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Emotionalizing the software products… uh…what?

I recently delivered a workshop on building winning products. The audience identified that it was important the customers loved a product in order for it to be a winner. It also came up that consumers increasingly want to buy things that thrill and delight in addition to simply doing what they were designed to do. Today, things around us from Gillette razors to Apple devices exude desirability and emotionally engage consumers. People look at their possessions as a means to provide them self-expression and extend their personality. They also crave for great experience in the journey of whatever problem they are trying to solve. They find the mere discreet functions and features unexciting.

The new focus on emotional experience is consistent with the psychological research that confirms that people value emotional experiences more than even the product functionality. Statements like this from users, “there is shortcoming in my iPhone, but still I love it”, are commonly heard now-a-days. Indeed, “Form follows function” has given was to the more emotion led approach to design: “Feeling follows form.”

Why build emotional connect

Technology people live in a rational world and they think the rest of the world too. This is however, far from truth. Emotions drive peoples’ attitudes and behaviors. Rational thought can lead customers to being interested in the product and be happy with tangible gains from its functionality. However, it is emotions that drive customers’ desire to own the product, pay any premium and recommend it to their friends. Emotional engagement promotes loyalty and revenue growth thru word-of-mouth. There is a proven ROI in emotionalizing software.

How does this impact software? Well the software is becoming an ever growing component of the plethora of devices and services that proliferate around at home, workplace and other places. This means software has enormous possibilities for creating emotional experiences for the consumers. It makes it imperative that software developers fulfill this consumer expectation.

How to build emotional connect and satisfaction

People think about and experience life through a set of deep rooted metaphors. The metaphors help them make sense of the plethora of experiences through these metaphoric lenses.  Emotional experiences happen thru the five senses – vision, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Software products and services are abstract in nature. Unlike other products (devices, autos, homes etc.) they can mostly leverage only vision and hearing for the emotional experience.

Keeping the challenges in mind, here is a set of steps that the author found useful in this endeavor.

  1. Develop customer empathy to gain deeper understanding of the customer, their needs, wants, deep desires and values.
  2. Understand that people respond to feelings, remember stories, and take actions based on deep rooted metaphors. Therefore
    1. Identify metaphors people live by. Metaphors vary by culture. Metaphors change with time.
    2. Use metaphors to create the symbols, icons, colors, texts, workflows etc.in interaction design.
    3. Use storytelling techniques in internal and external product communication like product vision, requirements, specifications, prototypes, press releases, product positioning statements, tag lines, advertisements and documentation.
    4. Keep customers and their pain points and value props alive thru the product development where daily engineering and feature decisions can easily lead to overlooking who the customers were and what they wanted.
    5. During product development
      1. Personify user / customer during software development. Use personas.
      2. Build not features but complete scenarios of customer problem solving.
      3. While making engineering / business decisions constantly ask – will that persona like the change? Does the decision breaks down any end-to-end scenario?
      4. Post product development
        1. Create emotional connect at every touch point like sales transaction, support and upgrades.

We shall delve deeper into each of these steps in forthcoming blogs.

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Quick Research / Usability Methods: Lean Usability Testing

(Post 3 of a series on quick research and usability techniques. Start-up’s can use these techniques fairly easily to connect to and understand their end users better, as well as maintain usability standards on their products.)

Previous posts in this series showcased two discount usability engineering methods – ‘Expert Usability Review‘ and ‘Heuristic Evaluation’. Both these methods are ‘expert based’ – i.e. an interface is reviewed by design or usability experts vs. getting feedback from end users – and are used to identify usability issues on an interface.

Post 3 introduces lean Usability Testing – A ‘guerrilla’ version of traditional Usability Testing.

Before discussing the how’s and why’s of ‘lean’ testing, here are a few basic points to better understand Usability Testing and why it’s important in context to start up’s.

USABILITY TESTING BASICS

Usability Testing (UT) is a research method used to gain insight into product usability.
It is a time bound ‘show and tell’ method where a moderator asks representative users to use and/or talk about the product being evaluated, in context to key task scenarios.
A basic test typically starts with open ended ‘interview style’ questions, followed by a longer scenario based ‘show and tell’ session and ends with a debriefing session.

Usability Testing can be conducted at various points of the product development lifecycle.
Although there are several types of usability tests and techniques that can be used, testing can be broadly classified into ‘Formative’ and ‘Summative’ Testing.

Formative Testing can be conducted at any stage of development. (Initial paper prototype / high fidelity prototype / even post release)
The objective is to aid iterative design. Formative Testing is typically qualitative in nature and the goal is to find specific pain points and highlight areas of improvement.

Summative Testing is done only with designs that are complete or near completion.
The objective is usually to judge the design against quantitative metrics (like efficiency or productivity) or against competitive products.

Find out more about Usability Testing and how you can plan for and conduct a test, at Usability.gov.

Steve Krug’s demo video is also a good starting point to get started with Usability Testing.

Demo Usability Test

 

 

 

 

 

 

WHY TESTING IS IMPORTANT: THE MALCOVICH BIAS

The Malcovich Bias

The UT method is particularly relevant to start ups, where the environment is characteristically ‘inspired’ and ‘driven’ by a shared product vision.
In order to pull in the best talent and sustain momentum, start-up leaders ‘sell’ their product to themselves, to their investors and to their employees.

While this can energize teams and enhance productivity, it also fuels the ‘Malcovich Bias’.
(‘The assumption that ‘target users’ use things / see things / care about the same things that the ‘product / design team’ does.’)

In a high-pressure, super charged start up environment, it is easy to become ‘product / vision focussed’ rather than focussed on the people who are ultimately going to use the product.

Usability Testing puts start up teams in touch with their end users and their reactions to the product that is being built.

And seeing people struggle with what seemed standard or obvious reinforces the fact that assumptions made about the product or its features may be very different from the way users actually perceive or experience it.

LEAN USABILITY TESTING

That said, traditional Usability Testing can be difficult to incorporate into tight budgets and product timelines. However, several specific elements add to the cost, duration and complexity of testing, and can be substituted with lightweight alternatives that help make ‘Usability Testing’ leaner.

Lean Usability Testing is easier to fit in because it is cheaper and can be done more quickly than traditional testing. And more so in context to Agile Software Development – where a key practice is quick and incremental development.

For example, did you know that testing in a professional facility can add to the cost, but is usually not a ‘must have’?
At a basic level, a test can be conducted very effectively in any room that is quiet and available for use without interruption.

Other (cost effective) alternatives to a professional / formal testing space include:

  1. Remote (Moderated) Usability Testing
    Remote Testing follows the same objectives and a similar process to traditional ‘lab’ usability testing. The obvious difference is that the moderator and the user are in two different locations. (e.g. The moderator in his office / the user in his office or home)
    However, with good screen sharing and screen recording software, usability testing can be conducted easily and effectively with a remote participant. Besides saving costs related to renting or setting up a formal testing space, remote testing reduces the costs of accessing geographically dispersed target users.

    screen sharing software

    Recommended screen sharing software – WebEx, Adobe Connect, Skype, GoToMeeting

    screen recording software

    Tech Smith’s Camtasia Recorder is an easy-to-use tool that can be used to capture remote testing sessions for later reference and analysis.

  2. Guerrilla Testing: This is an impromptu method and therefore should not be tightly scripted or planned. The distinguishing characteristic of this method is its spontaneity.

