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Insights from the Sales Playbook RoundTable Led by Ambarish, Knowlarity in Gurgaon

The second Sales Playbook RoundTable in Delhi-NCR was held at EKO office in Gurgaon, led by Ambarish Gupta– CEO/Founder, Knowlarity Communications. About 10 companies attended the meet such as EKO, Easework, Busy, Yippster, Conixevus and few more. The format was quite engaging and action oriented as participants were asked to come with their own set of sales challenges for the RT. The session started with a brief introduction and the specific challenges participants were facing.  There was a good degree of overlap among sales challenges of different organizations. The common theme emerging out of the challenges can be divided into three categories – Profit margin, Velocity of Sales & Scaling up. I’m listing down few of the actionable learning discussed

Improving Profit margin:- 

There was unanimous agreement over the core purpose of business among participants i.e to make profit which is a very elementary mathematical equation i.e difference between revenue from a unit customer & cost of serving a unit customer. Even if somebody is making revenue, he may choose to leave a particular customer if cost of serving customer is more than revenue. Exceptions are always there if the unprofitable customer is a source of bringing other profitable customers. Organizations should have real time view of profitability of different customer segments and may focus on segments with maximum profitability. While formulating any pricing strategy, the above mentioned formula should be kept in mind.

  1. The most important point in improving profitability is to understand the sustainable value coming out from the different customer segments & know associated risks. For example- startups as a major customer base are not good for companies because most of them die in a year so average cost of acquisition & serving is always going to be more than the average revenue for these customers. Similarly, up gradation to the existing customer may enhance profit margin significantly.
  2. Ask the customers to pay for the product you are providing, you will be getting right kind of feedback about product & business model, if majority is not willing to pay, it’s a red flag and one may need to modify the business model & product
  3. The pricing model should be taking care of mind set of customers so if the target customers are not in a position to shell out big amount of money, the pay as you go model may be applied with known risk that churning of customers is going to be high risk for the company.
  4. Payment term is also quite important, For example – Even in SaaS model once can ask for yearly payment rather than collecting on monthly basis. It has got several advantages-a) Advance cash flow b) reduced tension & effort of collecting money c) you have got a time in which you can make customers use the product and take benefit out of product.
  5. Make customers’ use the product so that they can feel the business benefit. A happy customer’s life time value is quite high for the company. The companies need to make as many happy customers as possible as a brand ambassador so after getting word of mouth publicity /referrals the cost of acquiring customers reduces significantly resulting in better profit margin for the company in long run.

Enhancing Velocity of Sales:-

A lot of participants expressed their concern about increased sales cycle and discussed the ways to reduce the cycle time & find a right process for reaching out to prospects.

  1. Network is very important in finding first few customers; it was observed that most of the companies got first few clients from personal network which resulted in an early traction for products.  So build a network of mutually beneficial relationship much before you try to reap the benefits.
  2. For reducing the time cycle, team should focus on finding the person in the target companies who is feeling the maximum pain for the problems you are going to solve and identify the decision maker such as CEO/CMO.
  3. For finding the relevant personal details such as mobile no. /email id internal to an organization, various tactics may be employed such as finding details from LinkedIn & Naukri profile, calling the board member as a journalist for interview etc.
  4. It is always advisable for going through a referral route if available so that the prospects would be in a frame of mind to hear. Moreover, while interacting on phone for the first time, you have just first 30 seconds to impress, be precise to what you are going to deliver in terms of benefits not about details of products. You will be getting enough time and a meeting with all the key executives if you can hold call for first 30 seconds.  The benefits should be clearly leading to either increasing the revenue or reducing the cost in direct or indirect ways such as, “I will help you in making additional money from existing customers” or “I will reduce the cost of serving to your existing customers”.
  5. If your product is new in market, one needs to identify the early adopters who are willing to take chances for launching the product with assessment of the probable competition, barrier to entry, market potential & preferred business/ revenue model in different markets.
  6. If the product is a replacement of the existing product then value from the replacement product should be of at least 10x more value than that of the existing product. The product companies need to understand & answer the key questions- why people should be replacing existing system/products? The mindset of a customer is always going to maximize the value per unit cost. One needs to find a solution of this puzzle for individual prospects before reaching them so one needs to concentrate on understanding the pain points with existing product and how to help prospects with those pain points while still providing the others as usual benefits to the customers.
  7. Both tangible and intangible value should be taken into consideration while evaluating overall value to the customer. One needs to be very careful if you are changing the path of doing business as usual for the prospects as there would be a degree of difficulty in doing something new for the customers. This is going to create negative value to the prospects.
  8. Keep customers / prospects engaged in a personalized way such as sending some information that may or may not be relevant to the product but may help prospect. Always keep a updated social profiling of the prospects from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and find an excuse to follow up such as Congratulations for getting award etc. One need to understand that we are dealing with human beings not machines so clubbing of trust and emotions is extremely important to reduce sales cycle.
  9. The first point of interaction with customer is what you are going to provide. Talk to the customers in a language they can understand rather than focusing on product and features, it comes later in answering to the question how you are going to provide. For example- Our product will reduce the serving cost per customer in call center from 50 paisa to 10 paisa or our product is going to help in your business conversion by x% that is going to increase your revenue by y%.
  10. Even from the same target customer segment, different prospects are at the different stage of the sales cycle so marketing pitch should be in line with different stages in a sales cycle i.e Awareness – attract – Engage- Convert – Happy customer – Referral / word of mouth – new customers and so on.

