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A product’s success goes beyond its features

It is an irony of sorts: the more things get real, the more they need to go virtual; and the more virtual they get, the more there is a need to balance the two with Augmented Reality. That is the case with events. As events – trade fairs, conferences, seminars, exhibitions – become bigger and span multiple dates, multiple venues, have multiple tracks and hundreds of exhibitors and thousands of participants, there is no way to keep pace with the event. So, what do you do? You get your event on a platform like Event2Mobile that lets you distribute event details like agenda, attendees, exhibitors, location etc with ease and without the problems of cost, time and distribution associated with print. And, of course, putting it on a mobile ensures that the event goes wherever the stakeholder goes.

Event2Mobile, of course, is selling the service on the strength of interactivity, deeper engagement with attendees, experiential capabilities, ability to update the event on the fly (and let attendees know about it instantly), networking capability, integration with weather updates and Google maps, live chats and so on. Not that it takes much intelligence to guess what a mobile app for events should be doing – but the thing about Event2Mobile is that it does all of what you guessed plus some more (there is a free version of the service, but it works only on the iPhone).

The intriguing part is the thinking that the platform has put in place. For example, delegates have a QR code that can be scanned and this makes it easy and accurate to send mailers or additional information to the delegate without having to exchange cards and keeping track of what needs to be mailed. The service also provides event analytics – if it can do this in real time, it can help event organizers deal with upcoming problems to ensure a better experience (like incentivizing attendees to go to Restaurant B on the venue when Restaurant A appears to be filling up).

The challenge with such a service is that it can be mimicked overnight. What took the original development team months to think through and get right can be copied in a few hours by a competitor. There are no real barriers to the business. Over a period of time a service like Event2Mobile will survive on competitive pricing. This means two things: first, it must race to bring in customers to recover development cost before competition begins to eat into the market; second, it must bundle itself as a component of enterprise grade Trade Promotion Organization (TPO) and Trade Promotion Management (TPM) solutions.

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EmployWise: Improving the ROI in employee lifecycle management

Effective employee lifecycle management is acquiring importance from a talent acquisition and retention perspective; from an employee satisfaction angle; as well as from a compliance and regulatory viewpoint. Many organizations, especially SMEs, are discovering to their dismay that the pile of unstructured employee data they have accumulated is a ticking time bomb. They suspect they are paying a price for poor record maintenance and employee management, but are not sure of the exact cost, or its implications.

The impact of poor employee lifecycle management could vary, but often includes an inability to quickly sift through granular employee records and performance metrics with any degree of confidence. This leaves organizations open to violation of immigration norms, wrongful termination charges, industry and local jurisdiction compliance penalties, productivity loss, fraud through inaccurate claims, growing recruitment costs, loss of assets and brand reputation through poor separation processes, etc. The problems become complex when the business grows from single proprietor to multi-unit operators across geographies.

But what’s an SME to do? Human resource management takes years to be codified. Processes around HR management (compensation and benefits, leave, attendance, travel, expenses, reimbursement, performance, hiring, learning and development, separation) and workflow can have gaps and leakages for years without being noticed. Replicating them across units with any degree of accuracy and consistency is a frustratingly uphill mission.

The problem is so large that it has drawn a number of entrepreneurs to try and solve it using technology and automation. With newer business models such as SaaS, pay-as-you-go technologies like cloud and anywhere-anytime access over mobile channels, the solutions are not only looking good, but are increasingly becoming affordable.

Which presents the single biggest problem to entrepreneurs trying to solve the problem: what’s the differentiator? Why should an organization opt for Solution A over Solution B, C, D….Z?

Sumeet Kapur, CEO of EmployWise an employee lifecycle management solution, took the long route to the answer. “Human relationships are very different from handling materials,” says Kapur, “People have names, not product codes. Human beings have memories and you have to treat each one as a segment of one.” EmployWise took this core philosophy and engineered it into their product. An early version of the product was launched in 2004 as Kapur and his team realized that India was turning into a service economy and employee lifecycle management would gain increasing attention. By 2008 EmployWise was officially launched. Today, the 9 modules of the product appear easy to use, can be integrated with existing HR management technologies (SAP, PeopleSoft etc) and giving instant access to best practices in a hosted pay-per-use-per-employee-per-module SaaS model.

