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Indix: Building the world’s product information repository

Indix is a SaaS + Big Data product intelligence platform that allows businesses to organize, analyze, visualize and act on the world’s product information in real-time. Indix uses big data analytics and visualization to deliver actionable insights. Indix also offers APIs for developers to build product rich applications. It was founded by former Microsoft VP, Sanjay Parthasarathy, who previously led billion dollar divisions at Microsoft. Other co-founders include Sridhar Venkatesh, Rajesh Muppalla, Satya Kaliki and Jonah Stephen Jeremiah. Indix is backed by prominent angel investors as well as Avalon Ventures and Nexus Ventures. 

Introduction

Indix is a platform that intends to be the single complete repository of information about the world’s products that are currently spread all over the Internet.

Consider this scenario: if you are responsible for analyzing price trends of a brand that you manage (say a fast-selling mobile phone) to ensure the market is healthy, you will do one of these two things:

  • Search for the product, filter the results that indicate price, and go through the pages, doing this every few days (or hours)
  • Identify a few top sites that sell the item and monitor prices on these site, every few days (or hours)

As you can imagine, this can be a very time consuming and inaccurate exercise, and may not leave you with enough time to act on the information you gain, (e.g. Why is Flipkart dropping its price every few days while Tradus does not?).

Using the Indix App for retailers and brands, that is built on top of the Indix product intelligence platform, you can get all these numbers from across the Internet at your fingertips, and get access to insights like price drops, new sellers, etc. This allows you to consume this real-time data and get on to your real job: analyzing price trends across various slices and dices of data.

Indix-Apparels

indix-graph2

It is very important to be clear on one point, a point which Sanjay (founder and CEO) emphasized in our interview: Indix is building a platform that provides access to the world’s product information, with all product attributes, in a structured form; the possible ways of using this data are limitless. This Indix App for retailers and brands is just one of the possible uses. A developer ecosystem around the Indix platform will create extremely innovative applications on this platform soon.

The Company

The company was founded to address three problems:

  1. Offer a good view of the products out there to product managers by providing a comprehensive and structured product repository. Today, searching for products using existing search engines yields unstructured and error-prone results, whereas Indix intends to offer structured information about products of the world to everyone.
  2. Today, product managers spend most of their time collecting data. Indix aims to reduce this time to next to nothing. This will allow product managers to do the work that is valued most – analyze data and generate insights for their business.
  3. Enable product awareness of applications, to the point of letting users complete the purchase cycle everywhere a product is mentioned. For example, on whichever page a product is mentioned (say a blog that refers to the recent ad of a deodorant), there can be automatic workflow created by an app (which uses the Indix platform to access details of the product) so that the reader can interact with the product information, get more details and insights, and buy the product from a merchant he likes.

Indix is headquartered in Seattle and has a total team size of 42, with six people based in the Seattle office focused on business development and marketing, and 36 people based in the Chennai office focused on the product development.

It is a startup with a deep engineering focus and great culture.  Here are a few things they do to foster a good workspace environment:

  1. They have an internal app that assigns every engineer a Super Hero status and tracks their attendance at their daily standup.
  2. They have treasure hunts / bounty hunts that involve the engineering teams taking on coding challenges.
  3. They have a monitor that screams when a build breaks and in the future, it will have a missile launcher, which will send a missile in the direction of the engineer who broke the build!

The Indix Platform

Indix is a SaaS + Big Data product intelligence platform that gathers product data from Internet, processes it, and makes it available in a structured form. Comparing two products listed on two different websites and figuring out whether these are the same products or not is a very hard problem, and Indix does a great job in product comparison by doing deeper searches and using multiple attributes to compare. They have a few hundred million products (along with rich attributes) collected so far and their target is to have a billion products on their platform.

The platform offers access to developers for its data who are then able to build various applications on top of this valuable stream of data. While price is the most important attribute of a product, there are many other attributes which can be interesting to app developers and their users.

Currently, Indix offers two products:

  1. Indix App for brands and retailers for better and faster market and product analysis.
  2. Developer API set to access their platform data and build rich applications.

Indix app is priced per user per month, and Developer API access is per company per month.

Indix App

Indix app allows brand managers to explore unlimited product, competitors, and categories; monitor various channels through which the product is being sold; and gain insights on pricing, assortment, and Minimum Advertised Price (MAP), etc.

The way it works is as follows:

  1. The brand manager logs into the app and selects a few products and categories that (s)he is interested in tracking.
  2. The brand manager can also select one or more competitors to track.
  3. Once these are set up, the brand manager can view the dashboard to analyze trends on assortment, prices, promotions, availability, competition, and social news, etc. within selected categories of the products.
  4. Insights can be obtained through the analysis center. These could be analyses done by the brand manager as well as pre-defined insights thrown in by the app (see screenshots below)

indix-app

 

indix-app2

 

Developer API

indix-developerSince Indix is primarily a platform, its value will be best leveraged when outside developers use the data to build rich applications for users and businesses. Developers get access to the large repository of product information, which is easily accessible via RESTFul API that the Indix platform exposes.

 

indix-searchstoresDifferentiators

Here are a few USPs of Indix that are worth noting:

  • Intuitive and visual interface – The Indix app is very user-friendly and designed to be intuitive, with customer use-cases in mind. It provides insights on pricing, assortment, markdown, availability, categories, and competition in real-time in a highly visual fashion; making it easier and faster for product managers to make data-driven decisions.
  • Scale – They have tens of millions products and billions of price points and other product related information. There is no limit on the number of categories, prices, or competitor’s products you can track.
  • Data quality – Their data is highly robust and accurate, thanks to their deep expertise in big data and analytics. They continue to improve their matching algorithm to do deeper comparisons (compare multiple attributes before declaring products the same).
  • Customer Service  – They have integrated help and feedback systems within their product and are very focused on providing an outstanding customer support service. If their testimonials are anything to go by, they have many happy customers.

Market and Roadmap

This is a big market that Indix is operating in. Currently, their product is targeted at pricing analysts, brand managers, category/merchandising managers, and others involved with product information at brands and retailers, broadly referred to as product managers. There are millions of product managers in the US alone.

This is a hard problem to solve, and there aren’t many companies building product intelligence platform at this scale. Some companies have worked in category-specific or attribute-specific (like price) product data space, but not in a category-agnostic way Indix is doing it – Black Locus (acquired by Home Depot), decide.com (acquired by eBay), and Kosmix (acquired by Wal-Mart). So this is an interesting space for them to be in.

Over the next 6-12 months, their priority is to sign-up additional customers, incorporate their feedback, invest in marketing, and achieve an even bigger scale for product data in their platform. There are more than 1 billion products and services on the Internet. Today, the Indix platform has tens of millions of products, billions of price points, and other product related information, and they continue to add new products. They mentioned that the next 6-12 months are crucial towards realizing their vision of organizing, analyzing, and visualizing the world’s product information and making it accessible and actionable in real time.

They also continue to work on refining and improving their API set based on feedback. 

The Road Ahead

As Sanjay writes in their launch post,

“In the future, all applications will be product-aware, just as applications today are people and location aware. The same way Facebook connects you with people and Foursquare connects you with places, Indix can help connect you with products.”

It is a very powerful vision that Indix is running with. They are enabling this by

“..[doing] the hard work of finding, understanding, categorizing, normalizing, matching and, in general, structuring the vast amount of product-related information on the Internet. Our ultimate goal is to provide a view of the Internet through the product lens”.

This is a tough and inspiring challenge for the company, to organize the world’s product information. However, the impact this can have is equally inspiring and this is what is driving the company forward.

