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Product RoundTable Bangalore @ Vizury Office

We had some very good hosts @ Vizury office and also joined by their product folks Shiju and Subra for the Product Round table that was organized last Friday. The other awesome people who were part of the event were Siddharth Ramesh (Exotel), Jose (Weavedin), Vinay Simha (Dfy Graviti), Sridhar (ex-Inmobi), Avinash Raghava (Product Nation), Nari Kannan (The man with experience of over 7 startups and currently working on a project for Barack Obama), Anjali (Capillary), Chandra (i7networks), Santosh Panda (Explara), Venkatesh (Insieve), Pandith (Impelsys).

The discussions revolved around 3 things in Product:
1. How to track growth & health of a product or Product Metrics
2. Product v/s Sales (When to listen to customer and sales person and building the feature)
3. Product Marketing

and 2 small sessions of Santosh explaining his re-branding story from Ayojak to Explara and Venkatesh about how they balance in a unique way not building before selling and working on product demo’s without having to build the features.

Sridhar led the moderation of the session and showed his secret sauce of a graph designed for Product decisions:

The graph helps Product folks take decisions based on a problem, and how ideally first level and second level product problems when probed can be solved by Education & Processes. This sort of product thinking gives more bandwidth to technology & product managers to focus on building the tech as well, apart from features as a solution to everything. It helps keep your product from being stretched into a services play.

Nari Kannan & Sridhar again spoke about how the health of a product and its metrics can be linked to the business metrics by the GEM (Growth, Engagement, Monetization) theory.

A lot of discussions around how sales folks like to ask fore more features, and how to decide what to build and what not to, but the graph helped a lot.

A snippet on the learning from Santosh’s Ayojak to Explara journey was that he communicated the brand change much in advance internally and decided to leave aside feature requests etc. and kept focussed on the UI/UX and internal communication of the change. It helped everyone realize that multiple massive changes should not be attempted together.

Venkatesh also spoke about how they develop new feature requests in a staging environment, and release it just for the customer in a prototype without pushing the code into the product, and ask him/her if they will pay for this and is this what they want. It is an interesting way to get a yes from the customer before getting your tech team working on something which might or might not sell.

All in all, everyone had some great learning’s, a few beers and cookies along with chai and coffee thanks to the Vizury team, and we hope to get some more Product Roundtable’s running consistently and involving more of the product companies to have cross learning’s via sharing best practices.

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Learning and growing together at the iSPIRT #Playbook Roundtable

iSPIRT Playbook Roundtable in Delhi Flickr Stream

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doesn’t that sum up what these round-tables are all about. Participate in the next one to find out!
With inputs from Vikram Bahl of Yavvy.com
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“Customer Relations is very important” – Kailash Katkar, CEO, QuickHeal Technologies

In this fascinating story, Kailash Katkar recalls the past almost two decades of running a business that at one time faced closure. But riding on quality people, constant innovation and proximity to the customer, Quick Heal has become a leading anti-virus software company that is giving even the international anti-virus companies a run for their money. Read on….

Why did you start this business? Why did you form Quick Heal? What was the intention behind it, and did you go for it alone or do you have partners? 

When I started this company I never thought I will convert this company into Software development. It started as a computer repair shop. I used to do calculator repairing first, and then I was into laser printer machine repairing. And in those days it was a monopoly in Pune. But when I saw that these machines were not going to continue for a long time and computers are going to take over I started, computer maintenance and started taking AMCs. In fact, I had a lot of customers. I was not into computer sales. I was purely into computer maintenance. 

My younger brother(Sanjay Katkar) after his 12th standard wanted to get into electronics for his graduation, but I instead said why don’t you do computers. He was a bit reluctant because it was very new and the fees were high but on my advice he did that and used to come to my shop for practice because I had computers in my shop. Now those days, nobody bought antivirus software. In fact it cost a prohibitive Rs. 14-15,000. Customers assumed it was the responsibility of the contractor to provide it and when computers came for maintenance it was the contractor who had to format the machine, re-install the OS, and reload the data. 