Scaling up:-

  1. Product companies should connect to prospects to understand the pain points of the customers rather than building a perfect product with no market requirements. They should start talking with customers even if the product is not ready to receive valuable feedback.
  2. Time to make entry in the market is quite important as  it decides the opportunity windows of a company to tap maximum benefits in minimum time & effort
  3. The system & processes during the early stage of startup should be highly flexible. After a certain period the same flexible system should be converted into process driven system to run the show. Therefore, one should evaluate & understand the system / processes / resource that are needed to drive the expected sales after scaling up & manage the changes from the existing level to the future level smoothly.
  4. One needs to find the sales model that is highly effective and scalable after market test and multiple iterations. Once you have found the right kind of value proposition and target set of customers for that value proposition with effective sales channels, you can scale up same model exponentially.
  5. The choice of domestic vs. international market is quite tricky. In developing market competition is less, quality expectation is less, market potential is high but customers are not willing to pay so ticket size is small. One of the biggest obstacles is the mind-set of customers in developing market. However in developed market ticket size is high, less hurdles with mind-set but competition is intense with very high expectations on front of quality. So considering these two facts one can take domestic market as a test market for testing and enhancing the product. Once it reaches the level of international standard, one can make international markets as the primary source of revenue. Jumping to international market without having a tested product may block all the future chances in that market forever.
  6. The selection of appropriate sales channel may be explored after trying established model such as telesales, channel, face to face & enterprise sales. Only after market testing, one can determine the right way to get more profitable customer at lower costs.
  7. The product companies need to create a sustainable source of inbound leads rather than outbound leads to improve efficiency of the sales system. Sales people should not be engage with every potential customer, they should be getting filtered list of potential customer for engaging & converting
  8. Another basic question is how customers are going to discover you? One needs to see the whole picture from the lens of customers for scaling up. Depending upon the computer literacy of the targeted customer offline or online or combination of marketing tactics may be deployed. For example- if customers are searching heavily over internet for the keywords associated with the products- Google organic and paid search could be good idea to hook the prospects. However if the search volume is less then display tactics may be needed to create the awareness among targets & later for hooking.
  9. The product companies need to understand the mindset of channel partners and dynamics that is happening in the channel partner industry. As profitability is going down, existing good partners may be looking out for new streams of revenue. So, they would be happy to work on a more profitable venture for taking a new product to the market. Apart from that capability, influence into target market and willingness to sell must be evaluated for potential partners.
  10. The big channel partner may not be a good partner unless the new product can create immediate good streams of revenue for them, so small partners would a preferred set of partners because they would be devoting dedicated time even for small revenue however the impact on company’s revenue per partner would be limited so number of such working partners come into picture for getting maximum revenue in a given time.

These insights were the result of the sales round table meet. The round table meet ends with a promise of meeting again for discussing and sharing experience again in coming month. Thanks to  iSPIRT ProductNation in being instrumental for building core competence in product organizations.

Guest Post by Manoj Kumar, a volunteer for ProductNation

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Building a Customer Focused Technology Business

Building a successful technology business requires an organization to have a clear strategy that connects several dots. From Market Place Relationships, Technology and Product Capabilities, Empathizing and Understanding Client Needs and Building Successful Business Models that create win-win-win relationships.

Strategizing in a dynamic ever changing market place requires several sub-strategies working with each other. These sub-strategies are united in their orientation by a strong team that delivers value and ROI to customers and fundamentally use that value to drive the strategy train to create a superior business organization.

These sub-strategies can be powered by groups within a single business unit or groups working across multiple business units. In fact, it is entirely possible that different process teams may work together simultaneously powering market place strategies focused on different markets and solutions.

To a client looking at the organization, what is visible is a perfectly choreographed interaction with a relationship manager that offers a compelling business and technology stack that comprises of a well defined problem space, a compelling well positioned solution based on a product and technology platform that delivers value at each level of the stack.

The business itself is organized into technology, product and solution groups simultaneously working on multiple business opportunities through carefully orchestrated business processes.

Such a customer focused organization delivers the rich feeling of a customized solution with the efficiency of a generalized product.

You can build a customer focused organization and yet win in the competitive market place through a generalized delivery platform. Here are some useful guidelines to follow:

  1. Clearly define the market places in terms of problem space, competition and your own solution position. Make a list !
  2. Have a dedicated business development manager well versed with at least 1, possible more of the solutions located close to the market
  3. Put a solid workflow management process in place to receive problem statements and create solution proposals driven by the business development manager acting in concert with the customer
  4. Build agile solution teams that build customized solutions quickly from verticalized solution platforms
  5. Build strong technology and product groups that work with solution teams and ship frequent product releases every 6-8 weeks
  6. Build a powerful support group with a mature director that can provide strong pre and post-sales support
  7. Invest in R&D, raise R&D funding and look out for collaboration opportunities.
  8. Build a strong and disciplined inside sales force

That for you is a text book approach for building successful technology companies.

About The Author(s):

Prasad Bulusu is a CFO at Sankhya Technologies Private Limited. He is a blogger and offers consulting services to hi-tech organizations. He also mentors startups. You may reach him at prasad@sankhya.com

Gopi Kumar Bulusu is the CEO and Chief Technologist at Sankhya Technologies Private Limited. He may be reached at gopi@sankhya.com

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Indian Entrepreneurs & The Happy Confused Stage

Last week, I met Sharad Sharma, an angel investor & the prime mover behind the iSPIRT, a think tank for software product startups. For those who have been into software products, he is a familiar face. We’ve met many times before but this time around, we talked about the dangers of mass entrepreneurship, which I’ll keep for a later post. That’s because I stumbled upon a more pressing issue, particularly painful to the Indian entrepreneur: The Happy Confused Phase. I’ll try and paraphrase some parts of the discussion here with a few additions of my own.

What is the happy confused phase?

The happy confused phase comes after the entrepreneur has discovered his customer and found a product market fit. Ideally, a startup would now be ready for the growth execution phase. But in India, the happy confused phase takes over. In mature markets, after finding the product market fit, an entrepreneur hires a team to execute. In India, you can hardly find the right talent (for various reasons). So then, it is up to the entrepreneur to train the existing team and the transition takes longer than you would imagine. This in-between phase, is called the happy confused phase.

Implications of this stage

“The execution team is hard to find in most cases and you end up retraining existing staff to do execution,” Sharad says. This is time consuming. Unless you cross this happy confused phase, most Indian VCs won’t fund you despite having found the product-market fit. Indian VC’s won’t come into a deal too early because they have their exits which is time bound in nature, to take care of. Running out of money is one of the many things that can go wrong in a startup.

Who can help?

Accelerators can help. But there is another problem here. Accelerators in India are time based. Which means, when they run out of time, they have to send the startup away. This is one reason why you would have started hearing of “accelerator horror stories.” After time runs out, many will promise you support but it is flaky at best.

A four month acceleration period is hardly enough in Indian conditions. There are exceptions to this. However, the general idea is that accelerators, especially the ones that take equity in the company, must be stage based.

Mentors can help. Mentors in the same industry as yours, who can help you with deals, are very valuable. They can also help you find talent and customers. However, as veteran Silicon Valley investor Vinod Khosla pointed out at his talk in Bangalore, “It can’t be people who are sideline cheerleaders who have never taken risks.”

Focused events like Uncafe or Playbook Round Tables by iSPIRT can also help. These events help speed up learning. Peers and people who have been in your shoes can help you learn faster. The important phrase here is “ experiential learning,” and not “startup event.”

Conclusion

The existence of the happy confused phase is not the only issue that Indian product entrepreneur has to deal with. With Indian startups, the discovery phase is longer than usual as well. An informed product entrepreneur who is aware of these issues can hack his way through these stages better than his uninformed peers.

