Forrester

Tom Grant serves Application Development & Delivery Professionals. He is a leading expert on the parts that application development and delivery play in the larger innovation process. His research interests include innovation, products and productization, Agile, product management, serious games, social media as an input into development, road maps, requirements, application life-cycle management, and embedded software.

Tom worked for two decades in the software industry. Prior to joining Forrester, Tom was a vice president of product management at a small collaboration software company and headed product management teams at Oracle and other Silicon Valley companies. As part of development teams working on a variety of products, Tom gained a keen appreciation for the challenges that application development and delivery teams face and the need to look beyond invention to understand what it takes to be a successful innovator.

Tom's background includes firsthand experience building and deploying technologies for collaboration, content management, compliance, and other solution areas, across a broad array of platforms and devices. Tom has worked with an equally broad range of clients, in market segments such as government, finance, manufacturing, energy, and higher education. In companies where he has worked, he has built social media strategies and tools, such as developer communities, and implemented new ways of bringing customers and stakeholders closer to the development team. He has firsthand experiences in other areas of his own research, such as SaaS, requirements, and serious games.

Tom earned a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California at Irvine. The topic of his dissertation, obstacles to innovation — specifically, American frustrations with counterterrorism and counterinsurgency — has direct relevance to the innovation challenges other organizations face.