    The method essentially involves:
    … taking your product to a public space
    … identifying and recruiting people who are interested / fit a broad profile from among a pool of strangers
    … conducting the test right after

    If your product is generic or targeting a wide audience, you can conduct guerrilla testing on the street / in a coffee shop / at a conference;
    For niche or specifically targeted products, a more specific space that is likely to be populated by your target users would work best. (Like outside a college for an educational product, or inside a mall for a product related to shopping.)

    Besides cost and time saving, Remote Testing and Guerrilla Testing are good DIY research options for start-ups who want to get end user feedback.
    They are easier to plan and organize than traditional usability tests. Several of the challenges related to scheduling and set up in traditional testing are no longer applicable here.

    Remote Testing

    Find out more about how you can set up and conduct a Remote Test at Usability.gov, Quick and Dirty Remote User Testing (A List Apart)More about Guerrilla Testing at – UX Booth

  3. In-Context Testing
    In this case, the researcher pre-recruits participants, and then schedules and conducts tests in the context they would typically use the product – rather than having participants come in to a formal testing venue.Testing in the participants natural context of product usage not only cuts costs associated with a formal facility, but adds richness to the test. Contextual influencers that would otherwise be invisible to the researcher now become added inputs to the research.

Coming up soon – How to be leaner in participant recruiting, selection of testing equipment / software, reporting and more…

Post 4 will discuss multiple additional ways in which start up’s can conduct a Usability Test at leaner costs and timelines.

Are you a design thinker evangelizing or facilitating user research and usability methods within your start-up?
We would love to hear about your experience / answer any questions that you have about the research and usability methods you use.

We invite members of the start-up community to volunteer their screens / functions for use as examples in upcoming posts showcasing additional research techniques.
Email me at devika(at)anagramresearch.com to check whether your screen is eligible for selection. 

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First B2B Bootcamp for product startups – last day to apply

The last date to apply for this bootcamp has been extended to 16th August especially for Product Nation subscribers.

TiE-IQ Bootcamp is a no contract and free  60-day bootcamp where the participating startups will have an opportunity to create products, launch companies and walk away with their spoils and a lot of learning.

This first edition of the TiE-IQ Bootcamp is restricted to B2B technology product startups. It builds up on the successful bootcamp conducted by IQ earlier this year. Selected startups will walk in to the TiE-IQ Bootcamp with just a minimum viable product (MVP) and take back the following :

  1. Mentorship and Workshops by entrepreneurs leading successful startups to help you.
    • Refine and finish the minimal viable product (MVP) into a ready to buy product
    • Market your product
    • Get the first few customers
  2. Peer Learning
    • Learn from some of the best startup brains developing B2B products alongside.
  3. Working Space for two months in the heart of Mumbai.
  4. Software credits with some of the bootcamp partners
  5. Interaction with some of the best brains in the venture investment world.
  6. Demo Day: Your chance to pitch to investors in Mumbai  (and Bangalore – to be confirmed)

Who should Apply?

  • Enterprising (co-)founders and technology enthusiasts who want to build disruptive technology products or services for the Indian or global market.
  • Teams with 2-3 members that are capable to design, code and release a beta version of their product to market & sell it.

How to Apply?

To apply, visit this page for more details on eligibility criteria, and how to apply. The last date is extended to 16th August exclusively for Product Nation subscribers. For updates follow the twitter hashtag #TieBootCamp.

 

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120+ companies in 120 days – Come join the movement to revolutionize India’s Software Product Landscape

iSPIRT’s roundtables create a buzz in the Indian software product community. Shehjar Tikoo doesn’t like conferences and seminars. The entrepreneur of e-commerce enabler Unbxd finds them boring and one sided. But all that changed when he attended the iSPIRT roundtable on Product Management in Bangalore. Says Shehjar, “I liked the fact that the audience was very carefully chosen as were the facilitators. The discussion was very healthy and I came away with some great learning. In fact, I still refer to my notes and each time it has something new to say to me.”

iSPIRT is known for bucking the trend. At the heart of the iSPIRT movement is the spirit of democracy. So just like decisions are made collectively and jointly, roundtables are whiteboarded and collaborative. It’s a joint learning exercise for both facilitators (note they are not speakers) and participants (not delegates).

Says Aneesh Reddy, Capillary Technologies, “It took couple of calls to talk about the challenges of product companies and the team defined three problem areas  – Product Management, Sales & Positioning & Messaging. The format was very clear in the minds of everyone – peer learning where founders come and do a deep dive, the objective was to create a cancer survivor network model for product start-ups.”

The first playbook Roundtable went on for around 260 minutes and attendees spent another 30 minutes outside the office networking.

“Round tables are a great way for teams, entrepreneurs to cross learn about the best things that worked in their scenarios and some of it can be implemented and experimented by other startups too, cross learning from startups is essential for this ecosystem to build and am glad iSPIRT round tables do exactly that.”, said Vijay Sharma of Exotel.

Since the first program on April 4, iSPIRT  has covered more than 120+ product companies (up to August 3). While the impact of the programs is slowly percolating the software product initiatives of different companies, what has proven an instantaneous hit is the format of community learning – for founders, by founders – little wonder it’s called a [Playbook] roundtable!

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The Virtual Medical Assistant – Practo.com – a cloud based service that covers over 8,000 doctors…

“Why isn’t there a place where we can store all our medical information?” is the question that bugged Shashank ND, Founder of Practo.com. Jamming together with a classmate from NITK Surathkal, they found a solution and founded Practo.com – a cloud based service that covers over 8,000 doctors and manages the records of nearly 3 million patients. 

Shashank, I was looking at your website and I was intrigued by the fact that you actually started this business because of a personal experience. Do give us an insight into how you started?

My father was to have a knee operation, and we had visited a couple of hospitals where we had some tests done and got some reports. The doctor advised based on the reports that my father required surgery. Now obviously I was concerned and we wanted to take a second opinion and have these records shown to a doctor in the US. It turned out to be a quite a clumsy and cumbersome affair. I had to take a photograph with my camera then transfer it online and then the doctor in the US responded to us asking for more information and then it suddenly struck me, if all the information was available in a secure repository that could be accessed easily 24/7 we wouldn’t have so much back and forth and delays.

But I wanted to double check things so the next time I visited my ophthalmologist I asked him to give me the prescription on email so I could keep a digital record of it. He told me that the system he used was 10 years old and didn’t support this functionality. He went on to say, if someone can give me a system like this I will gladly use it. So my imagination started running wild and I thought of a system where all our personal health records could be available digitally.

Fundamentally, we have a Facebook where we keep all our personal information, we have a LinkedIn where we keep all our professional information, I just wondered why there isn’t a place where we can store all our medical information. If you really look at it, doctors need records because they become more efficient in servicing patents. Patients are keen on information digitally stored because they don’t have the hassle of storing stuff physically as it is also subject to wear and tear. The problem was really the intermediary software and that’s the gap we stepped in to fill.

Did you have to invest a lot of time in educating the doctors on how to use the software or what potential benefits they would get? 

Honestly, the first few we didn’t have to, because they proactively told us that they need it, so it was more about convincing ourselves to quote for the software. All the doctors who came to us already had the problem, so they were contacting us to build the software, rather than us convincing them about buying it. But after the first few, we had to really sell the proposition to the other doctor’s.

So what’s the revenue model, you charge the doctors to use this or the patients, how does it work?

No, we charge the doctors. We give the software to the doctors and doctors pay us on an annual basis. Now what does the software do for the doctors, it helps them with four main things, one- it helps the doctors in scheduling, so all the appointments, reminders to the patients about their appointments are done through our software, it basically ensures that without any manual information the patients are reminded about their appointments and the patients visit the clinic on schedule. So the dropout rate because of being misinformed or not informed comes down drastically.