If you’ve been in a similar situation and have found a clever way out, leave a comment or write a guest post for us.

Reblogged from NextBigWhat – Post Contributed by Jayadevan

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Patent Holders Listen Up; The Government Wants to Give You An Award

India’s innovation problem is not something that an award can fix. But its a step in the right direction. The department of science and technology is calling applicants for the “National Awards for Commercializable Patents,” in a bid to make more innovative products available to the society [source]. The awards were first introduced two years ago.

The program seeks to recognize the innovative potential of Indian Nationals as well as Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) who have developed innovations relevant to the industrial and societal needs.

The award will carry a sum of Rs 5 lakh and a certificate. Selected innovations may be also get an additional Rs 5 lakh on commercialization of the awarded patents. The selected innovators will also get to use the the TREMAP, a government initiated innovation program.

The primary objective of the program is to help commercialization of patented technologies and will give a greater emphasis to those that have good commercial potential but could not be commercialized due to lack of resources and expertise with the inventors. The other objective is to establish an enabling ecosystem in the country to facilitate linkages of the innovative technologies with market.

Any Indian national or micro/small /medium enterprise who already has an Indian patent can apply. The year of grant of patent should not be before the year 2010 and the working prototype should be ready.

In 2012, the award was granted to 8 patent holders including the ones that held the patents to improved grinding machine for paste and powder making in wet and dry condition of soft material and device for mitigating shock waves and induced forces during explosions.

The last date for receipt of applications is August 14, 2013 and more details and the forms can be found here.

The central government has also implemented a five year scheme through which small enterprises can claim up to 50% of patenting costs from the Government.

There are various reasons why commercial innovation is really low at Indian institutions. Deepam Mishra, CEO, i2india Ventures lists out factors including wrong incentives and lack of early stage investments among others. Hopefully, these initiatives will help at the early stage.

Reblogged from NextBigWhat.com

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Key SaaS product innovations to be showcased at Techcircle SaaS Forum on August 7 in Bengaluru

ProductNation is pleased to support Techcircle SaaS Forum, now in its second edition, which will be held on August 7 at Chancery Pavilion Hotel in Bengaluru. The conference will host a special session called Techcircle Runway where handpicked SaaS products and companies will be showcased.

Techcircle Runway presentations will cover product details, innovations, market opportunities, business models and how these products will disrupt existing markets to create value, followed by live feedback and Q&A with a panel of jury members. Each presenter will have five minutes on stage.

If you are a SaaS product/company and would like to showcase your innovation at Techcircle Runway, you can click here to fill the application form. For any query, contact Kanika at kanika@vccircle.com or call 0120-4171111. Click here for more details about the event.

While mapping the opportunities in this sector, Techcircle SaaS Forum 2013 will bring together more than 150 stakeholders, including CEOs representing top and  emerging SaaS firms, innovators as well as private equity and venture capital investors betting on this space. Click here for more details.

Read the complete post here.

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Why every start-up needs a repeatable & scalable sales model?

Start-ups in their mid-growth stage are usually faced with an inflection point, where they find themselves standing in the middle of a transition – from having a bright product idea endorsed by a handful of people (usually investors & early customers) towards a scalable solution that can be sold to anyone.

Geoffrey Moore’s work in the book titled ‘Crossing the Chasm’ is pertinent to this transition that exists between early adopters and the early majority of a product in the technology adoption life cycle. Companies having a logical and repeatable sales process, backed by a validated product can succeed in any economic scenario.

Initial sales can help a company in determining whether the product/market fit is in place. The next and the most crucial step towards achieving scalability is to know that their product requires little to no customization to go from 1 to 10 to 10,000 customers quickly. Start-ups need to have a consistent process in place, which is embraced by the whole team to ensure smooth execution. This, in turn will help in having an element of predictability in the decisions and forecasting that the entrepreneur makes. The most essential characteristics of an ideal sales process are scalability, repeatability, and sustainability.

Most start-ups have developed somewhat of an ad-hoc sales process. That is, they have a process that they follow, though there isn’t any documentation for the same. For instance, if in a small sales team, all sales reps are asked about the process that they follow to approach and close a prospective client, one can be sure of coming up with a number of different approaches. At the core of such approaches are processes which are, more often than not, inconsistent with one another’s and sometimes not even in sync with the company’s vision. The key to scaling the sales process is establishing a well-documented and clearly repeatable process which can be adopted by new hires from day one, which makes them as productive as the existing sales team.

Once such a process is put in place, it is easier to establish a predictable, direct relationship between increasing the size of the sales team and targeting more geographies on one hand, and increased revenues on the other.

These are the most natural benefits of having a repeatable sales process in place for any start-up:

Enables closed-loop learning

Ideally, the sales process should begin with leads being generated from the inbound marketing team, and conclude in a closed-loop manner with feedback from the end-user. This setup makes sure that all the stakeholders are involved throughout the process, and also facilitates organization-wide learning and development.

Takes funnel metrics into consideration

It’s important to know the kind of conversion rates one is experiencing at every stage of their sales funnel and what are the various factors that affect these rates. For instance, different lead sources can result into different kinds of conversion rates. This kind of analysis is also useful in determining the most cost effective, or cost ineffective customer acquisition channels and can help in improving the marketing ROI.

Takes into account the Return on Investment

As most start-ups are bootstrapped, Return on Investment (ROI) becomes a significant aspect to watch out for. Only in case the expected value of business over the anticipated duration of a customer’s association with the company is manifold vis-à-vis their initial acquisition cost, is the association economically viable.

For any sales process to be scalable, it’s essential that the marketing function is identified as the primary source for fresh leads and it is well understood within the company that the primary job of a sales person is not to create new opportunities, but to sell and close business where such opportunities already exist.

Guest Post by Mohit Sharma – Lead, Marketing & Business Development function at PromptCloud. PromptCloud is a Bangalore-based firm dealing with Big Data solutions; where an integral part is large-scale web crawling and data extraction. It uses its cloud-based Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) engine for performing big data acquisitions. Views expressed are his personal, and do not necessarily reflect those of his employer

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M & A – The most preferred option to grow in uncertain times

It is a typical Monday 9 AM! Ready to kick-start another challenging week! Fine day in Chennai !! Not so hot like a typical Chennai climate. But, for first generation entrepreneurs it is an ordeal to pass thru weekly pressures of Cash flow, Attrition, New business and opportunities etc. etc. This experience is collectively described as “Monday Morning Blues”.