Sanjay ran billion dollar businesses at Microsoft, and this one surely is headed in that direction.

Sanjay’s Advice to Startups

  1. To get a billion dollar idea, you need to work on very hard, almost impossible problems. What we are working on at Indix is very hard, and it is inspiring.
  1. Build a strong culture and pour your soul into it. Everyone has a personality, whether writing code, doing design, managing HR – their work should reflect their personality.
  2. Hire great people whom you can trust.
  3. Create a healthy balance between what you think is right (vision and mission) and what customers want; don’t go overboard on one side or the other. We talked to 100 people (not only customers) before we built a line of code, to learn from them. Started coding in Jan 2012, did 7 versions, threw away the first 6. We built for about 6 months (3-4 prototypes), and only then started talking to customers, as guidelines and not as requirements. Only when the product was fleshed out in some detail (alpha release) did we start looking at what customers wanted, and after beta, started taking feature requests.
  4. I don’t believe in Minimum Viable Product (MVP) – critical mass of product is more important, at least in the enterprise space. I had the luxury to do so since I had funding, but it is an important point to think about.
  5. If you build for the US, one of the cofounders must have had significant experience living in the US, or one of the co-founders should move.
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What Makes a Good Product Manager: Lessons from Doers

For solo product entrepreneurs and product teams that are caught in a vicious cycle of build, release, build release, we bring some insights from “doers” that will help them differentiate through the demanding skills of product development. Deep Nishar, who leads product management at LinkedIn, had said sometime ago that a product manager needs brain of an engineer, heart of a designer and speech of a diplomat. Is product management an art or science is an extraneous question. It is both and more. If a product manager can understand where code sucks and how to place a nice button to entice the user, his job is well done. It’s a deft left brain right brain play.

Indian product ecosystem is evolving and many product managers are learning on the way to make their successes and don’t ask heartwrenching slips, which anyway is part of the game. These first-generation product managers are just sowing their seeds of a developing ecosystem. When we asked some accomplished product managers who are part of successful product ventures in India—Amit Somani of MakeMyTrip, Ravi Padaki of Pravi Solutions, Shivakumar Ganesan (Shivku) of Exotel, Krishna Mehra of Capillary Technologies, and Shrirang Bapat of Pubmatic—as to what makes a successful product manager, the answers were varied and thought-provoking.

Key aspects of becoming a product manager

Krishna Mehra and Shirang Bapat are unanimous in their view that a product manager should understand the pulse of the customer. Mehra adds another element to the product manager’s repertoire – execution. Ravi Padaki takes a holistic view in stating the a product manager should understand the how business works, be creative in solving problems for customers that may not translate as features in the product, and be a great communicator, not just in listening to customers but to the market as well. Amit Somani demands insane curiosity, building capability, and knowledge of how to work through influence. Shivakumar Ganesan (Shivku) of Exotel feels the product manager expects the product to sell itself and works backwards from market needs to build a suitable product. He feels product manager is a misnomer and the correct term is “market manager.” Shivku brings out the creative plus execution aspect of a product manager when he says, “he is willing to write a hack to keep the elegance.” Aesthetics are important for a product manager whereas the coder just concentrates on architecture and design.

Attributes demanded: ability to understand customer pulse, creativity, curiosity, influence without authority, capability to build what market needs

Top three priorities of a product manager

Ravi Padaki is emphatic that shipping is the first priority. Iterating and scheduling releases based on feedback and market response follows. Krishna Mehra cautions against building without validation and product discovery. In enterprise market, building for wrong requirements means loss of cost and time, while customer feedback should be gauged quickly for consumer products. Focusing on customer experience is the first priority of Shirang. Amit bets on a big vision to begin with. According to Shivku, customer support comes first.

The second priority for all the five revolves around execution. While for Amit, understanding customer requirement and translating it into a product is important, Mehra focuses on the ability to work with the engineering, design and QA team to deliver high-quality product. Shirang takes it a step ahead to focus on communication between customer, product manager, and engineering, which again emphasizes on aligning customer needs to building the product. Shivku emphasizes on product-market fit, while Ravi bets on validating the product through feedback through all stages of development.

The third priority for product managers is taking several parts of the organization together to build a successful product. For Shirang, the third priority is fitting the non-functional requirements into the product. Mehra wants the product manager to drive customer success by working with other parts of the organization. Ravi terms it triangulating and prioritizing, which means synthesizing inputs from various parts, which the product manager likes some part of it or not. Shivku calls for inventiveness in creating a product out of ideas from the junk. Amit takes shipping, iteration and metrics to the end.

Three priorities: 1. Enlisting customer requirements/support, 2. execution and continuous iteration based on feedback, and 3. taking the organization along during product development 

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Piracy and freemium killed the Indian software buyer

Nobody in India buys software.

If the above sentence draws your attention, read on! If you are based out of India, think of the last time you bought software (yes packaged products). Now think of all your friends and guess when they bought software. Now, here’s the clincher, “When was the last time you bought software made in India?”. 99% of the people, irrespective of their socio-economic status will respond in the negative. lr-processed-0399

Product evangelists will now talk about the cloud/SaaS and the subscription economy, and how it is the great leveler when it comes to software products. As an entrepreneur selling a SaaS software in India, let me be the first to tell you that it is really hard work. Most entrepreneurs have told me that the Indian customer is price sensitive, I say, a majority of them are insensitive. Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t wish to rant. I am trying to catalog and present reasons why selling SaaS software is hard. Here’s what I think it is:

Let’s talk a little bit about the Indian software market

In the last two decades, India has seen two revolutions which helped create a large software market. Firstly, the economic deregulation in the 90s which enabled a steady growth of the economy, disposable income and import of technology. Secondly, the telecom, and subsequently the PC and mobile revolution that has created a (supposedly) large software consumption market. PCs, Laptops and tablets are now commonplace in Urban and Semi-urban India and the latest numbers indicate 15 Million broadband and about 100 Million mobile internet users. A look at these gargantuan numbers and you might begin to assume a large consumption market, but to give you a sense of reality, let me ask you the same question one of my mentors asked me – “Name 5 large Indian software product brands selling in the Indian market”

Enterprise software is probably your best bet

If you are selling software, the enterprise market is probably your best bet. Bharat Goenka, co-founder of Tally solutions, said that “In developed economies, SMBs act like enterprises and in emerging economies, SMBs act like consumers“[2]. Many of our customers are SMBs who are looking to use technology to grow some component of their business. And most of the times, we don’t deal with the company, but with empowered employees. The ones who have a budget at their disposal and are forward looking in their outlook. What we found was that the same stigma that existed in the 70s and 80s in the US software markets exists in the Indian SME customers of today. A lot of them look at software as something that will displace them in the organization and are extremely defensive in the matters of adoption. But we all know how that worked out in the US and UK markets and I am hoping India follows a similar trend.

Oh wow! I never knew you could do this

A lot of people we have met have been genuinely surprised at what our product does. It’s tough to manage these customers because we spend a lot of our acquisition time on sensitizing them about the problem before we present the solution. Even if you are doing something radically new, it is easier to bucket yourself into a genre that is popular and accepted. For example, we are a customer conversations player, but it helps if we refer to ourselves as a Social CRM or a marketing insights product. Ignorance about a genre of products has a big pitfall – customers don’t know how much to pay for the solution. This is really tricky because it usually leads to a customer deliberating on paying for the solution.

“But we can do this for free on Google”

Freemium is both a good and bad thing. Almost every customer of ours expects a free trial for a few days. In the products eco-system it’s become a norm,  but a lot of productized service companies I know have been asked for a free trial on bespoke software. Most users don’t understand the price they are paying when using services like Google or Facebook and usually expect the same when we tell them about our “use on the browser” service. Usually this means we have to get into a lengthy explanation about  why our product costs so much. The best experience I have had was when a customer, who understood the online advertising economy, asked us if he could use an ad supported model of our service for free!