The second thing is EMR or Electronic Medical Records, just like my father’s report or my eye prescription. We allow the doctors to maintain all the digital records on an account of the patients. Now this information can be inscribed, a prescription, printout, and every type of medical information that can be stored about the patient.

The third thing is billing, so doctors who are doing billing manually or on MS Word or any other intermediary software can now do it on ours.

Finally we have built a functionality to generate reports; reports allow the doctors to keep the history of patients. So for example the doctor will come to know how many new patients they have seen in a month, such data could never be accessed earlier by a and we allow the doctors to see how many patients they have examined, the money they have paid, how much has been expensed, what is the profit for the month.

Shashank, you have a young team. I looked at that photograph on your website; they are all youngsters, average age, probably 25 or so, how do you keep them motivated and charged up to kind of support you in whatever you are doing? 

One of the thing that has worked for us is that even though I started the company, we ensure that everybody feels that this company is theirs by making sure that some part of the responsibility is completely given to them. Take our website for instance, the person who designed it used grey as the background color and frankly I hated the color but it was his design, it was his work, so even though I did not like it I allowed it to continue.

I make sure that each and every creator has ownership, and that’s what keeps them motivated. The other thing we did is to add experienced people to the mix and now we have about 30 people in the company who provide the experience to the team members who are inexperienced so that they can learn a different dimension of the corporate world. This keeps everyone going.

Finally, the idea that we set out with never changed. Whatever we embarked on from day  one continues to stay. This is a very good thing that binds us all together. 

How do you really take care of balancing the expectations of various stakeholders – investors, customers and your own employees… 

That is a great question and obviously it is a tough ask, but I have this pyramid of priorities that I have created in my life. Whenever a major decision is taken, I have a mental image of the pyramid. At the top of the pyramid is the company vision. The second block pertains to the needs of the customer; the third relates to my employees, fourth is the investor and fifth is me. So I ensure that any decision that I have to take, it is a combination of these priorities.

So where does this go from here? Are you looking at international market, what is your vision, what is your roadmap for the future? 

Our approach is very clear – we want to enhance the patient’s experience of healthcare. We also want to help doctors to be more effective in doing several things – working in their clinic, treating patients and learning new things among others. So with two fundamental principles of helping the patient and helping the doctor, we believe we can concentrate on healthcare for all of us. Implementing the solution in India certainly is a focus but there is no reason why it cannot be scaled and implemented overseas so we have set up base in Singapore and already gained a customer there.

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Data and User Experience: Two ends of the spectrum

Every product that you build has to be used by people.

This is irrespective of “who may pay for the product“. This is an often brought up topic of “User vs Customer“. And if the product is used only by machines and not by real people, then it’s perhaps best to call it “technology”.

As far as technology products are concerned, a significant factor of differentiation they claim and deliver on is by leveraging data about usage and user behavior. And in a product team, the cycle goes this way:

  • Product Manager thinks up the product (you can assume that in all these steps, others also contribute meaningfully, as product creation is both an intensely cerebral and collaborative exercise)
  • Designer helps visualize the user experience
  • Engineers code it and get it ready for prime time

The plot:

1. Roll out the current version of your product
2. Get users to use your product, engage with it and contribute inputs (read Data)
3. Collect usage and behavior data, analyze it and generate ideas for the future features
4. Design & develop the new features
5. Start from Step 1 again

If you notice, in this iterative and cyclical process, the two constants are Design new features (UX) and Collect more data. While this cycle goes on, imagine the various changes that happen to your company:

• People added/removed
• Infrastructure modified (change offices/locations etc)
• Technologies changed/added
• Investors changed/added
• Markets discovered/validated
• Pivots created/executed/dropped
• And the list can continue

But the core 2 tasks remain: Design UX for your user, Collect Data from your user, both of them aimed to improve their value proposition. This prompts me to call Data & UX as the two ends of the spectrum of building a tech company. It’s very interesting to note that if Data connotes Scale, UX connotes Empathy. To build a successful company, I imagine that one needs both Scale and Empathy and not just one of them.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

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“Social Commerce – Enabling trust and higher conversions in online transactions” – #PNHangout with Vipin Agarwal

In this #PNHangout, we spoke to Vipin Agarwal, who is the co-founder of enMarkit and an ex-VC turned entrepreneur, about his journey in conceptualizing the product, his team, the tools and the product management philosophy and what a typical day in his life looks like!

Give us a brief introduction to what enMarkit does.

Enmarkit comes from a combination of the words: ENabling and MARKETing. We offer product based solutions to merchants who want to start selling online without these merchants spending too much time or money on creating their websites or struggling to deal with outsourcing agencies. We offer simple plug and play solutions to the entire eco-system of companies, SME’s and entrepreneurs using a SaaS model.

We have two live products –

  1. enMarkit FAST (Fast Anywhere Secure Transactions) Payments Solution – helps anyone start receiving payments online instantly. This solution embeds seamlessly on any given website, blog, Facebook page or any social media page.
  2. enMarkit ONE Store – The socially integrated solution that enables anyone to create an online store within a minute. This web-store has payment gateway already integrated at no upfront costs, giving the merchant a ready-to-use storefront that he can start sharing with his clients instantly.

Besides these, we have a couple of products under development that would, we believe, go a long way to revolutionize the online commerce ecosystem even further.

How did you meet your co-founder and how did you bring this concept to life?

As a venture capitalist I was exploring bottlenecks that entrepreneurs and companies faced in the online transaction space and in the midst of trying to find technology enabled solutions that could solve this I had met Ekta, who was the Amazon head for market places in India. It took about 6 months of back and forth conversation with Ekta before we started. Finally we chose to tackle the online transactions space head on.

We took inspiration from the user behaviour when a person shops for something from a mom-and-pop store. We realised that the entire product discovery, transaction conclusion and post-transaction behaviour of a person in real world is not reflected in the current transaction models of websites today. Buying is inherently a social phenomenon – and yet Social Commerce has distinctly been untouched in all e-commerce business models today.

It is very common to find founders juggling multiple roles in the early stages. What role do you play when it comes to product management?

In my current role I interact with multiple teams and different kinds of customers to bring our product to life. Although I do not have a background in coding, I do have a very strong opinion of the product features that come over from the use case scenarios laid out by interacting with our customers.

With feature additions we constantly communicate with the registered merchants on our platform to get an idea of what their requirements maybe. We usually break our customer demands into two buckets, soft and hard. Soft requirements are minor changes which can be made in our user interface, which improve the user experience and aesthetics of the product. With hard requirements, that are more complex and require a larger change in the product itself, we consult with the front end and back end teams to ensure the changes roll out smoothly, these could be issues such as improving load times, etc.

It’s interesting to note that some of the biggest critics we have for the product are the internal team-members! Pitching an idea and getting a go ahead is one of the biggest hurdles our product has to cross even before we even start the test marketing campaigns. The benchmarks set by our team are very high and that reflects in our products as well.

When did you know enMarkit was a market fit?

I had personally made over 2000 cold calls, talking to merchants and demonstrating a prototype to target customers before going whole hog on product development. Even though our product was in its early stages, we received tons of feedback from our users. Out of the 800-900 people I personally met, almost 70 people had actually committed to using our product after it would be ready. Once we knew that we had their support, this encouraged me to continue building the product further. After adding the social commerce features in our future iterations the market for us grew larger.