Now my younger brother as part of his curriculum had to do a project so I asked him to write some tools which could automatically remove viruses since formatting the machine and reloading all the data was very time consuming and cumbersome. The Michelangelo virus was infamous in those days and was quite a problem for many computer users. He managed to write one simple utility that could eradicate the virus and it worked very well. So I started distributing the tool to my customers and that was the beginning of the anti-virus business.

So based on customer feedback, I ventured into anti-virus software and believe me I had no knowledge of the software industry. We started work on a full-fledged anti-virus software in 1993 and the first version of Quick Heal was released at the end of 1994 most likely.

Sanjay Katkar(left) and Kailash Katkar(right)

It was quite funny actually when I think back. The software was a DOS version that came in a floppy, and then we designed a small envelope with colorful packaging and started selling it. It was a bit tough for me to sell, but then gradually I started getting success, and I got this success through channel partners, because since I was into computer repairing, I used to know most of the computer repairing people. 

So, what was the competition like in those days, Kailash? 

There were a lot many antivirus software. I mean, there was Norton antivirus; there was McAfee; there was Dr. Solomon. And there were a lot of Indian antivirus also. 

From Pune itself, there were three antivirus software manufacturers. The two prominent ones were Cure and Vaccine. 

In Chennai there was Vx2000 and Star antivirus software. And from Mumbai, there was Red-Armour antivirus software, Red Alert antivirus software. From Delhi, there were three antivirus software. So overall across the country, I think there were about 10-11 software, and this doesn’t include international software. 

So from a customer perspective, was there a leaning towards the imported software or Indian software? 

People were more fascinated by imported products and software was no exception. McAfee and Norton were the preferred choices in the market. 

Correct. you must have had a lot of courage to kind of get into the market at that point. 

Yes. Actually, my computer maintenance work was still on. I continued my computer maintenance until 1998 and this gave me the cash to pump into the anti-virus software development and marketing also. Personally, I used to spend 50% time on computer maintenance and 50% time on software sales. And my younger brother was fully focused on development. 

What was your proposition to the customer? 

Actually, it was quite difficult considering the huge competition, with so many number of antivirus software. But in the late nineties, a virus called Dir 2 came into the market. The virus was extremely dangerous and used to decrypt the hard disk. In fact, users never knew when the machine is infected and after infection how many times the machine was rebooted. Now if you applied an anti-virus software in the traditional way, it was just remove the virus but whatever data was decrypted would be lost and the machine would crash. So every time the machine was formatted about 30-50% of data would evaporate. 

So Quick Heal pioneered a unique approach. We managed to find out how much data was decrypted and encrypt it before cleaning the virus. That way we got the virus out and the data restored. This way Quick Heal was the first antivirus software in the market  which used to do this. Even Norton and McAfee were not doing this. 

What was your communication strategy to inform the market of such developments? 

I was not able to go pan India, but I was able to communicate with most of the customers in Pune. In fact soon after Dir 2 came Natash a dangerous polymorphic virus. Again many of the antivirus software companies took a hit but we were able to find a solution and gradually started converting larger customers like the Times of India who took a corporate decision to adopt our software. 

How did you scale that now? From a development perspective, how did you scale it? 

Now we have a team of around 650 people but we went through some tough times. In 1998 I decided to close down the computer maintenance business because it was very difficult to run two business together. I focused on a distributor strategy but that put a strain on my business because while the distributors sold the product they never paid me on time. In fact it reached a stage when in early 2000 I decided to close down the company. 

In 2001-2, I had about Rs.2 to 3 lakhs in the bank, and then one of my friends advised me that if you really want to scale and grow your business, invest in a proper technical team. Also get a good business team. So finally we decided to do it under a lot of strain because in those days banks never supported software companies.

I somehow inserted a big advertisement in the Times of India, almost a half page ad, saying that I’m looking for country managers and city managers. I was then able to hire good people and together we changed the entire structure of the company.

Why did they come and join you? What was it that they saw in Quick Heal that was the game changer for them?

Quick Heal had become a bit popular in the Pune market and most of these people were from Pune itself. So, they knew about this product. They knew about the quality of the product, but they were quite also that the product was not reaching the masses. So they joined the company to take up the challenge and I am proud to say that more than 10 years later they are still with the company. 