Freemium might be a viable option early on but when looking at growth and scale, I don’t believe freemium is a sustainable economic model. It is a marketing tactic at best!

“muHive crack codes”

One morning, while peering through our website analytics, we were surprised to find a search keyword “muHive crack codes” in the list. This was a good and a bad thing: good because some customer actually found our service good enough to look for a cracked edition, and bad because we knew this customer wouldn’t pay. And yes, if it’s crack worthy, then it is probably good software – that’s the Indian psyche. Industry estimates put the total value of pirated software used in India to be upwards of $50 Billion[3]. Why won’t we pay for software? That’s a long post in itself, but to be brief: piracy was not controlled in the early days of the PC revolution and hence the assumption that software is free. Also, cost of software has always been calculated based on the affordability and costs in developed markets. To illustrate my point, I will end this section with a question – If Microsoft Windows were to cost Rs 1000 instead of $149 (Rs 9000) would the piracy numbers be different?

The pricing slope

Researchers put the Indian middle class at earning $10/day or roughly $300/month. To give you an estimate of why this matters, the urban poverty line stands at $14/month – yes, a month. The Indian middle class is about 100 million people and $300 per month usually supports 2 to 3 people on an average. Now when you think in these terms, you can imagine what the cost of ownership of a $149 software sounds like. Add the fact that software is a non-tangible artifact and you understand why Indian customers are extremely cautious when it comes to software purchases.

Even with enterprise customers, your pricing strategy has to be “just right”. And you have to account for discounts. A majority of the Indian customers we meet ask for some form of special pricing. Now, this might not be a trait which is unique to the Indian market, but understanding the cultural and economic context of the demographic becomes very essential when it comes to pricing. Marketers talk about using tricks like prepaid accounts (India has a large prepaid mobile subscriber base), daily subscription and data based pricing but all of them have the underlying assumption that the customer is willing to pay and understands the cost of the solution.

In conclusion

All these are what we have found to be the issues with selling software in India. Even though we have good answers to some of the questions our customers pose, in my opinion, it will still take a long time for the Indian software buyer to evolve and for good product companies to make a mark. Rather than end on a dismal note, I will now list down what actually seems to be working for us, and also some insights from other producteers.

– Customer don’t mind paying for bundled software. Hardware, especially mobiles and tablets might actually help in software sales.

– Customers will pay for immediate utility. What someone referred to as “First order business” solutions; meaning something that can make them more money instantly. Example: Email and SMS marketing solutions. Customers don’t mind paying for advertising and reach.

– Customers usually pay when they feel they are missing out on revenue or an opportunity. A loss averse technique to selling is what we have seen work best.

References:

 

 

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3 Easy Pointers to Keep In Mind While Creating Delight Through User Experience

Get the Mental Model right

Mental Models are essentially set of best practices in understanding users’ reason for doing things. Designing around it will create delight

While Aesthetics play a big role in the immediate impression might be very important as a “buying” feature, often it will fail as a “using” feature if not done in the  mental  model for a given customer context or usage scenario.

Good book on the topic is Indi Young’s Mental Models –Aligning Design Strategy with  User Behavior

Here is a summary blog post for the topic – Getting Mental Models Right  –  CrazyEggblogpost

“Nobody is complaining” – that doesn’t mean there is no problem

User adaptability is surprisingly high when it comes to dealing with inefficiencies.
A high tech enterprise software product (especially ERP) takes 6 months and 1 M$ to  learn and operationalize, TV remote has 84 buttons on it, the latest microwave oven can cook food in 101 styles (didn’t know there were 100 ways to cook idli!) etc. and yet after a while USERS ADAPT. They compromise & accept the product with its inherent  inefficiencies until someone comes around and solves it (think Apple!)

A good Product Manager and User Experience Designer will uncover those inherent  inefficiencies and create opportunities to simplify things, bringing the “aha” moment  with less capabilities!

One of the roadmap prioritization techniques we advocate as part of our Customer Insights courses at the Institute is Kano Analysis which basically suggests that every product has basic attributes, performance features and delighting features.  Most successful product releases will have atleast a few “delighters”

Integrate UX into the development process

User Experience (UX) is lot more than User  Interface Design and User Interface Design is lot more than pretty fonts and cool colors!

If you plot the maturity of R&D teams across the UX continuum you will find 3 stages of maturity

  1. UX as Styling
    Define the visual elements that determine look of the application

       2.  UX as Process
             Design as a method integrated early into the development process 

       3.  UX as Innovation
             Redefine product concepts based on user insights

Here is a typical interlock/flow of how engineering & design teams work together during a development process of product!

Any thoughts?

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Announcing the first list of #PNCamp attendees

Last evening was a really exciting one for Team #PNCamp. We’ve been cracking some goals we set for ourselves while building this bootcamp from scratch, and lofty as they were, the team has been reaching milestone after milestone. The incentive of putting together an event to help the ecosystem we are part of, has pushed us all towards something special, and we hope you’ll see that passion come through on December 4 and 5.

Amidst a flurry of mails yesterday then, we have just been able to take some time off to publish the first list of confirmed attendees.

The most important thing we want to make clear is that being in the same track as your friend or someone you know doesn’t mean that you are going to be attending the camp together or that you can sit together and so on. The boot camp format is not going to work that way.

How will it work then? Well, it’ll work better.

Here’s the first set of attendees and more will get announced as soon as we’ve collated the registration details.

Cohort

Dec 4th – Customer Discovery Hacking track

 

Dec 5th  – Scale Hacking track

If your name is not in this list, there’s nothing to worry. We’re still collating all your info and will be announcing the next set of attendees soon.

We’ll be seeing you in Pune!

If you haven’t registered/applied yet (there’s still time — in fact if you register before 22nd November, we have something special for you 🙂

 

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Scale Hacking at #PNCamp: What To Expect on Day 2 (Dec 5)

It’s a conference….it’s a summit….it’s a camp! Being a startup ourselves, we constantly listen to  our customers (who are startups as well!) and try and come up with initiatives that solve their problems and address their pain points.

In that regard, the genesis and the program design of the ProductNation Camp has come from what we’ve been hearing from you – the Indian product startup community. Sandeep has very nicely elucidated the need for a Product Bootcamp for Product entrepreneurs and laid out the broad agenda of the #PNCamp.

#PNCamp is expected to be a very intense, highly curated and focused two-day event with two tracks – Discovery Hacking (on Dec 4) and Scale Hacking (on Dec 5). For a product entrepreneur, getting the first set of customers is mighty important from multiple perspectives – validating the need for the product in the market, generating the first rupees (or dollars!) in revenue  and grow the startup from a buzz in the head to a live organism. While 2013 is expected to end with a Dhoom for Bollywood fans, it’s the same for product entrepreneurs attending #PNCamp. Rather than an ending, we hope it’ll be a new beginning for them to grow their startups to greater heights in the coming year. One of the producers of the product startup community’s Dhoom, Sai unveiled the first look of #PNCamp and gave us a glimpse of what’s in store for attendees of the Discovery Hacking track on Day 1.