From 2012 to 2013, your product must have scaled extensively. How did you ensure the product and teams also scaled the right way?

EnMarkit started off as a social commerce platform which was built with direct contact to our customers. How we ensured continuity and evolution of the product and teams was by not throwing all the features on day 1. We request for a feature, build it, get some feedback and if it does not work as planned, we junk it. It was this type of ladder approach that has allowed us to build our portfolio of products.

What has been your most challenging problem and how did you tackle it?

Our product development philosophy has always been to build, evaluate and either junk or deploy the feature depending on the feedback we receive. Some-times junking the product affects the team morale, as the team may have spent time and energy building it. The solution I’ve found to this is to make the team understand that even though the work was great, the market wasn’t ready a feature like this.

What are some of the tools you use to maintain communication between the tech, design, business and sales teams?

There are various teams that work on various parts of the same problem, so it’s usually my role to maintain these interactions between the teams and keep the teams in synergy. Team management internally is always a challenge.

I keep a Gantt chart with me to keep a track of the timelines of the proposed and actual build times and ensure that is matched by the team. I also ensure that if a task is a road-block for another task, that timelines are maintained so that there isn’t a delay.

Some of the tools I do this with are Trello(for project management) and although very basic we use Google Docs and Excel sheets track progress.

Could you briefly tell us what a typical day for you is like at enMarkit?

Before, I get to work, I usually allocate a little bit of time every morning to catching up on the latest news even before I leave for the office.

After reaching work, I allocate some time every morning for catch up meetings with my team. We evaluate the work we will do today and how the backlog looks like.

Around lunch time, we usually take a little a little longer break of 45 mins. We usually discuss all the industry news between the team.

Post lunch, I usually allocate a couple of hours to talk to our customers.

Towards the end of the day is when I sit with the many teams again, often getting into a detailed conversation of the progress made today.

How do you divide your time between: executing your current tasks b) planning for the future c) emergency

Since it’s just the first year of our product, we do spend a considerable amount of time in firefighting. I usually plan for the future with my co-founder Ekta to evaluate the roadmap of our product and what should be communicated with the rest of the team.

Where Ekta and I help each other out, is that I work as a product manager/salesman with a lot of ideas and demands for feature requests and Ekta is usually adept at giving me an idea of the challenges that we may face in implementing these features, and also the estimated time it may take for the team to do it. By the end of this meeting, we usually end up with a list of tasks in terms of priority that can be handed over to the teams.

Any advice for other product managers?

I think product management philosophies vary from company to company, and I would suggest each product manager to use tools, styles that suit his/her personality. There’s no one mantra that fits all. The longer plan is balancing the requirements of the customers and the capabilities of the team.

Editors Note:

Every member of the product team is important. To succeed, a company must design, build, test and market the product effectively. That said, there is one role that is absolutely crucial to producing a good product, yet it is often the most misunderstood and underutilized of all the roles. This is the role of the product manager. #PNHangout is an ongoing series where we talk to Product Managers from various companies to understand what drives them, the tools they use, the products they work on, how they go about their day and the role they play in defining the products success.

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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The One Feature That Changed Social Networking Forever

What is the single most important innovation that Facebook ever came up with?

Before I answer that, let’s think of the real value for users on a social network. Social networks are a classic example of the platform business model where users create all the value and there is very little value until users come on board. Real value for every individual user, then, is the value that his network is capable of creating.

Most communication and networking products have never truly succeeded in capturing this value on an ongoing basis. E.g. I might be connected to a lot of users on a communication product but I need to be actively engaged in a conversation to benefit from these connections.

This is why the News Feed is Facebook’s most important innovation. It allows users to constantly benefit from the surge of activity in their network neighborhood. It’s a stalker’s delight, a lurker’s guilty pleasure. But the News Feed is the single most important innovation that changed social networking from a user-centric to a network-centric activity.

It changes the use case for an entire product category. Post the News Feed, social networking was no longer about staying connected with a friend or even with a group. For the first time, social networking was about staying connected with one’s entire network.

The move from transaction to engagement

The News Feed represents a leap in the evolution of online communication and networking products. Online communication and networking have traditionally been transactional in nature. Email has always been a transactional product. Chat is transactional as well. We use these products only when we want to engage in an actual exchange (of information) with someone else.

Early social networks were built along the same lines. Imagine the days of Orkut, Bebo and, even, MySpace. Social networking, back then, was an extension of the existing communication models around email and chat. You typically logged on to connect with friends. If you didn’t want to connect with friends, you just never logged on. The dominant use case on these social networks was transactional.

The News Feed changed that! It moved social networking from a transactional use case to an engagement-driven use case.

Engagement products need to provide a minimum guarantee of activity to keep the user engaged. Transaction products, in contrast, need to ensure liquidity and the assurance that the user can complete a transaction conveniently.

If you think of Facebook pre-News-Feed, users used the platform largely to communicate with others. The News Feed shifted value in the platform from mere connections (and communication) to content (and engagement).

First among equals? 

By no means is the news feed the only determiner of engagement on Facebook. The decision to allow developers to build out an app economy on top of Facebook and the creation of social use cases on top of Facebook (most notably gaming and gifting), clearly helped the engagement cause. However, across all initiatives that Facebook ever took, the one that has been most persistent and that eventually took over as the default home screen – the first ‘feature’ that a user is exposed to on every log in – is the news feed.

The representation of the network effect

In traditional social networking, the feature that the user kept returning to was his own profile, with some notifications alerting specific network activity. This is why having the News Feed as the default Home Page is rather important. It changes social networking from a user-centric to a network-centric activity.

The News Feed embodies the very concept of the network effect. It shows that the network effect isn’t simply a function of the number of other nodes you are connected to but also of the nature of the links that connect you with them. A user’s past interaction with other nodes is a great determiner of the strength of ties between nodes. A real world network would have certain ties stronger than others. The news feed captures this and creates a user-centric view of the network.

This is also why I believe Facebook deserves credit for pioneering the news feed. An activity stream or news feed like feature was already present in Twitter, and before that, on Flickr. But these never gave an accurate representation of the network and were at best, mere activity streams aggregating the activity at neighboring nodes. There was no focus on the nature of the link with neighboring nodes. This is where Facebook’s focus on optimizing the news feed algorithm creates a more accurate representation of one’s network than ever before.

A stronger network effect? 

One might argue that the news feed also creates a stronger network effect. With traditional social networks, you could have a few hundred friends but it was arguably the same 10 friends bringing you back to the platform. This meant that losing those 10 friends to another platform could signal the need for you to make the move as well. With the news feed, a stream from a much wider circle of friends constantly hits you. When the central use case shifts from communication with individual friends to interaction with the overall network (via the news feed), it could potentialy make the network more resilient to a situation with reverse network effects.

Beyond social networking

Moreover, this doesn’t apply only to social networks. Any business model which relies on user-generated content can benefit from a well-architected news feed. Even marketplaces, which have traditionally been transactional, are creating engagement with a news feed.

Design principles

The key design consideration is relevance. A news feed should help with personalized discovery. This introduces another tension. Relevance and personalization often tend to reinforce things that we are already interested in. A personalized feed should factor in some form of serendipity to ensure that users do not get increasingly served only those objects that reinforce their preferences. (Designing for serendipity is far from trivial and merits a post in itself, sometime soon.)