With these new people, we embarked on a strategy to open branches in other cities. Soon I developed a lot of confidence that sitting in Pune I can manage branches in other locations also. We started with Nasik. And after Nasik started running well, in three months’ time I started an office in Bombay and then in Nagpur and then in Indore, and then gradually I went into Gujarat and then I went into North India and South India. Today, we have around 23 offices, apart from Pune, across India. 

So you still believe that a large part of your sales has to be achieved by physical presence?

Yes, yes. Most software companies try to appoint national distributors whenever they scale their product to other countries. And perhaps a few regional distributors.  I don’t believe in that. Because what happens, if you….if you appoint a national or a regional distributor he expects a lot many things to be done by the company. He really does not make efforts. He just waits for customers. If the customer demands the product, then he sells the product. 

When I appoint more than 100 channel partners, then I try to appoint one stockist on top of it, so that I don’t have to deal with each and every channel partner for a transaction like billing and invoicing and payment collection and all these things. I can just deal with all the channel partners just to maintain a relationship and make sure that they are comfortable selling Quick Heal, and if they have any issues or problems, we can go and help them. 

So, this is how I started developing a market all over India, and now we have around 12,000 channel partners across India. We have direct connectivity with each of our channel partners. 

How do you keep this channel partner base updated about the product and about new developments?

By giving continuous training. Every branch has a set of people for a sales team, a set of small – one or two persons – for marketing. Then a team for support, and then the administrative team. And among the support team, there is one person who is a trainer who keeps on training all the channel partners about the product features and product support and other functions. We have a training program conducted every Saturday for a specific set of channel partners. 

And how do you keep updated about the innovations that you need to bring into the products? So, the new antivirus, antidotes, whatever. 

Actually, since the team is spread out across India we always have meetings with the branch managers once in a quarter, and then we keep on getting a lot of feedback from the entire market through these branch managers as to what the customers are looking for.

Okay. Looking at this 15 year journey now, what would you pinpoint as the most important thing that you have done. 

Customer relations are very important for me and understanding the customer is very important for me. So, I have to focus more on that, what exactly customers are looking for and how I can get that service with less effort for me as well as for my team by developing some tools or something like this, you know. 

How do you keep abreast of fast changing technological developments? 

Our senior level team of about 7 to 8 executives constantly are attending conferences and travelling across the globe. For instance, we attend the Red Hat conference and this Hackers conference and most of the antivirus conferences and a lot many security conferences that keep on happening….Not only do they attend, but we also keep on presenting our research papers in these conferences. So every year, around four to five papers are being presented by Quick Heal.

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Platforms and Verticals—What to Build on and for Whom

An important decision is about development and deployment platforms. If your product is targeted for a specific operating system, the choice is obvious. When the solution has to be platform neutral, or if the deployment will be controlled by you (SaaS model), then the common options are Open Source (Linux) and Java or Microsoft Windows. Always keep in mind the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for the customer.

Open source in theory benefits from the availability of a huge number of re-usable components and tools contributed by an army of individual programmers. While open source is technically free, limited support and inter-operability between different open source products may lead to higher cost of development and support.

Microsoft now offers free development tools to start-ups for 3 years under their BizSpark program, but licensing cost of servers and other software for product deployment, may be high.
Other issues may impact platform choice. An implementation which is tightly integrated with specific platform features and interfaces will limit your ability to go cross-platform. Conversely, leveraging the tight integration and inter-oper-ability of various servers on a specific OS can substantially increase the product’s value and ease of use.

Web 2.0 ventures and CIOs have new options to develop applications with minimal investment. Salesforce.com is promoting the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) concept, which it says represents the start of Web 3.0. Called Force.com, it enables companies to build and deploy enterprise applications on-demand without having their own infrastructure. Core business applications, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), human resource management (HRM) and supply chain management (SCM), can be developed in just 5-10% of the time that is normally required for custom development, and deployed almost instantly.

Your OS decision should be driven by business potential. If a specific platform dominates or is acceptable to a majority of your potential buyers, then opt for it. Spend your engineering bandwidth on providing maximum compatibility and inter-operability with other applications on this OS, to improve total value to clients.

