee for the finished product. Clients are expecting to have to pay a half million [dollars] up front just to see if the relationship’s going to work, Ford says. When we tell them, Youll get software, and then just pay us this amount each month, their eyes light up. Aboard is betting on businesses realizing that vibe coding platforms are throwing AI at the wrong problem. The first three to six months of any enterprise software project typically dont involve much code at all. Instead, a ton of time and money is often spent aligning on what to code, then producing a first draft based on that specification just so people can give feedback on what sucks, Ford says. This is exactly what Aboard aims its AI vibes at accelerating: It turns out that bots can assemble and iterate on those detailed, bespoke product specificationsthe blueprintsvery, very quickly, while snapping together non-buggy first drafts (using human-coded parts) quickly, too. The product were able to deliver is the destruction of, like, 20,000 meetings, Ford says. It may not be finished software, instantlythats a fantasybut it is the beginning of a journey toward finished software that doesnt feel like a money pit or a death march. Everybody gets their thing Aboards pitch resonated with Grant Hunter, a senior vice president at Outsell, a specialty B2B research firm and a former product manager himself. Hunter needed to upgrade his companys client portal, which still ran on an ancient FileMaker database. He says he was tired of vibe coding as a concept and that when Aboard did their official launch at NY Tech Week, it clicked for me: Their whole idea of flipping this [process] on its head, using AI tools to do a lot of the up-front work, but with humans still being an ongoing part of it. Other software agencies hed contacted about the project were using tools like Lovable, but it was still the usual agency process: Heres what we say were going to get done, and we think its going to take this amount of time, Hunter says. With Aboard, it was an ongoing partnership. In essence, Im looking at them almost as an in-house product team. In other words, because Aboards human-steered AI agents can quickly plan the best solution for a companys needs, instead of building (and rebuilding) code for software elements that might turn out to be extraneous or unreliable, small or midsize companies like Outsell can afford to commission the kind of white-glove, custom-fit software that was often only available to huge corporations. Ford has a catchphrase for it: Everybody gets their thing. While Aboard only has a few clients so farthe company is not willing to name them yet, but they include a large insurance company and a prominent nonprofitFord and Ziade are confident that their model will catch on. Amazon is calling its version spec-first developmentand although its Kiro tool also uses AI to write its code, it shares with Aboard the basic idea of keeping coding agents on a tight leash. Humans have to come back into the mix, Ford says. Why would you want them to be out of the mix? This is your treasured software, after all.”
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E-Commerce
Faculty hiring freezes. Department budget cuts. Declining public trust. Across the United States, higher education is navigating one of its most challenging periods in decades. Yet, quietly, something else is happening: More universities are adding chief marketing officers, or CMOs, to their top management teams. From flagship universities to small regional colleges, public universities are increasingly hiring high-level marketing executives to oversee branding, enrollment campaigns, and public communications. Why is this happening now? And is it paying off? As a marketing professor who researches leadership structures, I recently co-authored one of the first major studies on CMOs in higher education, along with my colleagues Aisha Ghimire and Cong Feng. In the paper, which is under review at the European Journal of Marketing, we examined thousands of data points from 167 public universities from 2010 to 2021. Our goal was to see whether having a chief marketing officer actually affected performance. Attracting more students, if not more donations We found that having a chief marketing officer is linked to a significant boost in enrollment. On average, student enrollment rose by 1.6% more at schools that had chief marketing officers than at those that didnt. That may not sound like much, but in a competitive environment where many schools are struggling to maintain their numbers, even small gains can mean millions of dollars in tuition revenue. In this context, CMOs appear to help universities better understand prospective students, fine-tune recruitment messages, and coordinate outreach across multiple channelsfrom social media to targeted advertising. However, when it comes to endowment growththe other big financial lever for universitieswe found no overall positive effect. In fact, in some cases, having a CMO was linked to worse performance. For example, universities whose chief marketing officers held MBAs saw their endowments grow more slowly, or even shrink, over time. The same was true of universities that brought in CMOs from outside the institution. This doesnt mean these executives were bad at their jobs. Instead, it suggests that traditional corporate marketing experience doesnt always translate neatly into the relationship-building that fuels giving in higher education. Messaging matters more in a turbulent market If higher education were coasting along, the rise of CMOs might seem like a luxury. But the timing tells a different story. Since 2010, U.S. colleges and universities have faced declining enrollment, particularly among undergraduates. Public universities alone saw enrollment drop 4% in 2021. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated these trendsenrollment has never fully recoveredand many states have slashed public funding for higher education. Adding to the pressure, experts expect to see fewer exchange students studying at U.S. universities in the near future. In this environment, the ability to explain the value of higher educationand a particular institutionhas never been more important. Colleges and universities hire CMOs to do exactly that: define and communicate the mission, brand, and unique benefits of the university to the public. Public universities, unlike elite private institutions such as Harvard or Princeton, cannot rely solely on prestige to attract applicants and donors. They compete not only with each other but also with private colleges, for-profit institutions, and online programs. For them, marketing is a matter of survival. Inside the new higher ed marketing playbook When most people think of university marketing, they imagine glossy brochures or billboards during college football season. While those still exist, much of the work is now highly targeted and data-driven. A CMO might oversee digital ad campaigns aimed at specific students, or lead market research to identify what prospective students want from a degree. They may also handle crisis communications, alumni messaging, and internal storytelling to boost morale and cohesion. At some universities, marketing teams operate almost like internal agencies, serving multiple colleges, research centers, and outreach programs. This level of coordination can be especially valuable in large, decentralized institutions where departments historically created their own messaging in isolation. The rise of CMOs in higher education is not without controversy. Critics argue that growing executive teamswhile faculty and other instructors face cutssignals misplaced priorities. Some faculty worry that marketing language can oversimplify complex academic missions or shift a schools focus toward revenue generation at the expense of scholarship. The road ahead: Matching leaders to missions Our research underscores that CMOs are most effective in specific domains, such as enrollment growth. They are not a one-size-fits-all solution for every challenge a university faces. And certain hiring decisionssuch as prioritizing corporate experience over deep institutional knowledgewe believe, may have unintended consequences for fundraising. This suggests universities need to be clear about why theyre hiring chief marketing officers and how theyll integrate them into leadership. Without alignment between the CMOs expertiseand the institutions strategic goals, the role risks becoming symbolic rather than meaningful. The trend toward hiring CMOs is likely to continue, especially among public universities competing for a shrinking pool of students and constrained state and federal funding. But our findings suggest that simply adding a marketing executive is not enough. Success depends on matching the right leader to the institutions needs and supporting them with resources, cross-campus cooperation, and a clear mandate. For some schools, that may mean seeking CMOs with deep experience in higher education advancement rather than corporate branding. For others, it may involve building stronger bridges between marketing and enrollment management, academic affairs, and fundraising efforts. The rise of CMOs isnt a silver bullet for higher educations enrollment and funding challenges. But its a sign that universities are rethinking how they present themselves to the world. And in todays competitive, skeptical environment, that might be one of the most important strategic conversations they can have. Prachi Gala is an associate professor of marketing at Kennesaw State University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Category:
E-Commerce
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