If you’re building a networked product, think of what embodiment of the network can be delivered to the user. The News Feed is brilliant because it takes a user’s network and individual actions and builds out something that results when the two are superimposed on each other. This is exactly how our social experience works in the real world. Our world is shaped by a consequence of the actions that we take with our environment. None of that is, of course, simple enough to be replicated through a mathematical model. But the news feed is a great approximation.

Tweetable Takeaways 

How social networking moved from a transaction-first to an engagement-first model.Tweet This.

How to build products that deliver value from network effects. Tweet This.

The one feature that transformed social networking forever. Tweet This.

Design principles for building products that capture network effects. Tweet This.

This article was first featured on Sangeet’s blog, Platform Thinking (http://platformed.info). Platform Thinking has been ranked among the top blogs for startups, globally, by the Harvard Business School Centre for Entrepreneurship

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What’s my next Product Going to be? A Product Ideation/Extension Toolkit

You have your first product and it’s a success. Success only brings more demand from prospects, clients and customers for features that are not yet in your product. Some of them are not interested in all the features you have in your product but seem to use only some odd features. Or they have found a totally new use for your product that you have not yet thought of, as yet! As an entrepreneur you are sitting there thinking “Why don’t they just use what I have provided them in the way I think they ought to use it?”. These kinds of reactions from prospects and clients are not only normal but indicates that you are on the right path!. All of these can be confusing for a small product start-up. However it need not be. Here’s a toolkit put together with examples seen with various start-ups and mature product companies. Think of it as a set of dimensions along which your own products can be extended or new products ideated. Depending upon the nature of your software product – SaaS or On-Premise, different dimensions for product variations, price points or delivery methods could be applicable. The advantage of this kind of approach is that it makes it a systematic process and makes sure that what you do has exemplars elsewhere, preferably ones that have been successful!

1. Product Variants based on Number of Users 

This model may be  familiar with SaaS product companies. There may be a Free Version, say upto 10 users, Small Business version for  11 to 25 users and an Enterprise Edition for 26 to 400 users, for example. Before you choose this model it is always good to put yourselves in your clients’ shoes and make sure that it makes economic sense. Beyond a certain number of users, clients always prefer a very flat discounted pricing. I speak from personal experience! We once evaluated a SaaS product for a 25 person start-up company.  Beyond 15 users, a per user model did not make any sense for us since the discounts for more users was not steep enough. On-premise software was much less expensive than the SaaS alternative. An on-premise software with an initial steep cost and annual maintenance of 16 to 20% worked out to be much better. Like us, many clients and prospects may have unused server capacity, technical people on the payroll that have extra capacity. So hosting our own software did not add any additional hardware/software/people costs for us. This is a cautionary tale for SaaS product companies that go after large enterprises or elephants. Make sure your flat pricing makes it is still profitable for you with huge numbers of enterprise users after paying for servers, hosting, bandwidth, specialized support, etc. What if this client grew phenomenally?

2. Product Variants based on Additional Features

Most are familiar with Microsoft’s Home, Professional and Enterprise editions of software products. Basic features that made sense for home use would be in component products like Microsoft Word, and Excel. Professional editions added additional features in individual products and they added additional products that made sense in an office setting. Enterprise editions were capable of a lot more and some included server editions where the product is hosted centrally. One caveat is not to leave money on the table when you have a single product and you start adding features. At some point in time, your product needs to split into basic and advanced editions and you need to make sure you get paid additionally for added features. This is a problem you face after you add features. In product management, one of the big conundrums product start-ups face is knowing when to add a feature. If one prospect or client asks for a feature, put it on a running wish list. If two of them ask for a feature, put it in the next release. If three of them ask for it put it in the appropriate product variant and in the next build! When you do a demo and a presentation of your current product, always have Upcoming Features and Upcoming Products slides and solicit feedback.

3. Product Variants on Adjacent and Associated Technologies

In software product companies, there are always adjacent and associated technologies where your next products need to be. If your consumer facing product works in a browser, it may need a mobile version and sometimes,  vice-versa. Document management products may need workflow products to go along with them. An enterprise financial management product needs sales management, manufacturing, people management products to go along with them. This is one of those areas where paying close attention to what other software are used by your users may give you ideas about your next product stops. Clients will readily tell you what other products they need to go along with the one your sold them, if you have not already found them out when they implement your product. Integration services always go along with products, especially in enterprise facing ones.

4. Products based on different characteristics/preferences of users

Not all of your clients or users will use the product the same way. Some may re-purpose features you meant for something for something completely different. As I write this, our client is using an open-source CRM system for internal workflow handling. The reason is not that the workflow features of this CRM system are very strong but because the attachments and document version handling is very strong and 90% of their workflow depends on users submitting documents for verification, validation and formal certification. User Interface skins are based completely on preferences of users and personalization. For inspiration, consumer product companies like Unilever and Proctor and Gamble are great. You can be sure that there are one or two Dove Soap products, White and Pink, that contribute 80% of their sales. They still have Dove Sensitive Skin, Dove soap without any perfume, etc. Software product variants may not be that simple but paying attention to what different types of users or usages can lead to variants that make sense.

5. Products meant for different types of markets

Different markets may have use for some common features but sometimes may need to be completely tailored for a new market. Tax preparation software for the US market may not be of much use in Europe or Australia. Or by architecting the software a certain way, a lot of the software could be reused by including a business rules component and writing different business rules for different markets. Oracle Financials has an Oracle Government Financials parallel, which may have very little in common with it!. Adjacent markets are always good to go after. What are those markets for your product company?

6. Free Trial/Free-Paid Versions

Free Trial versions may be necessary for scaling your user base initially and converting them later on. Free Trials may have expiry dates but free versions without any expiry dates can provide data lock-in. Once a client or a consumer’s data is in your software, inertia may prevent them from switching and you can convert them to a paid one at some point in time. In some cases like LinkedIn, free and paid versions can co-exist and you can still have a profitable company. The free version may have some limits and if the limits are too onerous for intensive users, they may convert to a paid version. However, it is always better to provide as many of the features you can in the free version and not make it too much of cripple-ware! The free version should be fully functional for most of the simple stuff all of your users. If minimum functionality is not there for accomplishing something meaningful, free versions will only put users off. I hated free versions that don’t tell me after I have put in a lot of data in and then I cannot print anything or do something meaningful with it.

7. Service -Product Spin Outs

Tax preparation software companies also provide tax preparation services for consumers that cannot use the software, for whatever reason. This is a good example of spinning out a service from a product. If you are offering a service you may catch yourselves doing the same kinds of activities for your customers. If it can be automated or provided as a self-service online option for a fee, may be there is a product idea in there. That can be a service to product spin out.

When your product starts to take off, it may be time to streamline your offerings and create a road map of product variants and new products. It is better to have a process and some systematic thought put into this activity. Analysis of existing users, careful attention to what they are saying and which features of your product they are using; what they want new in your product or what new products they want,  can all help guide you in creating a product family and a road map. Having a set of dimensions in a tool kit helps  a software product company mix and match whatever is applicable to them to creating and rolling out this roadmap!

If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there! – Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland

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Leveraging Customer relationships as a Product Manager

There have been epics written on ways businesses should be:

  1. Identifying customers
  2. Acquiring new customers from competition
  3. Retaining customers
  4. Cross selling and up selling into existing customers
  5. Leveraging Customers for expanding business

For a Product Manager, who has to deal with many internal and external entities, Customer is by far one of the most business critical entities that he has to deal with. And rightly so, since it’s the customers who not only pay for your product but help in innovation, evangelizing product and most importantly give you the credibility to make the right product / business decision and the confidence to stand by it.