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Quick Research / Usability Methods: Heuristic Evaluation

(Post 2 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.)

In my last post, I introduced a discount usability engineering method called the ‘Expert Usability Review’ – A method best suited to start-up’s who have access to skilled and experienced usability / design professionals who can conduct a Usability Review.

Post 2 introduces a related technique called the ‘Heuristic Evaluation’.
Start up’s that don’t have a usability / design team in place, can start focusing on usability and ease of use, using the ‘Heuristic Evaluation’ method – A method with similar goals to the Expert Usability Review, but a relatively easier starting point for novice researchers.

In a Heuristic Evaluation (or Heuristic Review), the reviewers identify issues by looking at an interface in context to a pre-decided set of heuristics. Violations to any of the heuristics indicate non-compliance / potential usability issues.

‘Heuristics’ are rules of thumb – Broader than design guidelines, typically available as self-sufficient ‘sets’ (e.g. Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics / Gerhardt-Powals’ cognitive engineering principles) that can be used standalone / along with other sets.

Popular examples:

Visibility of system status: The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time. (Jakob Nielsen)

Reduce uncertainty: Display data in a manner that is clear and obvious. (Gerhardt-Powals)

The set of heuristics used act as a guideline – making this method more of a check list based audit rather than requiring reviewers to intuitively identify issues by drawing upon a deep knowledge of usability and UI in general.

(More about the technique and how to conduct Heuristic Evaluations at Usability.gov, Smashing Magazine and the NN Group)

One of the drawbacks of the Heuristic Evaluation method, is that the issues identified are dependent on the list of heuristics used. So if the set of heuristics is too narrow, there is a chance of some issues going unidentified. On the other hand, if the list of heuristics is very large, the review would take a very long time to do.

The most popular set of Heuristics are Jakob Nielson’s 10 Heuristics. However, these are broad guidelines – and may be too abstract for a lay person to interpret and apply.

10 Usability HeuristicsThe 275 Web Usability Guidelines from User Focus are more literal and therefore much easier to understand for the lay person. Moreover, these guidelines are available in a neat Excel spread sheet format that includes instructions on how to use them and an auto-calculated numeric rating for guidelines compliance.

275 Web Usability Guidelines


 

To end, here are a few tips you can keep in mind while attempting to do a Heuristic Evaluation:

Start with a Knowledge Transfer
Before critiquing a product, it is important to understand its context and usage.
The knowledge transfer must enable a good understanding of the product strategy and goals, target audience, known trouble points, constraints and design centres. The KT must include a walkthrough of all features, screens and task flows that are critical to the product.

Define the scope of the review
While this is not necessary for a simple product or a product with a manageable number of screens, in a complex or large product, defining the key task flows and screens to be reviewed is important to keep the review manageable.
With some exceptions, the 80 /20 rule is a good way to do this – Attempt to review 20% of the product features that are used 80% of the time.

Select the set of heuristics that are right for your product
There are plenty of heuristics available online.
Keeping n mind the product you plan to review, it is important to decide whether to use a generic set of heuristics (Like Jacob Nielson’s 10 Heuristics / User Focus guidelines) or whether domain specific / niche heuristics would be more effective. In niche or highly targeted products (products for senior citizens, children, disabled users, mobile phone hardware etc.) generic heuristics may be ineffective for unearthing all issues.

Select a set of heuristics that are right for the reviewer
The reviewers who are going to be using the heuristics, need to be comfortable / familiar with the heuristics in order to interpret and apply them effectively.

Focus on issue identification vs. recommendation
A common tendency among newbie reviewers is to jump right into fixing the problem / wording the issue as a recommendation. It is important to keep the Heuristic Review focused on issue identification, in context to a given set of heuristics. In fact, an issue may / may not be accompanied by a corresponding recommendation – Issues are sometimes too complex to be tackled by a quick written recommendation and need a larger, more focused redesign effort.

Rate issues to help prioritize
Doing this helps focus the post review effort of addressing the issues identified through Heuristic Review.

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 methods that you used.

Post 3 coming up soon, will showcase a Guerrilla Research technique – Remote Usability Testing. Look out for this post to learn more about the method and to compare the issues found through Usability Testing, against issues identified through the Expert Usability Review.