The growth dilemma

There has always been a great dilemma for entrepreneurs during fund raising exercise especially when it comes to taking the company to the next level of growth. The dilemma does not stop by simply raising the money for growth, but it goes on till such time one is able to strike a balance between how much stakes to dilute and the tangible benefits that the venture will get.Then comes the business and revenue models. The previous eras have brought countless innovations in the theory and practice of running businesses. Many are now staples of contemporary management, but others were ephemeral distractions that led companies down the wrong roads. Too often, leaders have sought the appearance of success rather than its reality – size for the sake of size, book-keeping profits as opposed to intrinsic value, earnings growth manipulated to please the stock markets. This era’s changes are already redefining management theory and practice. Raising competitiveness intensity forces a return to basic again. Going down to basics today means first and foremost focusing on how you can create intrinsic or fundamental value for your business. Your ability to create fundamental value rests on how good you are at finding the right balance between your external and internal realities and your financial aspirations; in other words, how skilfully you develop and use your business model. The major reason to focus on the fundamentals is that growth won’t come easily. Organic growth will not often produce the double-digit gains that were routine and even obligatory in the last era.

Leaders who hope to grow their way to success through mergers and acquisitions in the present market scenario are left with umpteen no of options. Needless to mention that M & As promises to increase economies of scale and yield efficiencies from synergy – or at least show the kind of revenue growth that looks like progress. And some players thrive by picking up battlefield causalities on the chips and hammering them to shape. Many people viewed General Electric’s acquisitions in the late 1980s of troubled RCA as a misconceived diversifications ploy. But after selling off RCA’s consumer electronics and aerospace businesses, GE wound up with NBC for a song, turned it around and went on to build it into a network powerhouse. NBC generated significant profits year in and year out, and with the addition of Vivendi Universal’s entertainment assets which greatly helped GE’s future growth.

The courage to change

Many first generation entrepreneurs lack with the intelligence to recognize that they have reached a crossroad but don’t follow through and head down the new path. Their inner core isn’t tough enough to allow them to acknowledge and deal with an unpleasant reality, whether it is closing a loss making division or taking realistic look at the business model and tweaking to market expectations. Many would like to continue in their comfort zone of their familiar managerial routines and protecting their pay checks. They may be afraid: change means taking risks and taking risks raises the possibility of failure. The fear failure occupies most of entrepreneur’s growth dilemma of raising money, divesting their stakes and working under a different management culture.

These entrepreneurs often don’t recognize that failing to make a shift can be riskier than making none. The entrepreneurs who have the appetite for tough actions have the inner strength. They are willing to look at clearly at the business model that has been highly successful and is no longer relevant.

To raise funds for growth or get merged is a difficulty and at times too difficult to get consensus from founder/ promoters. This leaves the emerging organizations with fewer options such as the following:

  1. Tag along with a bigger player and pitch for bigger contracts – on a case-to-case basis
  2. Dilute promoters’ stake heavily and raise money from PEs or VCs at the cost of losing control of the company in your eyes and also not knowing the business outcome after fund infusion
  3. Be a captive IT Partner for a big group and get acquired by them eventually once a decent value is built. The flip-side to this approach is that one does not know the time it will take to realise decent value

The current era of business offers promising option than the usual organic growth for entrepreneurs.

M & A – The most preferred option to grow in uncertain times

While an acquisition may have higher risk of failure than any other expansion strategy, it also provides a much superior return profile in comparison to organic growth strategy. M & As is intrinsically risky and predicting the aftermath of any acquisition is almost impossible. The fact remains that predicting the aftermath of any business plan execution is also an impossible task. But there are learnings from the past that can mitigate the risk of failure. Most M& A s fail due to inadequate articulation of two key enablers of a deal: transaction management, which is all about paying the right value, conducting a thorough due diligence and appointing the right transaction adviser; and integration management, which is about devising a detailed integration strategy ahead of the buy decision to keep the rationale of the acquisition intact. The fact of the matter,however is that any corporate strategy can go bad despite putting safeguards against any possible fallout in future. And so can simple business decisions related to marketing and research and development will lead to unpredictable business outcome.

If there are precedents where shareholders’ wealth has been written off as fallout of ill-planned M & A, there are more than a handful of cases in history through well executed M & A strategy that delivered immense value to share-holders:

  1. IBM’s market value of USD 227 Billion has been created virtually through acquisitions. It has acquired 187 companies since 200 for about USD 200 billion
  2. SAP has made 5 major acquisitions since 2001 for a whopping sum of USD 20 billion to reach its current position of Euro 17 Billion
  3. Cisco built the current sales turnover of USD 47 billion from USD 4 billion in 1996. Cisco has acquired more than 450 companies since its inception. Cisco’s fundamental growth strategy has been M & A
  1. GE has acquired more than 18 companies since 1952 ranging from Aerospace, Process Industry, Financial Services , Healthcare for whopping sum of USD 14 billion to reach its current revenue of USD 150 billion
  2. Exxon Mobile, It is what today on the back of a merger between two energy giants which clearly didn’t happen without the risk of failure in 1999. Exxon Mobile has surpassed Apple’s market cap and reached the USD 385 billion in April 2013.
  3. Maersk has acquired P & O Nedlloyd in 2005 to create one of the largest shipping lines in the world.
  4. P & O and Nedlloyd were merged together in 1996 which was yet another record in the history of shipping lines.

It is all about convincing the company’s management on the risks associated with a strategy like M & A on the back of statistics of successful transactions.

The entrepreneurs who are looking at raising money must do the following reality check and decide whether M & A is an option.

  1. Research and evaluate your competition
  2. Measure share-holders value year-on-year and see whether it is increasing
  3. Your ability to raise funds and offer significant returns within a short period of time e.g. 3 years to 5 years
  4. Ability to devote time on innovation and offer more customer value

The IT/ ITeS industry are moving towards consolidation and better economies of scale and efficiencies.The market is swamped by competition and the technological advancements are determining new way of delivering customer value. Therefore, IT services companies have to seriously consider M & A as their growth strategy to protect investor’s wealth, IP, customers, business.

Guest Post Contributed by Rangarajan Sriraman. The views expressed in this article are personal. The author is a serial entrepreneur, mentor and strategic advisor to start-ups in IT and ITeS segment based in Chennai and has been involved in 2 start-ups so far from the concept to execution stage and later on successfully exiting.

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Don’t try to solve every customer problem by a line of code.

My First playbook roundtable. iSPIRT’s first initiative at Hyderabad, was a 4 hour insightful RoundTable that was  organised by the ProductNation free of cost for the attendees, which most Hyderabadi entrepreneurs gave a miss and are sure to be regretting the missed opportunity and the learning possibility that it offered.