Every organization has different dynamics around customer management. Hence as a Product Manager, once you get into a new organization you have to feel your way into the customer management dynamics. Let’s focus on some of the common trends and techniques used for successfully getting a handle on building successful Customer relationships.

1. Identifying Customers:

One of the first and the foremost tasks is to identify the customer. There are two types of customer:

  • Internal Customer: These can be folks within in your organization who use your product or service to assist your external customer or use the product / service on behalf of your external customer. As a Product Manager you should give their voice a significant ear, since they can not only share their experience but also be a voice for external customer. Another benefit is that since they are part of your organization you can leverage them for beta testing, brain storming ideas, hand holding external customer and even for evangelizing products
  • External Customer: These are your paying customer. As a company you have made a promise to them for delivering a product / service and that must be kept. You should categorize the customers in terms of their value to the organization:
  • Revenue (current and potential)
  • Brand value
  • New market beach head
  • New geo beach head

 

2. Initial Customer Contact:

Initial customer contact is a crucial point in your relationship with the customer. Hence it is critical that you do all the necessary research on the customer account prior to the meeting whether it’s in person meeting or on the phone. The per-call prep can help you gain insights into customers:

  • Business
  • Current issues
  • Temperament

 

As part of this initial introduction to the Customer, you must establish credibility by highlighting your relevant past experiences and listen intently by being the fly on the wall. One the key things to remember is that as a Product Manager you must align and fit well into the Sales team dynamics, since they are typically the owner of the customer relationships.

3. Basic Ground Rules for Ongoing Customer Engagement:

Once your initial introduction is done, managing the ongoing customer contact is delicate balancing act. A customer managed properly can help take your product to the next level along with its revenue.

  • You must establish basic ground rules:
  • Reviewing meeting agenda with the sales team
  • Sending meeting agenda in advance to the customer
  • Follow through plan after the meeting
  • Set up meeting success criteria
  • You have to be careful not to overwhelm the Customer with long and frequent meetings since it can cause confusion and delay in reaching your goal. This is especially true when you and your Customers are geographically apart. Crisp, succinct and to the point conversation is critical for ongoing communication with any Customer.
  • Remember the Buddha story about teaching Nirvana to a starving disciple? As long as the disciple was starving, there was no way he would have been interested in learning about Nirvana. Similarly, focus on the immediate needs of your Customer before offering him advance solutions. Once you solve Customer’s immediate business problems, he will be interested in working with you since trust in the relationship is built.
  • It’s critical to set expectations when you have conversation with Customers. Typically, if you ask customers to share their pain points, they will open the floodgates and expect those pain points to be fixed immediately. Hence before asking the Customer to open the floodgates, you should make sure that you set the right Customer expectations so that Customer doesn’t loose interest and let down. No one wants to tell the same story again and again, especially if your organization is expected to fix at some point. This same principle goes for sharing product and services roadmap. You should help Customers understand that documents like these are for confidential and for directional purposes only.

 

These basic principles for managing customer interaction will vary based on geography, industry vertical, business model, company size, number of products, product life cycle, etc. But, if followed consistently will take your business to the next level by forging long lasting relationships with your loyal Customers…

 

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iSPIRT Playbook Roundtable: Positioning and Messaging – Lot of it is common sense!

If your grandmother does not understand your message, then you might as well not communicate is the crux of what was discussed during this Roundtable facilitated by Shankar Maruwada and Nandita Sinha.

This roundtable discussed the ‘What’ of the positioning and messaging and not the ‘how’ of the positioning. There was very little theory except perhaps setting the context and the entire session was practical.

To illustrate the significance of positioning and messaging, one of the participating companies gave an elevator pitch thinking the rest of us are his prospective customers. Then people spoke about what stuck in their minds about the pitch. It varied from ‘I lost him’ to ‘I was thinking of a completely different business model’. The person who gave the pitch looked at all the responses to understand if there were any surprises and what needs to be the part of their messaging.

Discussion on the first pitch led to the understanding of the following:

  1. The curse of knowledge forms a part of all the messaging – what is easily understandable for us is not understandable for the market.
  2. Often times, people start to have internal chatters – they start to think even before the pitch is complete and the attention span is just about 30 seconds.
  3. Most messaging is at a conceptual level and addresses the left-brain of their audience, which does not persuade people to make decisions. Try addressing to their emotions, their right brain and the easiest way is to do these through stories.

Using the first pitch as an example, Shankar explained what goes into creating a tight message and it was

  • Identify the customer segment. You can have one overall messaging of your offering and can have multiple messages for multiple segments
  • Setup is the context of your offering. It can be some challenges that your customer segment faces or the industry faces. There can be multiple setups to your messaging
  • Explain the benefits of your solution. How your offering is unique to the customers need will be the persuasive part of your pitch. Setup combined with benefits is what would make the message that you communicate
  • Features and supporting credibility will have to come after this phase of setup and benefits

After this, one more exercise was carried out where all the participating companies were asked to write down 3 setups and 3 benefits while avoiding features. All the pitches were discussed at length and I am sure all those who attended the Roundtable went back a lot wiser about messaging.

Shankar emphasized on a very important fact that you may not crack your messaging in one sitting and it has to be an iterative process. He also asked people not to think in words and instead begin with stories, then move on to thoughts and then switch to words. This is the best way in which you will get to do your messaging right.

This Roundtable was attended by 9 companies with 12 participants and 2 facilitators. This roundtable kicked off to a hilarious start, during the introductions most people in the room claimed that their Saturday night favorite drink was either butter milk, tea or coffee.

I am looking forward to more such sessions.

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“Envision, Evangelise and Execute”: Connecting with Satyajeet from Cleartrip #PNHangout

We recently had a chance to catch up with Satyajeet Singh – head of Cleartrip’s mobile solutions, on Cleartrip and his take on the role of a product manager in Cleartrip, here’s what we learnt:

Cleartrip has been an early adopter of m-commerce in India. How have you been involved in taking Cleatrip’s mobile offerings from a MVP, to the product that it is today. How did you ensure it was scaled the right way and it grew? 

A) Cleartrip launched its mobile site 3 years ago and was by definition,  a minimum viable product: In the first version, users could only book a one-way ticket for one traveller and nothing more.  

When we launched Cleartrip for mobiles, smartphones weren’t as popular as they are now and anything we earned wouldn’t have a large impact on our revenue. So we took small steps to make our mobile offerings market ready. We did not want to overwhelm the user with too many options, and we slowly scaled the product with more features as the market grew. Today we have apps for all major platforms and one of the most comprehensive mobile site, with mobile contributing over 25% of the traffic for us.

My first priority has always been to deliver the very best products we can, for our customers and it is very gratifying to see it getting recognized within the country as well as at international forums. 

You’ve been in product management for over 8 years now, what do you think is the role of a product manager in an organization? 

A) Envision, Evangelize, Execute, are the three key roles a product manager has to perform in any organization.  

Envision

This means having a clear picture of the problem you are trying to solve, the solution and the strategy that will lead you there. It requires deep understanding of target users, the existing solutions and competitors in the market and a compelling case for why your solution will win over the existing alternatives. 

Evangelize

An equally important aspect of my role is evangelizing  your vision to your team. The more you focus on thisthe easier it’ll be to executeAnd once the team is convinced with your vision, you’ll be amazed to see the change it’ll bring to the output.  

Execute

Remember the quote from The Social Network, “If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you’d have invented Facebook.”

It is one of the most critical aspects of product management and means doing whatever it takes to ensure your product ships. 