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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Where is Dropbox headed?

Having started in September 2008, Dropbox today is a leading cloud storage provider (CSP). It has over a 100 million signed free users and about 4 million paid users (4% conversion rate as quoted often by Houston). Assuming the lowest payment tier (100GB at $99 per year), this translates into annual revenue of about $400 million. Based on Amazon S3 costing and estimates of Dropbox employee costs, the EBITDA works out to $250 million. Its costs are always going down and its revenues are always going up. The company is valued at $ 4 billion. Dropbox is making money hand over fist. Right? But consider this –

It now has more than ten competitors several with deep pockets e.g., Amazon CloudDrive, Apple iCloud, Google GoogleDrive, Microsoft Skydrive, Box, Spideroak, Ubuntu One, MediaFire, Mega.  Its other competitors, purely in enterprise space include HP Cloud Objects, Rackspace etc.

Dropbox offers the smallest free quota – 2GB plus referral bonus. All its competitors offer 5GB or more (Skydrive -7GB, MediaFire and Mega – 50 GB).

Dropbox pricing is probably the highest ($99 for 100GB). For same capacity, competitor prices are much lower –CloudDrive ($50), GoogleDrive ($60), Skydrive ($50). Box ($480), iCloud ($160). Spideroak ($100) have a higher pricing but have more powerful features (see below).

Dropbox is merely a folder service. Its competitors have other value-adds and lock-in mechanisms. For example, iCloud allows streaming of music, apps, books, and TV shows you purchase from the iTunes store, Google and Microsoft have GoogleDocs and Office WebApps respectively. Documents created through these apps do not count towards the drive quota. Box is designed more as a business-collaboration and work-flow solution that a CSP. SpiderOak is the only service that offers data encryption before your data hits their servers. Perhaps, acquisition of AudioGalaxy should enable Dropbox with music streaming feature.

The  giants like Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft see storage as a way to lure customers into their respective cloud and then “upsell” them on higher-level and more profitable services that they have in the portfolio. They have been aggressive in launching or responding to price cuts from competitors. Dropbox cannot win against these Goliaths in the theatre of feature and price wars.

The Dropbox differentiator was the near seamless experience backing up and syncing files to cloud on multiple platforms. That differentiator is rapidly evaporating with the competitors catching up. Moreover, what happens if all your files are already in the cloud for example music (iCloud, Spotify), Documents (GoogleDocs, Office 365), Pictures (Instagram) and so on. There are umpteen such scenarios that make Dropbox redundant.

I am sure Dropbox product managers are having sleepless nights. Do you have a product strategy and roadmap for Dropbox’s future?

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8 Truths why IT Services Organizations cannot do Software Products

The bread and butter of the Indian IT Industry has been IT Services.  IT Services, as the terminology implies, is servicing a customer.  A customer states his needs, the IT Services organization makes a proposal to develop / maintain / re-engineer / etc., and the deal is done.  As offshoring and outsourcing has matured, customers have become savvy and are putting pressure on IT Services Organizations to compete more aggressively, provide more value and make cheaper proposals with no hidden costs to customers.

IT Services Organizations are in turn looking for ways to improve their margins by creating their own Intellectual Property (IP) and some of them have turned to building or investing in software products.

This articles core purpose is to warn leaders in IT Services Organizations – “DON’T BUILD SOFTWARE PRODUCTS”.  But success makes one arrogant, so I suspect some leaders will still build their own products, in which case hire somebody who has made these mistakes before and is familiar with the 8 Truths.

TRUTH 1: Trusting your best IT SERVICES Manager to build your Product

When an IT Services Organization decides to do Products, it is one of their significant investments and guess who they put in charge of it – one of their better managers.  A manager in an IT Services Organization is an expert at – scope management, cost management, SDLC, resource management, status reporting, financial management, etc.. And of course he is very good at managing other managers.

Building successful products has little to do with the above skills.  Building successful software products requires the ability to provide vision for the Product, ability to work with changing customer and market needs, the ability to build and trash architectures, deal with failures, inspire creativity, identify opportunities you had not seen before.