Sridhar Ranganathan, ex-VP of InMobi, a Product Guru and Aneesh Reddy, the CEO of Capillary Technologies, which is in the business of providing mobile-based customer acquisition, tracking, and loyalty business, were the key speakers for the day .The first half of the session was mostly participants- driven where each of us were asked to share our day-to-day stories at work along with our expectations from the workshop.

Below were the most common challenges that emerged from our discussions:

  1. How to validate the need for a product?
  2. How to prioritize from the features wish list?
  3. What is the exact role of a Product Manager to drive successful product deliveries?

Validating the product need

Sridhar began the afternoon session by saying that, “The best way to validate the need for a product was constantly interacting with the customers and understanding their requirements.” He said there are 2 primary things for a product startup to be successful in the long run. One is Speed- wherein it is important for start-ups to be iterating faster as its always better to Fail Fast and recover quickly.

The second is to be data-driven wherein start-ups should be religiously looking and researching in terms of numbers both externally and internally .He recalled a popular quote, “Data is God and code is only a messenger”, which was truly an eye-opener as it made me realize the importance of constantly looking at data and then using that to validate the need of the product.

Aneesh shared a few of his real-life examples on how during their initial days at Capillary Technologies, they had spent over 6 months talking to every store owner be it big or small, to understand their needs and how they literally changed their product idea thrice before conceiving the final version. He also said that listening to customers played a prominent role in shaping the product rather than merely selling. He also spoke of how Capillary mainly stuck to one mantra i.e.- “Locking down on the cheque with the customer even before building a feature for them,” which not only drives a sense of stickiness and commitment with the customer but  also ensures the right customer need is addressed.

Priortizing from the Features Wish list

This is by far the most common challenge faced by all of us today, which Sridhar strongly advocated by highlighting the need for PMs to start questioning  every feature-benefit ratio in order to prevent any feature overload. He also stressed on the need for every PM to evaluate if every feature was designed for the ease of the end user. He added that it is important to add features in a disciplined manner and remove the excessive features ruthlessly. Bottom-line being – “Don’t try to solve every customer problem by a line of code.”

Aneesh also shared on how Capillary builds prototypes and demonstrates them to customers to ensure if the customer’s wish list has been fulfilled or not and that this has helped Capillary to keep the fine balance between what their customers are looking for and how the future of the product would shape up.

Role of a Product Manager (PM)

Sridhar began asking each of us to define what we considered the role of a PM to be and after everyone was done presenting their respective  viewpoints, he mentioned the below as some of the qualities he would expect a PM to possess:

  1. Empathy towards customers – the willingness to engage, understand and appreciate customer needs.
  2. Confidence to have a point of view
  3. Ready to build a product for the future
  4. Culture of experimentation and being data-driven

Personally what I considered the best piece of advice for PMs is, “to be responsible for the Outcome and not the Output”. This actually accelerates the need for PMs to question every effort for a feature request and evaluate what would be its ability to generate revenue.

Overall, it was an immensely insightful session. I would also like to thank Sridhar for taking time out from his busy schedule to enlighten us. Huge thanks to Aneesh for being extremely patient and for responding to all our queries.

I highly appreciate the efforts of Avinash to create such a splendid product management session wherein we not only get a chance to meet/network with product gurus but also help us rethink our working strategies. Last but not the least, I would also like to thank Pramati Technologies for being an excellent host for this Roundtable.

Eagerly looking forward to the follow-up session soon!

Post Contributed by Thulasi, Associate Product Manager at Versant Online Solutions Pvt Ltd and can be reached at thulasi(at)moozup.com

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Learning and growing together at the iSPIRT #Playbook Roundtable

iSPIRT Playbook Roundtable in Delhi Flickr Stream

The Product Management Playbook roundtable repeated last week with an intent to check progress. The mentors – Amit Ranjan & Amit Somani were keen to know the problems product managers faced while they executed on ideas discussed in the previous episode.

We could guess this would be one power packed session, especially from the conversations that ensued over lunch. There were active discussions, funny anecdotes and heartfelt laughter which filled the Eko cafeteria. New bonds were built and older ones renewed as we savored the delicious dishes.

The RoundTable was started with Vikram Bahl of Yavvy.com presenting his product management approach. Presenting a meticulously planned mind-map, his presentation discussed the challenges, the solutions and their outcomes. Elements from the previous round-table were clearly visible. “All of our metrics have now been divided into 1/1/1 (1 day/1 week/1 month)”, he told picking up on the 1/1/1 metric philosophy suggested by Amit Somani of MakeMyTrip in the previous round-table. He also mentioned that the “email-suggestion” and “leveraging-existing-paradigm” suggestions by Amit Ranjan (of Slideshare) had done them loads of good and the results were very encouraging. “This time, I got advice on stuff that goes beyond traditional product management, it was more around positioning and marketing”, said Vikram as he reflected upon the discussions.

Next, Bishal Lachhiramka of Drishti soft spoke about his own product management approach. Touching upon organisational structure, product manager roles and global benchmarks, this was another amazing discussion. Participants shared their own experiences and what has worked for them and what hasn’t.

Tarun Matta of IIMJobs also got some amazing feedback on some of the things they intent to do. Picking up on the experience in the room, he picked up on strategy and executive advice on what could propel IIMjobs onto the next orbit of growth.

We also had Shantanu Mathur introducing ‘Smartwards’ and Mayank Dhingra of Paytm bouncing off ideas on how to build product-management metrics for online products. Even though, this was their first round-table, they found themselves brought upto speed by the mentors.

The final few minutes of the day were spent discussing “how to divide and structure roles and responsibilities of different program managers”. Avinash Agarwal and Abhishek Sinha of Eko, presented a delightful case-study which helped sum up the discussion.

As Nakul Saxena of iSPIRT summed up, “I just see so many product managers negotiating the learning curve together. That is the surest way to move quicker and grow faster. In contrast to any other conference or discussions, the round-table presents every product-team with a close-knit group to discuss personal challenges and personal experiences. ”  

Doesn’t that sum up what these round-tables are all about. Participate in the next one to find out!
With inputs from Vikram Bahl of Yavvy.com
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Cybersecurity: Israel’s Innovation as India’s Opportunity

India is one of the leading victims of cyber-crime and the cybersecurity market is estimated at around US$218 million. Indian cybersecurity companies have developed indigenous products to address rising cyber-threats, but, with limited success. By contrast, Israel is famed for its prowess in developing innovative solutions for fields that encompass agriculture, medicine, clean-tech, hi-tech etc., and this also extends to the emerging field of cybersecurity. Israel’s cybersecurity industry possesses the potential to be a willing partner in defying India’s cyber-world problems.