How do you organize your week and what are some of the tools you use to manage your work?

I try planning my week ahead by setting broad goals that can be achieved by the end of the week. My weekly goals could include tasks like calls, meetings, interviews, data analysis, and every little thing that I can foresee for that week. Planning for each day  is usually impractical so I set a broad theme for each day and try and stick to it; for example, Marketing Monday’s is when I spend more time understanding impact of marketing campaigns, or Competition Wednesdays where I try to catch up on the competitor’s activities. 

I also dedicate at least one day every two weeks, purely to plan future releases and to do a postmortem on our recent releases. 

Some of the tools we use are, Basecamp for collaboration, Jira for tracking bugs, Evernote & Wunderlist to organize my work and Excel for everything else 

How do you go about understanding your customers and his/her needs?  

We get a lot of feedback from our users through emails, app reviews, complaints, tweets, Facebook comments and by talking to them directly. But while collecting this feedback, my focus is always  to understand why users want a certain feature(instead of making a bucket list of what they want) or else you’ll end up building ‘faster horses’. 

Analytics is the other very powerful source of understanding and predicting market needs and for fixing critical bugs. 

It’s a mix of the two(feedback and analytics) that gives a good base for prioritizing releases. Making decisions by looking at just one side of the picture can sometimes prove fatal for products.  

Product managers spend much of their time communicating ideas, plans, designs, and tasks to their teams. How do you ensure that it is done effectively?  

You need to champion the three levels of communication between the teams. 

Long term:  By conveying your vision to the team and making sure that they are aware of the problem you are trying to solveis extremely important if you want a self motivated team. Even if they find it repetitive, you need to communicate it often, so that they don’t lose sight of it.

Short term: This includes communicating to all the people who will help in achieving this vision. It is mainly in a form of a product roadmap. You can share a broad yearly plan and a detailed quarterly plan that will enable everyone to plan accordingly. Make sure to keep all the stakeholders as involved/informed. 

Immediate: This would include the day-to-day communication that is required for a smooth functioning of your roadmap. SCRUMs, feedback on designs, prioritizing bugs, discussing & closing blocker issues, reviewing marketing plans, communicating deviations, escalations, all  fall under this category.  

Q) Any tips for aspiring product managers?

Your products can only be as good as your relation with your teams, so invest time in building a long-term relation with them. By spending time with your team you build trust and respect, that will keep them equally excited & help you achieve your goals. 

Editor’s Note: Every member of the product team is important. To succeed, a company must design, build, test and market the product effectively. That said, there is one role that is absolutely crucial to producing a good product, yet it is often the most misunderstood and underutilized of all the roles. This is the role of the product manager. #PNHangout is an ongoing series where we talk to Product Managers from various companies to understand what drives them, the tools they use, the products they work on, how they go about their day and the role they play in defining the products success. 

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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Enabling Product Managers to manage Product Experience

In my last post, Product Manager, or Product Experience Manager, I described the disparate features and experiences that got broken in SiteZ and made the case that product management team should be responsible for overall product experience. In the final post of this series, I will present my views on how product management team should manage experience so that such issues can be minimized or avoided. Note that I am not talking about creating initial product experience or its next version, which is a topic of itself. I will focus only on managing the product as it goes through incremental changes.

There are 3 questions that must be answered by product management team at all times (and should be asked periodically):

  1. Are we seeing all the activities we should be seeing?
  2. Are we processing all the activities we see?
  3. Are we making good decisions based on our processing outcomes?

Product Experience Contour

To answer first question, it is important to understand the boundaries of the product experience that you wish to provide, what I call Product Experience Contour. If you define this too narrowly, you will miss out on lots of user and system activities that you should pay attention to. If you define it too broadly, you will be inundated with activities that are not useful and you will be stretched thin. There are 3 approaches to draw this contour:

  1. Persona-driven: If you have created personas (a realistic and detailed description of a fictitious user who represents a category of target audience for the product), they are good starting point to define these contours. Any activity in your organization that impacts or is impacted by a persona is usually a candidate for being on your radar. For example, if I am a persona for SiteZ (someone interested in learning from experienced people, but not interested in changing jobs), the product management team needs to ensure they are plugged into what the other group is promising and offering me. Note that in this case, I may not be a persona SiteZ cares about, which is a marketing and positioning strategy.
  2. Use case driven: If you have created use cases (UML, flowcharts, long documents, whatever) to describe how user roles interact with your system, that also is a good starting point though it may not be comprehensive. You can start by looking at the alternate and adjacent flows the particular user roles can go through on your system and see if those need to be on your radar. Use cases are more constrained because they describe your understanding at the time of product creation, while persona allows for more contemporary interpretation.
  3. Data-driven: While this may be hard (depending on how evolved your data analytics team is), this can be a very useful way to draw the contour. If you are able to analyze the data available for your system for past user interactions, you should be able to enumerate user activities (along with frequency of use) that you are interested in. The problem in this approach is that if some flows can’t be completed successfully by the user, or your data capture is not comprehensive, you may not get to know about some flows.

If possible, you should use more than one approaches above to draw the contours. Usually, persona-driven is a great way to draw initial contours, validate it with the data from your analytics, and then use data-driven approach to detect new user activities that might be important to include in the contour. In my case, it is entirely possible that none of my activities were ever tagged as useful activities to track, since these are not primary use cases (except the first one – trying to register to join the chat with the guest).

Information Sources and Management Systems

To answer second question, it is very important to look at 2 aspects:

  1. Information Source: As a user interacts with the organization, information is generated at many different places. It is very important for product management to be well-connected to these sources and make sure they are getting the information frequently. A few of the sources are:
    1. Data Analytics: As mentioned above, data analytics is a great source for information and must be harnessed properly.
    2. Direct User connect: There are many ways to connect directly with a sample set of users and keep learning about their experiences from them – product blogs, twitter, facebook and other social media channels are very effective if users can stay engaged.
    3. Be the user: It is surprising to see how little product managers use their own products on a regular basis. While being your own user may not be the greatest way to design a new product, it is a great way to keep tab on how things are going. Depending on the product, product managers can enlist their family and friends to be regular users and give feedback.
    4. Other departments in the org: Many departments interact with the users Product Managers want to know about, so it is very important to have a good flow of information from these departments. Typically, Marketing, Sales, Support, and Training teams can have good information about the user that should be captured.
  2. Information Management Systems: How information is captured, stored, and disseminated is very important for effective processing. Most activities can’t be processed in real time. Processing can mean many different things – I mean it in the sense of understanding, clarifying, analyzing, ranking and other handling of data. Product management teams need to procure, and use a management system that serves the purpose, and avoid leaving information in emails, chat boxes, whiteboards, or in their minds.

Good Decision-Making Process

To answer 3rd question, we need to make sure we have a good decision-making process in place which is used all the time. A good decision is a collaborative effort, and it is a process rather than a moment. It requires lots of data (which your information sources and management systems can provide), and it requires following a rational decision-making process. Such a decision-making process has following characteristics:

  1. Right stakeholders in the decision-making are identified.
  2. Participants are contributors and idea-providers, not spectators.
  3. Decision-making criteria (how will different options be ranked and prioritized) is defined before solution options are figured out.
  4. Personal responsible for the decision (and its consequences) is clearly identified (and it must be a person, and not a group).
  5. Once the decision is made, it is communicated, along with the rationale for making this particular decision.

In this context, since we are talking about incremental changes to product, the decision-making criteria should be known upfront and should be applied consistently. Impact of a change needs to be validated against all the known implications to the personas we care for, and this should be a key data in the decision-making process.

