Good (and bad) ideas can come from anywhere
If you are lucky, you will have a team of highly skilled, highly trained professionals who have technical acumen in varied areas that include math, technology, data management, process design, user interaction design, and more. For your success and your team's well-being, you need to celebrate their expertise. Also, you need to bring value in several ways.
One way that you can bring value is by bringing the perspective of a novice to the discussion.
About 15 years ago, I was on the executive team of a start-up. My role was marketing and corporate development. The development team was trying to solve a problem related to fraud in credit card use. The technical team had camped out in the conference room and they were furiously debating how best to draw a curve through the data space that described all the possible uses of a credit card. The line illustrated the risk frontier for the credit card issuer. The team had the data space...