The essence of India’s ongoing cybersecurity partnership with Israel has primarily been characterized by Israeli cybersecurity companies serving requests of the Indian governmental sector. However, the flow of the collaborative needs to take another direction, and more partnerships need to be formulated in the corporate world. India’s reliance on data systems continues to increase rapidly and corporate entities including start-ups will undoubtedly play a pivotal role in shaping the cyber-domain.

Joint-product development is possibly the most vital area of cybersecurity-cooperation for the Indian and Israeli private sectors. Indian cybersecurity corporations and start-ups are certainly gifted with an enormous market, great ideas, and skilled manpower; but have had limited success in creating innovative products. However, a great idea will not suffice to build a successful product; something ‘extra’ must be added to the existing idea! Israel’s expertise in innovation promises to grant the much-needed edge for the Indian cybersecurity industry to develop world-class products.

A true goldmine for innovative partnerships in Israel is embedded in the globally renowned “Start-Up Culture”. It is very common to see Israeli cybersecurity start-ups being founded by fearless-entrepreneurs with considerable military experience, as they understand the nature of cyber-threats, and the intuitive methodology to pioneer relevant solutions. The start-up community is a significant segment of Israel’s cybersecurity ecosystem that provides valuable partnership and investment openings for Indian corporations/start-ups.

Cybersecurity remains a field where the numbers of threats are growing rapidly; but so are opportunities for collaboration. Securely connecting India’s existing and ever-expanding infrastructure to data systems is an enormous task which continues to open avenues for constructing strategic alliances with Israel. Indian cybersecurity entities must recognize, and capitalize, on opportunities to partner with Israeli counterparts to address India’s cybersecurity challenges.

Guest Post Contributed by Vishal Dharmadhikari, the concept initiator of a business-event – India-Israel Cybersecurity Connect (IICC), which featured as a sub-event in Israel’s largest cybersecurity event i.e. the 3rd Annual International Cybersecurity Conference. 

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7th #PNMeetup – Get to millions of visitors without spending money

3 founders, 25 good listeners and a rainy Delhi afternoon. Topic: “Get to millions of visitors without spending money”. It was a perfect setting for sharing of experiences by those 3 doers (Ankur@Akosha, Rajat@Socialappshq, Pallav@Knowlarity) about their own experiences of getting users, when they started. Keeping in its tradition, Avinash and Nakul organized this month’s meet-up in the office of Akosha.

Ankur, started the afternoon with his thoughts on “Zero” cost marketing. He shared many simple things that start-ups can do or shouldn’t do. It is not easy in the beginning to get people to know about your product and/or brand. One would typically need to find innovative ways. He shared some of this tricks that Akosha followed and what worked and what not worked. One of the key takeaway was that one should never outsource SEO. The product is yours, outside people cannot help you out. You have to learn, try and make it perfect. One also need to know about google analytics, if one is launching a web product (or if I think about it, any web connected product. It could be a website or it could be an app). Audience also shared their experiences with SEO and many felt that if done correctly, it can do wonders.

Rajat also shared some neat ways where companies have taken help of SEO. If your product allows (or if you can find ways of doing so), you make others do your SEO work. e.g. you can do content partnerships where your content is shown by other leading websites.

  Many other consumer connect ways were discussed like Twitter, email marketing. Email marketing generated quite a bit of discussion given that different people had different experience. However this is also a fact that email is a very powerful tool. A trick, which I find worth mentioning is, always run your campaign in 2 steps. You always get email databases from market or from “someone”. Run a dummy campaign to exclude bad addresses (you can use a dummy domain as well for this). In Part 2, exclude bad addresses and use your actual domain to send your emails. 


For finding leads, in your early days, one need to think out of the box. e.g. if you are in classifieds business, visiting your competitor sites would give you quite a number of leads. It is also true that finding fist few customers if often way more difficult than getting your next 1000 users. When you start, many a times you believe that world is your playground. Problem is that you keep looking for that first mate to play with. As Pallav (Founder Knowlarity) shared an anecdote about how he got first customer, there were many oohs and aahas I could hear among audience. Getting you first customer also tests one’s persistence as was evident in the anecdote shared by Rajat. 

In startup, we always need people who can hit the ground from day 1. There is no, as they say it, settling in time. This was very well explained by Pallav. An interesting graph shared by Pallav


In a Start-up, you are typically looking for a Maverick sales person.

Overall, an afternoon, from which I could find many practical take-aways. There may not really be Zero cost way to reach million users, however there are many ways to do this in price effective way.

Guest Post Contributed by Ajay Bansal, Director, Product Management at U2opia Mobile

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#DesignThinking: Desirable. Feasible. Viable

We all know quite well the value of Design to business, and Design Thinking to problem solving. But what remains a bit fuzzy for many start-ups, organizations & individuals is the gap between thinking and doing or making it happen.

In this time of volatility and complexity, the role of design to drive meaningful innovation and change is growing and while there are multitude of factors that need to be taken into consideration for a product design that is desirable, feasible & viable the design thinking process can help overcome these product characteristics. 

Yes, great design starts with design thinking! Reminds me of David Kelly from IDEO who puts this together as empathy or being empathetic. In other words focusing on what users value the most and building on top of the ideas they share with every incremental value we deliver to make designs better.

In an effort to bring all designers, engineers, product managers & entrepreneurs together via an informal coalition of like minded design thinkers community to help promote the how-to’s of design thinking, MakeMyTrip in co-ordination with #PNMeetup hosted a day long #DesignThinking event in its premises inviting them to discover the stories, solutions and tools that design thinkers are putting to work, from start ups to multinationals helping them find inspiration and learn how real world solutions are provided using innovation & technology to work to solve complex global challenges. 

This event was a first step in NCR UX community with series in pipeline with start of an exciting thought-leadership plank in the UX ecosystem in the country towards creating a platform to nurture design thinking & promoting design thinker’s community fostering an ecosystem that promotes delivering great experiential online products. Industry experts from LinkedIn, Mettl & Anagram Research supported the event with inspirational talks on subject and sharing how they practice the same in their respective job functions, startup’s & organizations thereby embracing the process in their day-to-day routine while driving the product vision at their setup. The experts also covered upon bootstrap strategies for startups who cannot afford the UX agencies or a big design team and face design challenges day in day out during their product design journey. Some even illustrated the design thinking approach to problem solving of product features design and helped them uncover the latent needs, behaviors, and desires for their users. 

Altogether,  #Design thinking event saw noteworthy achievement with 40+ design thinkers joining us from NCR and could leverage the platform listening some inspirational talks from speakers and meeting few like minded folks around. Had participant mix from passionate startup entrepreneurs to designers & dev engineers. Audience was glued to program embracing the talks & interactive workshop from functional experts in domain. 