Most importantly, if you decide to build software Products please find a Software Product Head who has a couple of failures under his belt.  And if you find one that hasn’t yet failed, guess what – he will fail on your Software Product !!!

TRUTH 2 : IT SERVICES ORGANIZATIONS serve Customers and their Projects

The real expertise of a successful IT Services Organization is Scope Management – negotiating successfully with the customer on agreed scope and what is not in scope.  If you are the Program Manager and your team is on the wrong track or if you have made a mistake, you are taught to revisit the scope.  Examine the scope document with a fine toothcomb to compare what the customer asked for with what you have delivered.

If the customer says “The system is not easy to use” then examine the scope to say “Yes, but we did not agree on usability guidelines”, so if you now need “Usability”, it’s a change request and please Mr. Customer, do pay for it.

If the customer says “The system is too slow and it takes 45 seconds for my Employee Screen to come up” then examine the scope document for “Performance Requirements” and tell the customer “Oops !! Mr. Customer you seem to have missed defining Performance Requirements” and what you are asking for is a major redesign.  Guess who’s gonna shell out big bucks for it?!

Customer: “The database design is bad”.  IT Service: “That is not a deliverable as per scope”.

Customer: “The coding guidelines are poor”.  IT Services: “We follow our organization standard guidelines, if you need anything different it’s not in scope”.

… and so on.

Importantly, the cost of changes and mistakes is either borne by customers or at least shared by them.

In the Software Product world there is limited Customer defined scope and there is no fallback position to ask a customer to pay for mistakes.  If you have got it wrong, bad luck. Do it again and by the way do it better.  And please meet “implicit needs of the product” – customers implicitly expect a Software Product to load within 5 seconds and the usability to be impeccable and intuitive.

This is a culture shift for an IT Services Organization.

TRUTH 3: IT SERVICES ORGANIZATIONS don’t know when to say STOP

IT Services thinking:  If we got it wrong, lets change the manager, lets change the technical architect, lets change the Business Analyst.  Or better still … lets throw more people at it, lets change the location of development, lets get more funding.

How about just stopping and starting again.

IT Services Organizations just don’t know how to stop or setup metrics to stop.  IT Software Products have high failure rates – over 80%.  The IT Services Organization is used to 80% success rate.  It’s a another  culture shift.

This is also related to how Software Services Projects and Software Products are funded.  A Customer Services Project even if gone bad often continues to be a revenue earner, till the customer decides to stop development.  An investor in a Software Product organization often invests in multiple Product companies and has clear criteria to continue or stop.

In Software Products there is little room for carrying baggage and making incremental changes.  If you have got your product wrong, throw it away and restart or just stop.  Any kind of incremental changes cost a lot and makes the whole team slower.  Your technical team also knows they are building an elephant which will not be nimble, flexible, easy to change or responsive.  There is no greater demotivator than a technical team that doesn’t believe in the Product.

A Software Product is developing IP for the future – there will be peaks and troughs of investments and returns and these will typically be in separate time-cycles.  This is another reason, why an IT Services organization just doesn’t know when to say STOP.  They may well invest much more than a pure-play Software Product Organization would and that too for poorer returns.

TRUTH 4: IT SERVICES ORGANIZATIONS have Forgotten how to BUILD SOFTWARE

IT Services Senior leadership is chosen for Customer Engagement skills, for P&L responsibility, and not for Product vision.

If you are in IT Services, when you resource for a Customer Services Project, you pull out your Gross Margin sheet and see what level of senior / junior people you are allowed.  You then go to your Resource Management team to help you fill those resources.  You could need a team of 20 or a team of 200, depending on the size and complexity.  And that is your focus.

When you develop a Software Product, you first review the market of the Product, then you review its features, then you validate it with some customers, then you do prototypes and proof of concepts, then you validate it again with customers.  You convince an anchor customer.  Your entire focus is on – are the features right, is my customer happy, is my software maintainable, will I get references to other customers?  Resources and budgets are just as important but features and benefits to customers come first.

When a Software Product organization scales the problems grow differently – what is the scope of my product, what are the analysts saying about it, how will my licensing model work for small and large customers, how will I support customers, what is their upgrade path,  are there core architectural bottlenecks that will prevent the software from scaling?

