Freescale

Austin, TX
$7 billion dollar manufacturer memory, microprocessor, logic and other chips. Formerly part of Motorola.

Business unit and multi-product use of SyncDev.

Motorola used Campaign Selling to acquire customers for the next generation of CodeWarrior IDE, a popular software development tool, which they had acquired from Metrowerks. Its success on this product led Motorola to use Campaign Selling across all four of Motorola Semiconductor’s businesses: automotive, networking, telecom, and industrial. The team covered three continents and forty prospective charter customers over four months. Motorola teams had a reputation of bloating and over engineering its products with features. Here, they achieved their goal of validating the product they already had, by definition the Minimum Viable Product™. Motorola simultaneously spun out the semiconductor division into a new $5 billion company, Freescale Semiconductor.

The success of the CodeWarrior team spawned additional initiatives inside the automotive and industrial divisions of Freescale. Ross Mitchell, a skeptic of the SyncDev in Europe, summed up several SyncDev successes at Freescale, “That wave in Italy and Germany paid for itself 50 times over. Discovering those “Minus Features” [unnecessary features that only serve to bloat] that we assumed we had to build in version one of the silicon saved us millions and recouped eighteen months of development time.” Results like these have led to several SyncDev applications at Freescale.