It is said that well begun is half done. Let’s stay the tough part, that of beginning well has been taken care of and you are now staring at the tougher part – of growing your startup across multiple dimensions. That is when the startup is in the happy-confused state and there are a lot of questions on your mind.  Sales cures most ills, but how do you sell? This will be the primary thrust of the morning sessions which is mandatory. Here, we will have separate tracks for those who are selling to a global audience and those who are selling domestically. The challenges, hiring, operations, etc are completely different. In the afternoon, we have various exciting sessions on how to understand and communicate with customers and how to pick the right product direction when you have scarce resources to spread amongst several promising ones. Choice in an uncertain world is not easy and while we promise no silver bullets for your problems, we do promise to ignite enough fire in the belly (and in the heads!) for you to go back and navigate your way into scaling your startup. We also have specific “Oh, Oh, How do I do that?” sessions on specific topisc you’ve always wanted to know..

So specifically, what do we have to offer to you on the Scale Hacking Day:

We will have around 75 chosen participants for the Scale Hacking Day divided into cohorts of 15-20 people each. There are mandatory sessions which all participants will attend and then the cohorts will attend the optional sessions depending on the stage of the company and their interest.

The Mandatory Sessions

“Great Indian Street Fight or Selling In India”

No wonder most of the selling in India happens through ‘feet on street’. And when you’re out there on the streets, it’s always a fight. Fight against time to sign-up customers, fight against a thousand other things to get the customers’ attention, fight for receiving payments on time and just fight for survival!

You have probably got your first set of customers, but you want to scale now. What are the different ways to do that? Does the Channel Partner route work and what are the pros and cons of taking that approach? How do you reach out to your next set of potential customers in an effective manner? Should you now start considering mainstream media for advertising or scale up your digital marketing efforts? More importantly, how do you plan for scale and put together the right team to execute your plans? How to hire the right people and fire the ones that don’t work out well?

Dhiraj Kacker, who has built Cavera into the leading destination for customized printed merchandize and an e-commerce solutions provider for photographers, will facilitate this session. Dhiraj along with Canvera’s Co-Founder Peeyush was recognized as amongst the top-10 Most Influential People in Photography in India by Asian Photography magazine. So he surely knows what clicks with his customers!

“Dancing with Elephant/Winging in the new flat world or Selling to Global Customers”

If IT services companies made the world flat, Saas product companies have made it even flatter!

While Zoho remains the pioneer, we have seen many SaaS companies FreshDesk, WebEngage, Wingify, Capillary Technologies, ChargeBee among others whose products are proudly Indian and that are selling to customers from across the globe. What does it take to build a global SaaS company out of India? More importantly, what does it take to sell to customers you haven’t met or even spoken to? How do you price your product so that customers from across geographies can buy it? How do you take care of the differences in the customers expectations, time zones, languages, even customs and culture across different regions? After all, every product has a personality. What about providing support to global customers?

Samir Palnitkar (ShopSocially, AirTight Networks) & Girish Mathrubootham (FreshDesk, Zoho) will facilitate this session. You wouldn’t want to miss this session unless you want to see your dollar dreams go sour!

The Optional Sessions

“Customers Buy Features, Not Benefits or How To Think Customer First?”

Here’s a quick question – which is the Indian brand that has grown the fastest in recent times and its identity (hint, hint!) transcends all barriers of language, region and religion? What’s more, it is very much an Indian tech startup! Yes, you guessed it right. It is Aadhar. Meet Shankar Maruwada, who gave the Aadhar its brand name and developed its identity and made it into the household brand it is today. Get to know how to place yourself inside the customers’ heads, try and understand what factors play in their decision-making and how you can approach your customers better by anticipating what’s possibly on their minds.

If you want to get a sense of what’s in store for you, watch this video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTNVTaPXfqI#t=58

Well, you wouldn’t want to be that fish which can’t understand how people live without water!

“How to get featured in TechCrunch, spending $0”

It’s true that media coverage alone isn’t the true barometer of success of a startup. But hey, when has positive media attention, especially from a top global publication like TechCrunch hurt any startup? That is of course, assuming that the product is a good one!

For a lot of product entrepreneurs, getting featured on TechCrunch is a dream and considered as a good means to be visible in front of a lot of people – customers, investors, partners among others. So what does it take to get featured in TechCrunch? Considering they’d be getting hundreds of requests each day, do the writers and editors there even read such emails? Do you need to hire a high-profile PR agency and spend a lot of money?  Or should you just build something meaningful and the coverage will happen by itself?

Valorie Wagoner, Founder of ZipDial, has done that and been there (on TechCrunch). ZipDial is one of the fastest growing global startups emerging from India and Valerie will share her experiences of getting covered in global tech blogs and tell you how your startup can also get featured with no money spent!

“Positioning for Getting Acquired”

So you think acquisition only when you have reached a certain level and scale of business? Well, that’s what a lot of entrepreneurs in Bangalore thought before they attended this round table. How do you know if the time is ripe for your company getting acquired? How do you choose between multiple suitors you may have? What are some of the key things one should keep in mind so that all the stakeholders have a favourable outcome? While an acquisition is a regular business transaction in the US, do we Indians get (needlessly?) emotional about it?

Jay Pullur, Founder and CEO of Pramati Technologies and Sanat Rao, Director, Corporate Business Development (Emerging Markets) at Intel will facilitate this session. iSPIRT has a very active M&A initiative with Jay and Sanat actively leading the M&A Connect. You’d surely not want to miss this opportunity to understand how you can set yourself up for a nice acquisition.

“The Forum or Where You Can Bring Out Your Worst Fears!”

Every CEO needs somewhere to turn for the insight and perspective only trusted peers can provide. When such peers meet together in a setting where there is an atmosphere of confidentiality, respect and trust, it can become a supreme sounding board. We will call such a setting a “Forum”. Such a forum can become most valued asset for the members, because the maxim holds true: it can be lonely at the top, but it doesn’t have to be.

At #PNCamp, we want to experiment, for the first time, with building such a Forum by forming a small group of peers who meet regularly to exchange ideas, thoughts and experiences on the issues that matter most to them. During the first meeting at the PNCamp, this group will be taught effective forum techniques, a set of protocols and a shared language that creates immediate and meaningful connections among members.

We expect that once created, the Forum group will periodically meet either in person or online with the following agenda:

1- Update each other by looking back since the last meeting and looking forward

2- Identify, discuss and park business issues that are typically Important but not Urgent

3- Make presentations around these issues and get non-judgmental feedback from the fellow members

I’ll end this post with a quote from the very inspirational movie, The Shawshank Redemption.

Dear Red, If you’re reading this, you’ve gotten out. And if you’ve come this far, maybe you’re willing to come a little further. You remember the name of the town, don’t you?

Of course, you remember the name of the town. It’s Pune and we look forward to see you in Pune on Dec 4 and Dec 5 for #PNCamp.

PS. After all this if you haven’t still applied for #PNCamp yet, we’re afraid you may be a little late. Apply Now here!

 

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Everything is an experiment

A few days back, Sameer, Avinash and I chatted about my learnings from doing the Product Nation Playbook Roundtables as part of iSPIRT. If you’re curious what they are, here’s how iSPIRT describes this program.

We convert conversations into playbooks for product entrepreneurs. Product companies need a different mindset than IT services businesses. They need to anticipate customer needs rather than just react to them. They need to brand themselves in very different ways and create IP that will disrupt the marketplace. They need deep technologists rather than fungible engineers. And so on. pn.ispirt.in will be the platform for enabling crucial conversations around these issues amongst practitioners. It will use an evidence based methodology to shine light on successful playbooks.

From iSpirt website.

I believe building products is a continuous and highly impactful experiment that one can do. More so in today’s digital day and age. Here’s a short video put together by Sameer that captures my thoughts.

Sridhar Ranganathan(CrediBase) sharing his views on “Building a Product is Experiment” from ProductNation on Vimeo.