Check out what happened at the First #DesignThinking Workshop on http://t.co/g0DDFbP7kS  

Guest Post by Dushyanth Arora, Head, User Experience & Design MakeMyTrip

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Designing Great Products: A Startup CEO’s perspective

I had the opportunity to attend iSpirit Foundation’s #PNMeetup: Design great products through experiments – Product Leadership Workshop on 20th April 2013 at TLabs in Noida. 

Avi from iSPIRT put together a delightful, half-day session that brought together a smattering of product people from Delhi-NCR region.  In addition to product managers, CEOs, and senior executives from a wide range of Delhi startups, the icing on the cake was the presence of a hard-hitting product team from Intuit that had travelled all the way from Bangalore to share their experiences with the assembled audience. The Intuit Team included Deepa Bachu (Director, Emerging Market Innovation at Intuit), Samarjit Ghosh, Lalitha Ramani, Vivek Vijayan & ThiyagaRajan ) 

The Intuit posse had experiences working on a variety of products from the uber-popular Turbo Tax to the socially relevant Fasal and an engaging discussion on their diverse experiences exposed the audience to a wide range of challenges that the Intuit teams faced and the teams’ approach to overcome these challenges.  Many an aspiring entrepreneur has been flummoxed with multiple questions vis-à-vis product development, not limited to prioritizing features, costs, and release cycles and the Intuit team cleared a lot of misconceptions around commonly accepted best-process with their highly structured product management approach.  Intuit’s product management model is largely based around the hypotheses driven approach that, in addition to software development, is the bedrock for business decision-making from optimizing scientific discoveries to underpinning most strategy consulting engagements.  We were walked through a detailed explanation of the Intuit way and were then led to put our newfound knowledge to task with an actual exercise on the streets.

The hour spent on the streets by 25 eager entrepreneurs, braving the Noida summer-heat led to the thread baring of multiple, seemingly unambiguous truths about how we thought about product research, design, and development.  The interesting aspect of the exercise was that that like many frameworks, the Intuit approach brought out its share of naysayers and skeptics among the assembled audience but the healthy discussion that followed enabled multiple perspectives to heard and discussed. 

 

As a startup-CEO at Studycopter, managing the product development process is an integral part of what I do, day in and day out.  Sharing of notes and perspectives with fellow CEOs and product managers was a unique opportunity for me to test my assumptions and build a new way of looking at problems and coming up with solutions. 

I can write with a reasonable degree of certainty that all participants would share my thoughts about the utility of the aforementioned session and moving forward, I look forward to the Studycopter team and I participating in multiple such meetups to build the intellectual rigor that would be critical in delivering breakthrough product experiences for our customers.

Guest Post by Adi Jain, Founder and Chief Awesomeness Officer at Studycopter, a mobile + online learning platform to enable students to get their best possible scores in competitive exams such as the GMAT and GRE.  

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Top 10 things to look for a digital marketing roadmap.

Today the biggest challenge for any of us as entrepreneurs is not to build kickass products or services but to reach out to the relevant target audience. Many of products fail not because they were not awesome but because of poor marketing strategies. I have myself made terrible mistakes which costed me and my company a lot but it’s just part of a learning experience and entrepreneurial curve. Lot of people think digital marketing or social media marketing is free or easy but I fell it’s the make or break for any company whose customers are online. It needs the same amount of attention and effort you had put in while building your product / services. It needs a lot of thinking, prioritization, knowledge and off course a lot time investment. Today there is so much noise on digital mediums that you need to be remarkable to stand out or youwill be just one out of many. Here are my top 10 learnings from the many digital campaigns I ran.

  1. Map your efforts to the end goal: Most of the time startups do not have a clear end goal in mind and they map the entire campaign to a wrong goal. What is you end goal? Drive traffic? What is your KPI which will make you successful this quarter? Does your organization’s goal is to drive sales or build user base for this quarter. Once you decide on your KPI for this quarter do not change it. Stick to it. Do everything to achieve your goals, tweak strategy to achieve it but not the goals.
  2. Don’t be scared of spending: Most of the digital campaigns are bound to fail. Just that one of your campaigns failed doesn’t mean that platform is not good for you. It just takes a fair amount of money and time to optimize your campaigns and make them successful. I have typically spend around 2Cr. on Facebook platform in last 4 years and still may of my campaigns fail today. If you want fast results hire an expert of the platform.
  3. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket: Diversify your mediums to generate leads or traffic. Typically any medium should not drive more than 20% of your sales. It becomes really lucrative to go deeper and deeper into a medium when we taste success on it. I have learnt this hard way. There was time when Thrillophilia was driving 80% of the traffic through Search engines and then suddenly the website was hacked by Chinese hacker who did lot of artificial link building. We realized this 3 months later when we got penalized by Google and traffic dropped to 1/10. We had a nightmare on sales side and had to diversify in hurry which really isn’t the best approach.
  4. Build smart email lists: Emails are still going to exist for next 10 years so it’s a good idea to invest on them. The more you know your customers, what they want and better segregated your email lists are, the lesser you will spam your consumer and the more leads you will generate. Keep a close eye on subscription/ unsubscribing and see what drives them.
  5. UI is the key: Drive emotions. Lot of impulsive buying happens over internet. People get carried away with emotions, drive them to do what you really wanted them to do. A good visual can be 5 times more powerful than an average one. No other thing can have such an effect on your campaigns. I again say drive emotions. It can be anger, humor, inquisitiveness etc.
  6. Have a short term strategy and a long term strategy: Your short term strategy could be have a good user base to feed your platform or generate leads to feed your sales team. Paid advertising might be really helpful in doing that. Your long term strategy should be to build a sustainable long term engine based on active user base, repeat customers, reviews or organic traffic.
  7. FANS and no fans: When I talk to many startup friends they ask for tips of building fan base seeing that we at Thrillophilia have done a good job in building a 32000+ Fan base on Facebook. It’s just the most false metrics to look at. We have never ever done a single campaign to increase our Fanbase. It’s not going to take you anywhere unless you plan to sell your company to a not so tech guy. A better metrics could be active users on page, virality of posts or traffic on website from Facebook.
  8. Keep a close eye on 24 hour results: It’s very imp to know what the world is thinking about your company at this point of time. I am just addicted to 24 hour results of keyword “Thrillophilia” on Google. A simple way to do it is go to Google and type in your brand name. In Search tools select in “Past 24 hours” This will show you the results of your brand in the last 24 hours over net indexed by Google. It will help you to identify if some is talking negative about your brand or if you just had a fake review from a competitor. Also set you your key Google alerts.
  9. Lessen up the dependency on other platforms: Let’s say today your 80% of the traffic is driven by Google and Facebook. How can you bring it to 50%? Building better email lists, having more repeat traffic, people who love you and are addicted to your website, affiliates etc. You never know if Google of FB will exist after 5 years but I assume you are building a company that probably will.
  10. Build relationships: Nothing works better than this. Start helping people in your ecosystem. If you design T-shirts design it for free for a NGO, a startup or for a big company. If you run a blog, give links to other good websites. Take your vendors for a dinner. Soon your 24 hours result will start getting better. We recently did a camp for Make a Difference, and yesterday they posted a Video on Youtube with our special mention – Let people talk good about you and enjoy the ride. In the end you were here to disrupt something and build something better.
Guest Post by Abhishek, Co-Founder of Thrillophilia.com, the biggest activity travel website of India and comes with 6+ years of digital marketing experience. Before Co-Founding Thrillophilia he has helped national and international companies like Biocon, Flying machine, Discovery Channel to build their digital marketing presence
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Notes on Product Management – insights from Slideshare / MMT / ex-Google PM