At the moment EmployWise uses SMS to stay mobile, making it unnecessary to deploy fancy smart phone apps. In an Indian context, especially in relation to SMEs, this may appear to be a wise strategy – but one that is unlikely to remain a strength for long. Smart phone costs are coming down and SMEs have very compelling reasons to opt for mobile technologies. Mobile banking, communication, inventory management, sales tools, even mobile credit card payments etc are becoming affordable for SMEs over smart phones. Why would they want to remain with clunky SMS for HR? EmployWise must address this quickly if they are to remain relevant in a scenario where smart phones are already dominating.

The advantages of software products such as EmployWise extend to the ability to have one source of truth, they obviate the need for secondary data entry for analysis, empower employees through a self-service model, reduce the HR : employee ration to as much as 1 : 400 and allow companies to benchmark practices with those of their peer group. The last really depends on the density of customers EmployWise has within any given industry. At the moment, the company has 75+ customers – many from technology — and handles 32,000 employee records. The number is adequate to provide reasonable insights, especially in the technology sector where 40 to 60 per cent of the investment is in people – and where managing them well can produce quick ROI.

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Why a degree of chaos is better than order

I can bet you are familiar with this one, but not its consequences, in product development: you’ve seen project managers in product development teams express frustration at not being able to keep the development on track, on time and on budget. I had earlier written about the kind of expectations people have of product development and its perils – but this problem of project management is worse. In response to delays, project managers begin to get even more hyper. They start asking for more detailed plans, better definitions of deliverables, tighter schedules, better time and resource utilization and more frequent reviews (ouch!). That’s natural. That’s what project managers are born to do. Except, in the product development context, this approach is just not applicable. It’s a great approach in manufacturing and service environments where assets are under performing and people need to tighten their process management. But in product development, this can all but kill the development.

Product development and shop floors are very different – to start with code being developed can be in several places at the same time, in the hands of different people, undergoing several changes (and becoming altogether new products!). This just can’t happen in a manufacturing scenario. A copper pipe being manufactured can only be at one place on the shop floor. A car being manufactured can only be at one point on the assembly belt.

The difference is crucial. And well worth appreciating. Product development managers can’t afford to have their teams ticking at 100% utilization. Not even at 90%. It can cause untold harm. In development, busy does not necessarily translate into productive. Reason? Nothing is predictable in product development (again, I hark back to my older post on the topic at https://pn.ispirt.in/the-weight-of-expectation/). Development thrives in chaos. No one is certain how long a task in development will require – or should take. Unlike in manufacturing and services, where there are well-set benchmarks for most processes, in development there are practically none. Teams should be given leeway to make unpredictable changes, and start from scratch. And starting from scratch does mean low people and process utilization.

Bringing order to development is futile. Okay, I’ll take that back and rephrase it a bit: Bringing order to development is not recommended. This is because the process of development has large variances and reducing those variances can take up considerable resources, adding to project costs. In a world of shrinking resources, that’s a trade-off few will opt for. Or am I in a minority in thinking this?

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10 No-Brainer Marketing Lessons for Nerds

Marketing a product is always tricky business. Step into a marketing discussion and it invariably ends with, “Should we really be spending so much on marketing? Isn’t there a better (read: cheaper) way to do this?” Now observe the marketing head honcho whose responsibility it is to get the product into the hands of users. He or she will scrunch the shoulders into a compact shape, ready for the tackle. You instinctively know the two tactics that will be used: First, he or she is going to talk about the need the company has to get its brand under the nose of users and next parade the marketing figures of successful competitors in the hope that reluctant bean counters will write the marketing cheque from sheer fright.

I don’t know if you noticed, but the head honcho just used the two key tenets of marketing we can all learn from:

You can market something only when there is a need. Figure out why someone needs something. Then fill the gap.

There are lessons in what others have done. First observe; if necessary, follow.

These are seemingly simple – and obvious – guidelines for successful marketing. But over the years I’ve noticed that techies make several marketing mistakes that can be easily avoided. These should serve you well if you are planning to release a software product for the first time:

  1. Don’t sell anything that is half baked: If you think the product is not ready, don’t waste time and money marketing it. Good marketing can’t fix a bad product.
  2. Don’t sell anything that the customer doesn’t need: Stop trying to convince others that your product has more features than competition. Focus instead on how your product meets customer needs better.
  3. Don’t blitz the customer with jargon: Chances are that the person about to buy your product doesn’t understand a word of technology. Would you buy a product you don’t understand? The same applies to your customer.
  4. Don’t believe you are the product’s ideal user: Often, a product begins by trying to solve a problem its user experienced. Over a period of time, this leads to the mistaken impression that the developer is the best use case. Remember, you are not trying to sell to yourself.
  5. Don’t bulldoze the customer with information: Don’t think a thick brochure or a 60-minute slide presentation that explains everything about your product can sell better than a sentence or a paragraph. You know that no one has time (otherwise, why would Twitter be such a killer of an idea?). Now make your marketing strategy understand that.
  6. Don’t spend marketing rupees without a sales process: This is a problem typical of start-ups. You may go and spend on fancy collateral, online media, cute videos, a stunning website, mobile marketing and discover you have customers but no sales process in place. By the time you wake up, the customer is gone.
  7. Don’t sell to customers who don’t have the budgets (or think of innovative business models for them): You can sell, but only if your customer has the budget to buy your product. In really crude words, target your customer better. If your customer doesn’t have the budget think of innovative business models that can co-opt the customer (outcome oriented pricing, co-ownership, pay-as-you-go, rental, profit sharing, etc).
  8. Don’t believe that marketing is maths: Just because you can measure some metrics doesn’t mean you can completely manage marketing by applying a couple of formulas. You can bet Steve Jobs did not have a metric to measure his ability to market Apple products. So, use instinct, see what works for you. On the other hand, don’t ignore the story marketing metrics are telling you!
  9. Don’t ignore the mistakes: Even a company like Google has seen hundreds of failures. Remember Google X? It was a version of a Google home page launched in 2005 that was made to look like a Mac OS interface. The bottom of the page said, “Roses are red. Violets are blue. OS X rocks. Homage to you.” Google removed it within a day of launch. Can’t imagine Google wanting to do anything with Apple today, can you?
  10. Don’t slash prices: The idea of marketing is to sell and make profit, right? So why hurt yourself by slashing prices? Instead, keep pricing realistic and competitive (unless you hold a monopoly in the market, in which case, why would you be wasting your time reading this?). With right-pricing, your customers will know you are in the market competing with your product, not with a price tag.

 

 

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The weight of expectation

How many times last month did you use Power Point? Most would have used it at least a couple of times. Power Point is one of those products that seem so natural and effortless to use. And when you think about it, Power Point acquires its muscle from its core ability to dumb down a variety of thinking processes. What were its creators — Dennis Austin and Thomas Rudkin – thinking when they were writing Power Point? Could they imagine that within 25 years their creation would be installed on over a billion computers worldwide?

Ironically, Power Point was designed for the Macintosh and was the first venture capital investment that Apple ever made. Forethought, the company which created it, was bought by Microsoft in 1987. With such a rich history and possibly the only company to have the two software behemoths in its DNA, we may well ask, “What have Dennis Austin and Thomas Rudkin done after Power Point?” Austin created some average-to-middling clip art (Screen Beans) and Rudkin worked for Microsoft in Silicon Valley, turning Power Point into a product with $100 million in sales. Why could Austin and Rudkin not create another great product?

That’s because creating software products is not like building a home or a work desk. The problems that software solves are not the same as those which apartments and office cubicles solve. Software solves newer problems (hopefully!) each time. That’s why there are more failures in creating software products than in making homes and offices. Every time a software engineer sits down to write code, the end goal is different – and often the end goal doesn’t stay the same through the lifecycle of the product’s development (surely you are familiar with scope creep and change requirements?).

It doesn’t matter that the profession has its own set of guidelines and best practices to follow. There are languages and project management techniques. There are tools and quality processes. Yet, practically any software project you come across has seen time and cost over runs, has versions lying on shelves that have been discarded, and has bugs that cannot be eliminated before release (these are passed off as “known issues”).

Why is it that creating software products is such a random process? Why can’t success be replicated even though the team has experience and ability? In other words, if there is a lesson in the creators of Power Point, it is this: building software products is not like constructing a home or a table with raw material that is pretty much standard. Software products have to be built from the ground upwards. From the framework to the data types and structures, from how the data will be
managed and manipulated to the protocols and networks that will come into play and finally how human beings will view it, store it, share it and deploy it. Creating software products is an intensely unpredictable process. The industry may try to provide examples of how great products were created, the role of engineering and innovation, of time and funding, of requirements and usability, market studies and prototypes and a whole list of other imponderables. None of them hold fully true when you get down to solving a new problem with fresh code.

The point is this: if you are trying to create a software product, the top most problem you have is not your skills or resources, but the expectations that industry has about you getting it right first time. You can’t will that expectation away. The trick is to not let it weigh you down – or even dictate the course you are charting for yourself.