The key aspect of every experiment is that there’s definitely an OUTCOME! Whether that is good or bad, is something left to the hypothesis one frames, before the experiment.

Meanwhile, a bunch of folks who’re very interested in seeing the product ecosystem evolve in India, have come together to create #PNCamp, a 2-Day Boot Camp for product entrepreneurs. You can learn more about it here, and if you’re a product entrepreneur, I’ll strongly recommend getting an invite for this – you’ll learn a bunch from it. Even this is an experiment, to learn from how to evolve the ecosystem. Do you agree with me? Share your thoughts in the comments section.

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Creating a platform needs a broad vision and a long leash from investors– Ranjit Nair, CEO of Germin8. #PNHangout

Ranjit has a PhD in Computer Science from University of Southern California and is the CEO of Germin8. In this #PNHangout we had a chance to catch up with Ranjit on the challenges of building a platform and finding the initial market fit.

Ranjit-PRCIMSMarket research companies world over found conducting surveys about brands and products difficult. People were reluctant to take surveys and those who did take these surveys were not representative of the target audience, eg: housewives and retired folks instead of working professionals. We saw a trend where people would often go onto social media sites and/or company owned channels of communication such as emails to express themselves. Hence, as a solution to this market research problem we developed NLP algorithms which were capable of understanding opinions expressed in textual conversations. These algorithms were designed to perform functions such as topic segmentation, topic identification and sentiment analysis. Although these theoretical problems were interesting to solve, it was far from being a product that had much broad commercial appeal.

The push to create a market fit for Explic8

By March 2009, I had assembled a team to develop a commercial product that harnesses these NLP algorithms in order to draw actionable insights and leads from public and private communications channels such as social media and emails. To fill the missing features that could make this product commercially viable, I had challenged my team to build a working prototype in 23 calendar days — just in time for the General Elections in India. Our goal was simple, to analyse what people globally were talking about politicians and parties during the election and make this data available to the public.

This sprint drew us closer to creating the foundations of a minimum viable product which solved a market research pain point (i.e. reliability of surveys). But we knew that the technology we had developed could also solve pain points felt by customer service, sales and corporate communications. For example, this tool could be used for lead generation by a sales team by finding conversations where customers had expressed a stated or latent need for certain products.

An expanded vision could mean a larger product development cycle, but it was worth it

We knew that if we expanded the product vision to solve problems beyond just market research and in multiple verticals, we were setting ourselves up to be a little unfocused; instead of narrowing the focus on one specific problem, we chose to develop a platform that could be used in different applications. We chose this approach because there was no market player who had taken the platform route and attacking the larger market would make this product more feasible. We were lucky to have the support of our investors to back us up on this decision.

We, as a product company, were a little bit ahead of the curve where we sometimes ended up with features that the Indian market wasn’t even ready for. When we launched our product, we realized a lot of the features we built weren’t actually being used by our customers.  For example, we have a feature that allows our users to analyse sentiments not just at the brand level but also for each of the brand’s touch points. We realized that apart from a few brands, most were satisfied with just using the overall brand sentiment without concerning themselves about the sentiment for each of their touch points. We preserved this feature and as users evolved, this feature became one of the differentiators that is now used by most of our customers.

Hindsight is always 20/20 and as we went about from concept to production there were many ups and downs that I think are common with every start-up. We would battle between adding features that add functionality and features which made the product more useful, usable and scalable. I think if I had to do things a little differently today, I would have focussed a little more on marketing initially and a little lesser on building many features. However, we have reached a point where our product speaks for itself and customers from a variety of industries are interested in using Explic8.

Platform and Goals

We are now more than a product but a platform. Explic8 is one of the apps which reside on our platform and we’ve built it in such a way that it could be used in multiple use case scenarios such as analysing emails, chat conversations, etc. We also allow third party applications to use our API to develop their own tools. Analytics that comes from our app is very industry focused. For example, if you’re an automobile brand, then the insights you receive will be benchmarked against competitors using metrics and sources relevant to the automobile industry. Hence, the insights you get are highly actionable. The sentiment algorithm is tuned for each industry, for instance “unpredictable” in the context of a steering mechanism would be treated differently from “unpredictable” in the context of a movie plot. We are also in the midst of expanding our platform to encompass predictive analytics.

If you have any feedback or questions that you would like answered in this series feel free to tweet to me: @akashj

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Bend Me, Shape Me, Anyway You Want Me – Responsive Design in Action!

Bend Me, Shape Me, Anyway You Want Me – Long as you love me, It’s alright! – goes the catchy song from American Breed in 1968. It captures the essence of Responsive Design! Do not make people adapt to your web or mobile experience on various devices.. You make the user interface adapt to the device that is being used. And talk about adapting? Watch the drummer also play the saxophone towards the end! This song was so catchy and appropriate they used it for Flexon flexible eyeglass frames and Gap Stretch Jeans ads!  Let’s enjoy that song first, shall we?

Why is responsive design needed? Let’s start with a simple example of what happens when I access the IRCTC website on my iPhone:

irctc-iphone2

Here the website is not doing anything except display the desktop version in a smart phone with small fonts. I can barely see anything.

 

 

 

irctc-iphone2

I will have to zoom in and locate the login section to login. The web page is doing nothing to adjust to my device. It is up to me to zoom around different parts of a static, same sized page and do my work.

 

 

 

To see Responsive Design in action, I took a good example of how they have done it at worldlife.org, the US web site of World Wildlife Federation. I visited them on my laptop, ipad and iphone and here is what I saw:

First my laptop:wwf-desktop

Next the ipad when I hold it in a landscape mode:

wwf-ipad-lands

Most of the details are still there in this rendering.

 

 

 

 

wwf-ipad-port

In the iPad Portrait Mode the browser adjusts and is able to show more of the screen; all fit within the available screen real estate automatically! Since it’s an iPad, the real estate is still big enough for them to fit everything in.

wwf-iphone-port

Now when I look at the same site through my iPhone Safari browser, the site strips it down to the bare essentials – the logo, the picture of the snow leopard and the two most important links to them – Donate and Adopt.. More of the picture is also visible in the Portrait mode.

wwf-iphone-lands

In the iPhone Landscape mode the picture adjusts automatically all of the elements.

How do we do Responsive Design?

There are many different ways to do Responsive Design and all of them have pluses and minuses – You offer information and functionality only through browsers and make the pages be responsive to the device – laptop, tablets, smartphones or feature phones. Or on smartphones you can create apps that replace webpages or a dedicated mobile website. Initially the whole movement started as Responsive Web Design but the movement has spread to include mobile devices also since users are transitioning a lot of the time they spend doing things on those.. Ethan Marcotte has written a very good book, Responsive Web Design, that outlines a number of techniques to achieve responsive web design:

  • Specifying design elements in terms of percentages instead of pixels
  • Sensing the width or the browser and using different CSS Styles accordingly
  • Extensive use of server side enhancements to enhance the user experience on mobile devices that have narrower bandwidths than an ethernet  or wireless connection at home.

Responsive Design is not a single, monolithic approach. You don’t need to rigidly try to offer ALL of the functionality on every device. Like this blog entry on the facebook developer pages indicates, it can be optimized by different companies for different purposes for different devices.  Luke Wroblewski writes in a compelling way that different devices like laptops, tablets and mobiles have different contexts of usages – some on your sofa at home, some in a hassled situation on the move on your mobile. What you would like to accomplish in those two situations are very different and so your user experience could be limited or more, depending upon this kind of context.

Clarissa Peterson provides a number of additional compelling examples in her presentation here.. If you are worried only about Mobile Responsive Design, the underlying approaches may be the same but the tools may be different. They are outlined here in this article with other references from there. 

