iovation was going through a rapid growth phase. Product enhancement requests from customers, executives, customer support, and engineers were piling up. Features were being delivered, but there was significant dissatisfaction with their nature, completeness, and timing.

After CheckFree completed its acquisition of Corillian, it had to demonstrate the value of the combination to the world.

CheckFree completed its acquisition of Corillian in May, 2007. As frequently happens following acquisitions, the Corillian product development organization faced a challenging reconciliation of its priorities with CheckFree's.

In discussions with product management professionals, it became clear that many organizations faced a similar problem: They expected a return (in the form of sales revenue) on their product development investment (in the form of labor or capital costs). Unfortunately, as known and unknown risks came to fruition, they ended up "throwing good money after bad," to the severe detriment of the product and the organization.

At Corillian, I led a team of four senior product managers responsible for P&L of Corillian’s entire product line. Revenues exceeded $20 million, and the company became profitable over this period.

Corillian powered the internet banking sites of some of the world's largest financial institutions. We had to maintain the highest standards for web application security.

In an effort to extend its market beyond online banking for consumers, Corillian decided to transform a custom small business online banking implementation into a full-fledged product.

In 2003, Corillian took a hard look at the markets it was serving and accessible markets that we were leaving underserved.

As an engineering manager at Corillian, I knew it was important to understand the priority of development initiatives. When deadlines loomed, it became necessary to reassign people on one project to another, and priorities came into question. However, it was challenging for product management to assign priority to proposed initiatives, especially incremental feature additions and enhancements.

As Corillian grew its customer base and revenue, its development organization had to scale and mature.

In 1998, Corillian was a one-year-old start-up with a couple of internet banking products. The company had to differentiate itself from larger competitors and close business with marquee customers in its market.

By 1994, Moore's Law had created a challenge for Intel Corporation: business and consumer software applications drove the majority of demand for microprocessors. However, software's need for faster and faster microprocessors was diminishing.