Evangelizing Product Management role

Even when you have great answers to the questions above, it is important to enlist the support of rest of the organization in keeping product experience awesome for the user. To do this, product managers need to be product evangelists who go out and talk about the product and their role as the guardian of product experience, to whoever cares to listen, and whichever platform they find. Once enough people in the organization realize that they should talk to you whenever they think about tinkering with the product experience, you will have created the strongest source of information about user activities and your product will thrive.

One final time, let me go through the list of issues, and show how they could be caught if above is done well:

Issue Solution
They misled the user about the time it takes to register. Evangelism would make sure they talk to product team, and good decision-making process would ensure that either advert is corrected, or product is fixed.
They didn’t allow the user to abort the registration attempt gracefully (which left the email address behind and created rest of the mess). Good decision-making process would ensure right prioritization, and if feature is not prioritized, user is provided enough information about what to do in this situation.
They were not forthcoming about who is sending me these spam emails (the email address was hidden with a display name that was the advertiser’s). Being connected to user (or enlisting friends and family as users) might flag the mail as inappropriately crafted (you are receiving this mail because.. line should be at the top somewhere).
They exposed a feature to me (unsubscribe) which didn’t work Good decision-making process should ensure that an alternative exists if this feature is not going to be implemented, and that user is told about it honestly
They didn’t give me an easy way to delete my account – emails bounced, UI didn’t have a button to delete, etc. Good decision-making process would ensure right prioritization, and if feature is not prioritized, user is provided enough information about what to do in this situation.

To be fair to SiteZ, it is hard to do all this because these are elements of organization culture and everything can’t be written down as a process and followed. Also, it is entirely possible, that they are indeed doing all this (though I highly doubt this!) and still I became a victim. Such caveats aside, I think this is a good discussion about product experience and hopefully companies will focus more on product experience than what they do today.

This concludes my series on Product Experience Management. I look forward to your comments and thoughts on the topic.

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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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“For a product business the product roadmap, customer segmentation and a delightful user experience are extremely crucial.”

Started in 2011 with only three employees, Emportant has grown to serve thousands of users with their cloud based end-to-end HR and Payroll products. Co-Founder and CEO, Emportant, Sandeep Todi says his company is focused to appeal to firms that would identify with its motto, ’Employees are Important’.  In an interview with ProductNation, he says his biggest learning is you must always take good care of your customers even as you keep expanding.

How would you describe the shifting paradigm from Outsourcing software to Software as a Service?

Software as a Service (SaaS) allows you to try business class software with ease and without being tied down with painful and expensive procurement and deployment cycles. With no upfront investment, it’s easy to try and buy SaaS products. In that sense, a SaaS network of products mimic the behavior of a ‘technology grid’ that you can tap into. In contrast, building custom software is like installing a captive power generation unit at prohibitive cost that is hardly justified when the grid is at your doorstep.

Companies have also realized that SaaS is not just amortizing costs over several years, but a new way of thinking. You are not selling a box, rather a product that’s constantly on the move. SaaS products see anything around 4-12 releases a year, are built on rapid release cycles. Moreover, customer feedback is acknowledged and incorporated in these rapid release iterations, something which is impossible in outsourced software or licensed software. The customer is therefore always on the latest release and does not suffer from “version fatigue”. Businesses are realizing this by adopting SaaS products with very little risk, tasting success and then quickly going on to embrace this new pedagogy.

In what way does this new model benefit users in terms of effectiveness, cost and support?

This SaaS apps-grid or ecosystem of apps that can co-exist with each other, is becoming more powerful by the day. No outsourced software is able to deliver this as elegantly and as cost effectively as SaaS product delivered over the cloud.

SaaS software is able to deliver benefits rapidly through new releases and eliminates risk of obsolescence. FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) has been used by traditional software vendors, scaring users about impending obsolescence. Having left with little choice, customers had to regardless opt for expensive upgrades and consulting efforts. A transparent SaaS business always keeps users on the latest version and ensures that this version works 100% with all customer environments. This dramatically lowers the cost of maintaining the product because you are no longer dealing with different versions that must be supported for different customers.

Tell us the story about your recently launched web based HRMS and Payroll software, Emportant? How did it happen?

We are in the HR software business for nine years now. Having sold our product PowerApps to several mid-to-large enterprises, we delivered mission critical and high performance HR/Payroll software to customers like Bank of Baroda, Ford, TI Group, ITC, L&T, GTL etc. In 2009, we wanted to adopt cloud computing in a big way and struggled for two years. It was then that we decided to carve out a separate company and a separate product for the cloud – this was the genesis of the birth of Emportant in 2011.

In creating Emportant we initially feared it would cannibalize our own product PowerApps. Thankfully, that did not happen and now both products have a good market presence of their own in two different customer segments.

Emportant.com drives every HR process with the Employee at the center. Every HR / Manager / Employee interaction can be initiated by the Employee and is available on a self-serve platform.

How easy or difficult is it to market a software product in India?

The going was pretty tough in 2011 as cloud was not very well accepted back then. Now it’s different, as CIOs are less wary about the cloud and more concerned about the stability of the vendor, maturity of the cloud product, etc.

Custom software is still viewed as a viable alternative primarily due to the inexpensive cost of hiring programmers. Moreover for a product sold to mid-market and large businesses, you have to traditionally sell one-to-one, engage in multiple meetings and convince customers about the solution fitment without landing into the trap of customization.

What are the factors that make a successful software product and the challenges faced in taking it to the market?

For a product business the product roadmap, customer segmentation and a delightful user experience are extremely crucial.

We have focused on how HR can be employee friendly and have a focus on achieving business results using software tools. The product’s benefits must be easily understood and should quickly demonstrate value. We have successfully kept bringing original thought and real customer feedback into our product, coming out with unique and uncomplicated ways of solving business problems.

Emportant drives HR administration in real time and moves away from the concept of HR software being only a system of record. This model of ours has led to a success rate of > 80% in converting prospects to customers.

We are now looking at stepping up our efforts on social media and on overseas customer acquisitions. Establishing credibility amongst large customers continues to pose interesting challenges and working with business partners means we have to convince them about long term value vs upfront margins.

What is the future of software products vis-a-vis services?

Software products and services will always have their own separate customer segments. I don’t think software products can solve every business problem out there and services have an important part to play. Customers are beginning to realize that service consumption burdens them with unreasonable costs of operation and in an increasingly competitive world they would rather adopt a product if one exists which can meet their requirements. The benefits of products to the customer in terms of cost, sustainability and continuous improvement are already well established.

Look at Dropbox’s recently announced Datastore API. They have just commoditized the offline storage market for independent app makers. In fact, storage is now being turned from a service into a product as will be any service which can be wrapped into a standardized and repeatable delivery.

What learning would you like to share with other product companies?

Every launch of a new version is a learning experience for us. We are faced with the challenge of what to build in the next version, how does it affect pricing and how does it affect our current customers. What we’ve learnt is that you must always take good care of your current customers even as you keep expanding. To ensure this, we reward existing customers with new features for free whenever we release new versions and keep them protected on price changes perpetually.

What role do you foresee ProductNation to play in nurturing the growth of software products?

The biggest obstacle to exponential growth of Indian products is the lack of access to experts in marketing, product growth and cutting edge technology. Too many companies face mortality because of an idea or execution gone wrong.

ProductNation will hopefully help overcome these hurdles quickly and open up the opportunity for Indian products to be recognized globally.