The priority for an IT Services Organization remains quality of service, size of business, revenue and margins as it should.  IT Services Organizations do not know how to build software any more.  They knew it once – now they have forgotten.

TRUTH 5: IT SERVICES ORGANIZATIONS’ HR works on scale and size.  They cannot focus on the problem of 1 Employee

The HR team of an IT Services organization has a very clear idea of where and how to recruit, what compensation to give, how to give raises, how to be fair across thousands of people.    There are employee benefits, training programs, career growth plans, dual shore movement, etc.

Product teams start by being small teams.  They often need expertise in small bursts – speed is everything.  An IT Services Organization just doesn’t have the flexibility and nimbleness to take care of the needs of a Product team.  Can I out price my 1 core architect and 2 functional experts?  Can I provide them with ESOP that is way beyond others on the services side?  Can a developer in the product space get paid more than a manager?

Can HR deal with the above?  More importantly does HR have the mandate to make such exceptions?  What happens when a Product person moves to a Services Project – how do the incentives work?

For a services organization with thousands of people – it is not significantly important to solve the problem of at most a few hundred people working on products.  For the Product Organization every decision MUST be driven towards getting a great piece of software to the end-customer.

IT SERVICES ORGANIZATIONS don’t know their TOP DEVELOPERS

A developer in a software Product organization is the go to person to solve any problem.  It is extremely unlikely that a Services Organization even knows their top developers.  Developers of Software Products may often get paid more, and maybe more relevant to a customer implementation than any manager.  I have seen situations where One Top Developer has by himself been able to solve a problem that 15 managers, technical leads and developers could not.

The best Product Organizations will identify and nurture these developers.  IT Services organization will struggle with salary bands, designations, bonuses, and the best ones will find workarounds to reward these developers.  But that’s just what it will be – a workaround at best.

TRUTH 6: IT SERVICES ORGANIZATIONS don’t know IP management

Providing an IT Software Service to a customer and actually being the owner of the Software Product are very different perspectives.  When you own the Intellectual Property – here this refers to the Software Product; it comes with a different set of liabilities as well.

The questions an IT Services company may not ask – Did I leave a security hole in my software through negligence? My design is faulty and my code is badly written – did I disclose this to my customers?  If one customer is going to sue me for damages, does that mean all my customers will have to be informed? What if one of your developers has copied code that is Open Source – what are the implications? Etc. etc. etc.

Also, to develop IP, requires a certain amount of R&D (loosely used term here to indicate trial and error, waste and true R&D) – which algorithms will be most optimal? Which UI will be a hit with the customer?  Which features will be used the most?  And anyone who has been in R&D, knows that investment in R&D does not guarantee results and is often considered waste.  R&D needs an open mind and the results are often serendipitous.

Services organizations are experts at managing waste and reducing fat.  The Product organization actively produces waste and a CFO or an Accountant is often looking at the Product team (within the IT Services Organization) with itchy fingers to take that number off his xls sheet.  The Product team needs to experiment, to create and to throw away;  to improve things and hone it and make it better.  It is an idea generating machine that needs focus to create more value.  It is just such a throwaway piece that a product may need to make it standout, to break through the clutter and the noise in its space.

Related to IP is also a host of copyright, trademark and patents related issues.  The IT Services Organization needs to come up to speed with all of this if it is to create software products.  The last thing you need is for your Product to be successful and then to discover that someone else is using the same name or you have been slapped with a copyright infringement.

IP is the differentiator that can make your Software Product successful.

TRUTH 7: IT SERVICES ORGANIZATIONS grow through SIZE and PERSEVERANCE

IT SERVICES ORGANIZATIONS are all about growth through replication of success.  The growth mantra for this replication of success is to scale through resources, infrastructure, deployment on projects, managing bench, engaging with customers, building competencies, delivering software projects successfully time after time after time.  There is also a huge push on sales and winning large deals.

An IT Services business is also conservative by nature.  Due to its maturity, it is also a predictable business model.  Investments are made in people after knowing the size of Customer Projects that will be won. You assign resources on a won Project and then remove them when the Project is over.  When you don’t win the projected business and have a large number of unutilized resources (bench) you either cut salary or you ask people to leave after a certain amount of idle time.