Avinash Raghava, who is doing a wonderful job of getting product start-ups together all over India, organized a product management roundtable with the help of Aneesh Reddy(CEO, Capillary). They invited Amit Ranjan (Cofounder, Slideshare – acquired by LinkedIn) and Amit Somani (Chief Product Officer, Makemytrip, ex-Google) to share their insights with a small set of entrepreneurs.

Credit for all the good stuff goes to Amit Ranjan, Amit Somani and Aneesh Reddy. Notes are rough. If anything is unclear, feel free to comment.

Here are some quick notes/thoughts from the event:

Who would make a good product manager?
Someone who can do 70% of everything (coding, design, listening to users etc.)

Best way to find a product manager in India is to find someone who did a startup but failed – he/she is likely to know all the various aspects that go into managing a product.

Someone who can lead by influence and manage to juggle all the balls in the air. Should be someone who can say NO.

It’s a very tough position to hire for – you need to have patience – you might go wrong the first few times. Once hired, give them around 5-6 months to get the hang of the whole thing.

What does a product manager do? What is his role about?
A good product manager would understand the requirements from various constituents and write a detailed specification, plan for bugs, testing, urgent requests and then create a product roadmap/deadlines.

A product manager has to identify and write down what metrics will move once the product is launched (e.g launching the mobile app will increase our repeat orders by 9%) – in some cases it is just to ensure that people work on things that matter but overtime it also brings more accountability.

User specs should have – what all do you need, who will use it and why – need to be elaborate it before you give it – need a hypothesis that will it move an X metric. Read thetwo page spec document that Joel Spolsky wrote for a fictional website What time is it? It should also have non-goals – what the product does NOT try to do.

Engineers tend to underestimate the time it’ll take – product manager needs to be able to correctly estimate how long something should take. And you will get better at it with time.

Use the 1/1/1 rule – sit with the engineering team and plan what needs to be accomplished in 1 week, 1 month and 1 six-month period.

People want to see the product roadmap – it is important for the CEO / Product Manager to communicate this to their team mates since a lot of people feel uncomfortable if they don’t have a clear idea of where the product is headed. (Amit Ranjan mentioned that people may even leave if they feel that the founding team does not have a clear vision – but the nature of start-ups is such that it is bound to happen that the product roadmap keeps evolving)

You need to hire coders who have a design sense (that eliminates 70% of work later).

Role of special data or analytics person has become very important (Amit Ranjan said that he could see that products of the future will be decided and influenced by data scientists). It is very important to get such a person on board early. Someone who has crunched SQL and nosql logs etc and can find trends and look up aberrations. Read up on Hal Varian and DJ Patil to understand more about this.

Difference between customer requirements and product requirements – customer requirement only becomes product requirement when more than 3 people require it (it’s a rule of thumb) – (People shared various tricks they use to ensure that the customer requirement is serious – “just wait for a few days and see if they come back with the same request”, “ask them to email it and not take feedback over the phone” etc. – these are situations where there is too much feedback coming your way. In most cases, it is best to make it as easy as possible for people to give you feedback).

Keep product engineering teams small – Amit Somani mentioned Jeff Bezos Two Pizza rule i.e. if the team cannot be fed by two pizzas alone, it is too big. Read more here.

Try to do daily scrum – gives everyone a sense of what everyone else is doing and ensures that people are making progress

Everything is a 6 page document – another Jeff Bezos funda for getting clarity. So a specification or a product request could be a 6 page long form document which ensures that the person achieves clarity before building anything.

You need to benchmark your product against other products especially in enterprise. When starting a product from scratch this can be a really useful exercise.

Amit Somani suggested a mental trick – before building a product, write a one page press release for the product that comes out upon product launch – what will this press release have? What the key features? The target audience etc. This PR drafting exercise could help you decide what to build, what is critical, and for which audience.

Don’t ignore email as a channel for activation and returning visitors

Product activation – Use banners on your own website – do get them to take action – on landing page – on other parts of the website

Track at your mobile traffic – people at the roundtable reported some crazy growth numbers for mobile internet usage – huge sites are now getting 20% to 60% of their traffic on mobile. Mobile traffic is split 50%-50% on mobile browser (including WAP) and mobile apps. This was a big eye opener for many people.

Tools people recommended

Use Trello (a Joel Spolsky product) to manage your product

Use Zapier business tool to connect various sources of product input (e.g. taking Zendesk tickets and automatically creating Github issues)

Use Clicktale or Inspectlet to record user sessions

Use Morae for recording users’ reactions when they are using your product ((Amit Somani mentioned how they put a live usage recording on a LCD screen in the technology room so that engineers could understand how their products were being used – it lead to a lot “can’t he just click on the button! Why is he scrolling up and down!”). One way to get users for such recordings is to ask interview candidates who come to your office to use your product and see their reactions.

Use a call-outs software when introducing new product features (like Cleartrip / WordPress / Facebook do).

Concluding notes
This was one of the most gyan-heavy sessions that I’ve attended. It was useful to hear things from people who had been there done that. Aneesh (even though he is based out of Bangalore) had taken the lead to do this with Avinash and our hope is that the group meets every 6 weeks to keep the conversation going. We’ll keep you posted.

Feel free to email me at ankur AT Akosha dot com if you’d like me to give more details to you.

On a related note, there was some basic debate about what a “product” is. We didn’t get into it at length because everyone in the room intuitively understood what a “product” was. However, we had internally debated about it – if you are interested, do read –Understanding Product v. Service [ThinkLabs Notes 1].

Reblogged from the Akosha Blog by Ankur Singla