As with anything, any approach comes with their own pluses and minuses. This article  – The Truth Behind Responsive Web Design: Is It the Next Great Hope or All Hype? explores some of the minuses in greater detail.

Benefits of Responsive Design

  • Consistent user experience, same URLs on every device
  • Single website/code base to create/maintain for a variety of devices
  • Support for a variety of screens and also future-proof – New screen sizes are automatically accommodated

 

Drawbacks of Responsive Design 

  • Sometimes developing one app for each platform may be the right way to go! And sometimes for News, people prefer browsers over apps!  You may have to look to your own application for an answer. Responsive design may not be applicable if  you decide to go the app route!
  • Not very efficient and can be slow on mobiles with slower connections. All elements may be downloaded whether they are displayed or not.
  • Initial development cost could be more than developing just for a browser
  • Consumers may not necessarily want the same user experience on every device

So next time you design something remember the song – Bend Me, Shape Me, Anyway You Want Me!

Simplify before you suppress. If it’s not worthwhile to show to mobile users, what value does it have to other users? – Ethan Marcotte

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First Look – #PNCamp Day 1 (Discovery Hacking)

Exactly a month away from the inaugural #PNCamp and as schedules and attendees are being finalized, we are getting a lot of questions about what exactly is going to happen on D-Days, especially since we have told everyone we are not going to have one-to-many speaking sessions and workshops that have been the norm.

I spoke to Pallav Nadhani(FusionCharts) today, who is planning and designing the first day of #PNCamp, on 4th December, focusing exclusively on what we are calling the ‘Customer Discovery’ stage, the race against time to get those first 10 customers on board.

So much depends on those first 10 customers, and all of us product pros know this. It is not just the matter of the first customers, the first 10 are a validation of the time and effort you have built, a proof of the market that you’ve bet on and the first high-five entrepreneurship is going to give you.

What Pallav has envisioned for the first day of #PNCamp is a one day experiential learning bootcamp that will take a product entrepreneur across the entire journey he is going to take, from the initial idea to his first customers in a series of closed workshops. The small teams that we have planned will enable direct conversations and peer learning like no other format can.

Exciting, yes?

Let’s dive into the program then.

Entrepreneurship is a 7 year ‘bitch’

As a product entrepreneur, are you scared? At the end of this session, Pallav wants you to be. There are so many things that can go wrong in an entrepreneurial journey that starts off looking like a dream. The people who have been there, done that, will be talking to you about what they had to go through before they got to where they are. This is the session when you will be forced to think about what you have gotten yourself into. It isn’t going to be easy. You have to be strong if you want to weather the 7 year ‘bitch’.

Picking your battles

Are you building a product because you can or because you should? Is there a market for it? How do you know? Have you tested it? How have you tested it? What are your strengths that makes you believe you can win this battle? Get ready for a maelstrom of questions. Pallav and co. are going to help you chose the battlefield you are going to fight in. This is important, and you know how important it is. You should be the Indian Army fighting in Kargil, knowing that you have the upper hand. You shouldn’t be the US Army in Vietnam, fighting in a terrain you don’t know against an enemy you don’t understand.

Customer Development through design thinking

In the business of designing, building and selling products, the customer is sometimes left in the lurch. As Pallav says, you should be asking the customer what he wants to eat, and then try to give it to him. You shouldn’t be asking him if he wants Hyderabadi Biryani, for instance. Talking to the customer will give you more ammunition than you can ever use. But you should know how to do that, what signals to watch out for, and how to use the information you have gleaned. This session plans to make you masters at this.

Experiments never killed anybody

How do you know what is going to work when you are designing a product mockup, or when you are doing usability testing, or when you are testing a new kind of email form, or when you are booking an expensive ads in a magazine, or perhaps composing a quirky email communication to send out? You don’t. And that is why you do as many things as you can, and choose the best, which you replicate and optimize. But again, how do you do that? What are the tools, the processes to do this? This session is aimed at making you the greatest judge of such experiments.

Shameless is the new sexy

This is the session that is going to put all the disparate pieces of the puzzle together. Now that you have done all you can – you have designed a product for the market, you have studied customers, you have positioned your offering perfectly, and it’s time for you to go after the first customers, you need to remember something, a principle of sorts. Shameless is the new sexy. In short, no customer is going to come use your product because you have something special to give them – if it isn’t broken; they are not going to fix it. You are going to have to convince them. And for that, you are going to have to be shameless. Shameless really is the new sexy. And yes, this is the session I’m most looking forward to.

I think this is more than enough to get you excited for what we are trying to put together. More information will be forthcoming right here, and if you have any questions, remember the hashtag #PNCamp.

If you haven’t applied yet for #PNCamp, you can do so here

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MyParichay – Find jobs by leveraging your network

MyParichay is India’s Largest job search and career network on Facebook. The company consists of a dedicated group of successful entrepreneurs, HR professionals, and computer scientists that want to capture the spirit behind a Parichay (an introduction) from a known person to transform how people achieve their career potential and companies find the best quality talent. The company’s technology prowess and deep understanding of the industry have encouraged several corporates including Genpact, 24X7, IBM, PWC, Grollier, Airbus, EXL Services, Cognizant, Yahoo India and Convergys to adopt MyParichay solutions. MyParichay has two product lines; one a social job board for job seekers, which is an internet consumer product and the other a set of social recruiting management products viz. Employee Parichay and Company Parichay for employers and recruiters. Here we focus on the social job board for job seekers, their B2C product.

The Company

Every job seeker knows that it is much easier to get an interview call when your resume has been referred (or at least forwarded) by an employee of the company, than if you post it through regular job boards or company’s website. However, it is not always easy to find out who amongst your friends and acquaintances can help refer you within the company. Most people still rely on regular channels of job search, which continue to yield poor results.

MyParichay (like other companies in this space) intends to solve this problem of discovery by allowing job seekers to discover their connections (Facebook and LinkedIn for now) within the companies where they see a relevant job opening, and allows them to request them to refer their resume.

It is a social recruitment platform that believes in the power of a ‘Parichay’ – the Sanskrit term for introduction. It was established in 2012 and is co-founded by Ranjan Sinha and Vivek Sinha.

Considering that 6 out of 10 job seekers are only on Facebook and that according to a study by ERE.net, chances of finding a friend increases by 54X when applied through a friend, MyParichay brings the power of social network to Job seekers. Their target segment is 21-30 yrs. which spends a lot of time on Facebook and uses Facebook as both a personal and professional network. They offer a job board for job seekers larger than Naukri and Monster combined! Their job seekers app is in Facebook’s Top 10 business app.

The Product

MyParichay allows their users to sign-in using Facebook (the only sign-in option) and look for jobs in companies, hence acting like a regular job board with a large number of job openings posted. You can add your Linkedin network to your MyParichay account to leverage your connections on LinkedIn. Every job search result is tagged with a list of people from your network who are connected with this company and can potentially refer you. The site then allows the user to apply to these companies by requesting their friends to refer them, thereby increasing the chances of an interview call significantly.

(All pictures and names have been blacked out in screenshots below for privacy reasons)

myparichay1myparichay2myparichay3myparichay4Technology

Their proprietary ConnectedJobs technology is built on a combination of Java, Python, and various Open Source projects. They use a combination of NoSQL and SQL data stores and use AWS. Their website is Android and iPhone friendly today and they will continue to invest in improving the website experience on handheld devices. They are also planning to bring to market a native android app that leverage key capabilities of mobile devices, such as OTT messaging and geo location, to deliver a unique social experience within the career enhancement context.

