Sometimes You Fix the Bottleneck by Moving Inside It

At 3Dlabs, certification by companies like Parametric—now PTC—was critical. A graphics card could be excellent, but if it was not certified for the applications and systems customers depended on, adoption and system sales would stall.

We kept working the process from the outside: prepare, submit, answer questions, wait, follow up, and repeat. Eventually it became clear that our biggest obstacle was not the card. The certification process itself was the bottleneck.

So instead of continuing to polish the handoffs, I changed the operating model. We established a dedicated 3Dlabs resource onsite at PTC in Massachusetts, focused on accelerating and self-managing certifications across systems.

It worked because the person could see the work, build the relationships, resolve questions quickly, and manage the whole flow instead of tossing pieces over a wall. The success contributed to my promotion from Developer Relations Manager to Director of Developer Relations, but the title is not the part I remember most.

The useful lesson was simpler: sometimes the fastest way through a bottleneck is to move inside it. Proximity can solve what another checklist, meeting, or escalation never will.