Differentiators

Their biggest differentiator is the size of the job pool that they have, and which continues to grow. They have tie-ups with various other job boards and thereby act as an aggregator of various jobs out there. They also have tie-ups with various large companies, which allow them early access to the jobs.  They continue to sign job board partnerships around the world and will announce three significant partnerships this quarter; they are also building their own job crawler.

Another advantage of social recruitment solutions like MyParichay is that by using social networks, they provide transparency whereby both job seeker and employer can learn more about each other, much before serious discussions have started. With its B2B solution, MyParichay closes the loop on referrals by both making it easy to refer (for employees) as well as making it easy for companies to track these referrals using MyParichay’s system.

Market

While job portals proliferate in India, hiring good talent remains a tough problem for organizations. Referral continues to remain best channel for good hires, but referrals account for a very small % of total available profiles. Hence it is not surprise that recruiting through social media (and hence job search through this channel) is a hot area, and MyParichay is positioned well. They have signed up some marquee clients and continue to do well in that area. They have 24M+ profiles in their database and continue to sign-up 12000 profiles a day (more than Naukri’s 11,000 a day). This demonstrates the traction they have in the market.

Among their competitors in Social Recruitment space, Career Sonar is best known, with very comparable offering. In addition, traditional job boards are their competitors, as well as their potential partners. Ranjan Sinha, Co-Founder, says, “Apply Button is our competitor, not the job portals.” They recently signed up a deal with Shine.com (HT Media has a stake in myParichay) to allow social bar on Shine.com site, essentially replacing ‘Apply’ with “MyParichay Apply”.

The Road Ahead

Recruitment has always been a social process. Good companies and roles are found by word-of-mouth, good hires are found through referrals and from passive pool of candidates (who are not looking for jobs). Interview process is more about knowing each other and liking each other than comprehensive evaluation of capabilities (which is anyway impossible to do in the short interview window). Job boards traditionally have made it a transactional activity where recruitment has primarily become a resume collection program. Social recruitment tools offer a much needed push towards making hiring social again.

MyParichay is uniquely placed in this space with a product that has excellent traction in the market and which offers some very good capabilities. Here are a few areas that they will do well to focus on as they go forward in this space:

  1. User Experience: Experience of their web site is decent but need to be at par with other consumer products their target segment is used to – it looks more web-like and less app-like.
  2. Relevancy of connections: Currently, I need to choose who do I go through if I have more than one connection who can refer me to a job. Clearly, with more data at their disposal, myParichay is (or should be) in a better position to recommend the person I should go with to have the best results. This will make the process more effective and seamless for the job seekers.
  3. Job Search vs. Recommendation: Job Search is going to be obsolete concept, given that many roles names and job definitions continue to evolve rapidly to fit a globalized world’s new requirements. Given that myParichay knows my profile details, it should be able to recommend jobs for me based on elements of my profile and my online behavior.

MyParichay is in a growing segment and has carved out a good position for itself, and they seem to be on track for a fast growth. Future seems very bright for them.

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What India needs is a bootcamp for existing Product folks

PNSummit just pivoted. But only in name. And it was to reflect the true nature of what this first-ever bootcamp for product folks is all about.

Many ProductNation friends asked why it was called a Summit because…  hey, it is not a conference. Its more intense than a conference and much more meaningful for a product startup. This led to the pivot and thus was born #PNCamp – the bootcamp for product entrepreneurs by iSPIRT, cooked in the ProductNation kitchen.

With the new name we wanted to share with you new insights into #PNCamp…

There’s 4 Masala packed sessions on the Discovery Hacking day (Dec 4) for young startups. You’ll stay with the same group of 20-25 folks all day, across all sessions and get to know and help each other in depth. Now does that sound interesting?

Selling in India and selling to the world – baked oven fresh for you and served on the Scale Hacking Day (Dec 5). There are group sessions and in between several informal sessions or ‘quick bites’.  The groups sessions are the “a la carte” for a software startup – conceptualized and cooked with your taste in mind.

There’s food for B2C folks and B2B folks. For 1 year old Startups. And for 3 year olds. All slow cooked the way it should be. Hand curated sessions, every single one. This is what the volunteers are doing, and being product folks themselves they understand this intricately.

Does all this talk about food make you hungry for more?

  • See the Slideshare deck below for a more detailed overview of #PNCamp
  • Attend a PNCamp Q&A webinar and meet one of our volunteers online – click here
  • Directly apply for PNCamp here.

Wait, there’s more… the icing on the cake at #PNCamp awaits. That icing is the hand curated peer group we’re creating for you and one that you’d love to work with during the #PNCamp, and even after.

P.S. : you can choose which of the days (Discovery Hacking OR Scale Hacking) is suitable for you, depending the stage you are and the traction at your Startup. We kind of want to ensure that the folks in your room have similar stage of challenges as you do. So some filtering will happen. It’s for the common good so we’re sure you won’t mind. The volunteers are product folks like you, putting in a lot of effort to make this vision a reality.

 

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Agility Flexibility For Software Product

[ There is an interesting discussion in ProductNation on Customizable Product : An oxymoron which triggered me to write this post]

I find many people use these words interchangeably. However the distinction is important and source of value. Agility can be engineered with proven techniques and best practices. With advancement in software engineering there is convergence on the tools and techniques to achieve agility and it may no longer be a source of differentiation but a necessary feature. Flexibility on the other hand requires deep insight into diverse needs and types of usage and done imaginatively can provide great value to users and be a source of competitive advantage.

The online Merriam-Webster     dictionary offers the following definitions:

Flexible: characterized by a ready capability to adapt  to new, different, or changing requirements.

Agile: marked by ready ability to move with quick easy  grace.

In Software product context it may be more appropriate to define agility as the ability to change things quickly and Flexibility as the ability to achieve a (higher) goal by different means. So ability to value Inventory by different methods like FIFO or LIFO or Standard cost is flexibility. The ability to change commission rate or sales tax rate quickly (generally by changing a parameter in a table of a file and avoiding need to make code changes) is agility.

There is a range or scale ( 1 ..10)  of agility. Making changes in code esp 3rd generation languages like Java, C# is the baseline. Using a scripting language like Javascript , Python may be less demanding then compiled language but it is still not as agile as most users expect. Most users would rate it simpler to update a parameter in a file or a simple user interface like a Excel type spreadsheet as simpler and faster. Changing logic by using a If-Then type of rule base is in-between. Simpler then coding but more complex then table updates.

You should have picked up some inter-related themes here. Complexity or need for skill in making changes to a scripting or Rule engine . Need for easy to use interface to make the changes. Need for relatively easy and error free method of making changes. If you need to update ten parameters in ten different places or change 17 rules in a  If-Then rule base it may not be as simple and is less agile .

Most modern Software products are fairly agile with scripting, table based parameters and rule driven execution engine. The use of style sheets in generating personalized User interface, specialized components like Workflow or process management engines etc also provide agility.

Flexibility is a different beast. Layered architectures and specialized components for workflow, rule execution and User experience can make it easier to accommodate different ways to do the same things. They make it easier to make the necessary changes but they do not provide flexibility as such. End users do not value the potential flexibility of architecture but the delivered functionality. This is a major problem. Even Analysts from Gartner , Forrester do not have a good way to measure flexibility and use proxy measures like number of installations or types of users ( Life Insurers and Health Insurers or Make to order or Make to Stock business).

Flexibility is derived from matching the application model to the business model and then generalizing the model. I will illustrate with a concrete example. Most business applications have the concept of person acting as a user ( operator) or manager authorizing a transaction. So a clerk may enter a sales refund transaction and a supervisor may need to log in to authorize this refund. The simplest ( and not so flexibly) way to implement this is to define the  user as clerk or supervisor. A more sophisticated model would be to introduce the concept of role. A user may play the role of clerk in a certain transaction and a supervisor in another.  Certain roles can authorize certain types of transactions with certain financial limits. So user BBB can approve sales refund up to 100,000 INR as a supervisor. However BBB as manager of a section can initiate a request for additional budget for his section. In this BBB is acting as a clerk and DDD the General Manager who approves the budget extension request is acting as a supervisor. This model is inherently more flexible. It is also not easy to retrofit this feature by making changes to parameters or If-Then rules. If the Application does not model the concept of Role all the agility in the product is of little use. Greater flexibility can be produced by generalizing the concept of user to software programs. So in certain high volume business a “power user” can run a program which can automatically approve a class of transaction under certain set of control parameters. This “virtual user” is recorded as the approver on the transaction. The application keeps a trail of actual control parameters and power user who ran this “batch”.

Flexibility comes from a good understanding into user’s context and insight into their underlying or strategic intent. Business and users will vary the tactic used to meet their intent based on context. Consider a simplistic example to illustrate. I need to urgently communicate some news to a business partner. I try calling his cell but to no use. I would send a SMS ( India) but if a US contact ( who are not as yet fans of SMS or Text) leave a voice message on his phone or send a email. A Smartphone that allows me to type a message and send as SMS or email is more flexible then one where I have to separately write the email or the SMS.

Frequently Software designers and Architects generalize all types of changes as extensions. They are not interested in understanding intent and context of usage and want a horizontal generic solution to all changes. This leads to overly abstract design with extension mechanisms to change logic, screens and database and reports. In essence to develop a 4th generation programming environment or Rapid Application Development Environment (RAD) . These help by making programming easier and faster but are no substitute for understanding user’s context and designing the application architecture to match and exploit them.

Users relate to a product which speaks their language and seems to understand them. They also get excited and impressed when they see new ways of doing their business and improving their revenue, reducing cost and improving customer satisfaction. Most managers want to make changes incrementally. So ability to “pilot” changes to a smaller segment of users, customers and products while continuing in traditional way with the larger base is of great value. That is ultimate flexibility.

Flexibility is not a mélange of features haphazardly put together.  I have seen many service companies developing “Flexible Product” by adding every feature they can see in other offerings. Invariably this leads to a mythical creature which does not work. If you put a Formula 1 Race engine in a Range Rover chassis with a Nano steering  and Maruti wheels you have a car which does not drive!! A Formula 1 car is intended for maximum speed and acceleration that is safe while a goods carrying vehicle is intended for maximum load carrying with optimum cost of fuel usage .

Delivering Flexibility requires heavy lifting in developing a good understanding of user’s domain, their intent and context. It adds value by simplifying the feature set and matching users intent and context.. If we can use our imagination and understanding of technology trends and capability to provide more then users have visualized we can lead them to newer ways. Leadership is an important way to differentiate your product. Invest in doing this and reap benefits.

Guest Post by Arvind Tiwary

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Customer discovery meets Indiana Jones at #PNSummit

If you haven’t made up your mind whether you should be at PNSummit, then you’re probably thinking too hard.

It’s not a Conference.

It’s not a Conference.

Yes, I said that twice.

It’s brought to you by iSPIRT ProductNation. And a team of selfless volunteers who want to give back. These guys have regular companies to run. And day jobs. Putting together #PNSummit is back breaking work. But they enjoy it. Ask anyone of them if you think this is hyperbole.

Product companies at different stages have different needs. #PNSummit is styled like a bootcamp. Only, it focuses on the underserved entrepreneur. Is that you? If you’re between 9 months to 18 months old you’re probably searching for a lot of answers. But we don’t have any. All we have is a method. It’s a secret sauce that’s going to be revealed at #PNSummit Customer Discovery Hacking Day on December 4th. This sauce is cooked by Pallav and his team of cohort leaders who will take you through an entire day of… ok let me stop here.

I don’t want to spoil the fun. Not yet. This is for believers. We’re not taking in everyone who applies. It’s selective, based on your current profile. Even if you don’t make it, you’re probably very good at your trade so we’re not being a judge here. Our goal is to have similar minded people in the room, who want to learn and are eager to share. In many ways Discovery Hacking is also about discovering yourself. It’s like Indiana Jones, who never fails to surprise even himself.

Meet us in Pune this December. Only a 100 will make it, so think later, act now. You can apply here.

Sandeep Todi

Co-founder of a software product and a #PNSummit Volunteer

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100 minds – 8 mins with each.

In simple maths, every one of the 100 who saw the videos, was kept engaged for at least 8 minutes. Assuming they didn’t see all of the videos – a sales guy was around to continue conversations.

Humans have recently surpassed the attention span of a goldfish. And you thought keeping a goldfish engaged was easy….

Knowcross sells a service automation and management software to Hotels. It’s called Triton. Some of the world’s reputed hotels are their customers. For good reason – the tool is just remarkable to see at work.

Recently they attended HiTec – world’s largest and most expansive hospitality technology event.

“We were one of the last to book our space and we missed the best spots on the floor. Even with that, we managed to get about 200 people to the booth in 3 days. And about half of them we kept engaged through a touchscreen that played the 8 videos.”

Neha Singh | Senior Manager Marketing at Triton

 

Here are the 8 videos in their glory.

Triton EngineeringTriton MobileTriton SupervisorTriton Attendant

 

 

 

Content is one of those things a marketer has to spend money on. The pursuit, however – is to find the highest ROI from content. 

Here are 3 things that made their conference content investment a high return exercise:

1. Spray it. Don’t just say it.

Pepper your audience with multiple small bite sized information.

When you are expecting guests – as in a trade show particularly – try to put up more than a single piece of information.

So 100 brochures is great. But a choice between 20 each of 5 types of brochures – is a better idea. Within the first audience set (5 – 10 people), you’d know which brochures to send the mascot with.

“The 37 inch touchscreen had an application running. So after they see one video, they’d be presented with another one, and then another. This allowed us to comprehensively cover the product and its propositions without them getting bored with one long video. ”

– Neha Singh. senior Manager Marketing at Triton.

2. Address different causes.

If you can solve my problem – tell me how much you’ll charge. You’ve got 8 seconds. Go.

So Engineering has its own problems. Housekeeping has its own problems. The management has its own problems. And individuals within these units – have their own problems.

For Engineering – they made a different story – connected to the engineering’s cause. See this.
For Housekeeping – they made a different story – connected to the housekeeping’s cause. See this.
And for Senior Management – they made a more overarching story – connected to the business’ cause. See this.

So if Joe the CEO wanted to check with Bob the CTO – they would both just huddle at the booth. There’s a bunch of smartie pants ready to answer questions.

Instant gratification as many cultures call it.

3. Consistent and simple visuals

We eat with our eyes – as taught in culinary schools. That’s why plating is important.

Did your eyes catch the variation in the color RED above ?

In their case, the characters were simple with little detailing. So there was no distraction. And the colors and icons are consistent.

See the image to the left – there are 3 slides one below the other.

Did your eyes catch the slight change in color?

Imagine how distracted you’d get if the characters, scenes, music, or even narrator’s voice changed on each video. 

They got this done from a single creative team. A set of minds that didn’t change during the production process. This ensured visuals and audio and the look n feel and the sounds and voices – were all synchronized. Everything looks and sounds in sync.

Its like Ballet.

So the costumes were same colors. The characters were similar. The situations and icons were similar. Think different episodes of a television series.

If you have dabbled in Video marketing, what kind of results have you got from your initiatives? I would love to hear your thoughts.