In a Software Product Organization, at the first level, the Product should be able to talk for itself.  The word of mouth is critical.  For Example, for an internet product to grow, the problem is eyeballs and retention of the end customer on your internet site.  The primary focus is not on growing the number of people you have to hire and train.  In Services deals you may lose out if you are unable to show the customer your ability to scale up and get office space, people, training, rebadging, infrastructure, etc. on time.  In Product you will need to do a flawless job of your product implementation and ensuring your product Roadmap is road worthy.   You grow through better products, with backward compatibility, with presence on mobile, with analytics – and many other features around the product along with a science to replicate deployment methodologies and customer trainings.

Both IT Services Organization and Product Organizations scale and grow in very different ways.  An IT Services Organization doesn’t have the DNA for software products.  So, if a Services Organization chooses to go for Software Products be prepared for some gene level surgery.

TRUTH 8: IT SERVICES ORGANIZATIONS are not experts in their Customers’ Business

IT Services have today moved away from being just technology companies.  A website of an IT Services organization shows you industry verticals and domain solutions.  Full credit to IT Services companies for providing such exemplary service to its customers.  However, the customer still doesn’t expect the IT Services organization to know its business better than itself.

IT Services Organizations have honed Customer Service to a fine art.  There are processes and sub-processes to be followed.  You have frameworks like ITIL that continually reduce cost of maintenance and support.  The focus is on reducing cost of Business As Usual (BAU) activities.

With a Software Product it is different.  In the domain of a particular Software Product, customers expect you to know everything.  You are expected to know the domain, the technology, competing products, integration with other systems, mapping to business processes, etc.  You are expected to know how the beginner users and how the expert users will use and misuse your product.

All Customer Service comes from the knowledge of the customers’ business scenarios and not from a support management framework.  The ability to anticipate a customers’ problems and to be able to demonstrate thought leadership are critical to the success of a Product Organization.

Conclusion

If you are an IT Services Organization the biggest mistake you can make is to think that a Software Product is just another piece of software, which it is.  But that is not ALL what it is.  It is a completely new business.  So be prepared to reinvent that part of your team or else …

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How to think about a product startup progress ?

One of the most difficult things in a product startup is to know when has progress happened and if it is in the right track. This is an even more difficult problem for first time product entrepreneurs. Not to say that it easy for a second time entrepreneur but in that case experience intuitively guides.

Most prevalent thinking is to go from idea to a product build phase leading to a launch in alpha & beta followed by several product releases. Sales & marketing gets somewhat sprinkled on top of this mostly spread after the beta release.

Another way to think about this that I have found very useful is the following.

When the anatomy of an idea is examined it leads to revealing of problem and solution hypothesis inside it.

Problem/Solution Fit

The first stage or milestone therefore lends itself to a problem/solution fit. This is the stage when product idea under question has established that it addresses a large pain point and demonstrated a solution that works well for the problem faced for a specific set of users/customers.   For a B2C company this occurs when a few 1000 of users exists and some amount of recurrence or stickiness exist. In case of B2B or SMB product 1- 5 paid or evangelist customers.

User/Experience Fit 

Subsequently this milestone involves having identified the right architecture/flow, copywriting that connects & forms right positioning in the mind, visual and graphic design to create an element of identity for perception and recall.  Essentially providing an experience to the identified user/customers that truly delights and  helps improve acquisition and create retention.

Product/Market Fit

Product/Market Fit is a term that was coined by Marc Andreessen. It means being in a market with a product that can satisfy the market. It is the stage where the product is used or adopted repeatedly by a sizable number of users/customers

Sean Ellis further refined the definition to say that in a survey with customers they are told that product that they are have been exposed would be discontinued and if at least 40% of customers will revolt at that the thought.

In B2B/SMB it is few 50-100 customers and beyond, In B2C it is at least 200,000 users with a good repeat usage could be roughly called to.

Business Model/Scale Fit

It is the growth stage where the right business model for growing at scale is identified at which truly phenomenal growth happens.

Up until the Product/Market fit it is phase of learning and discovery and several iterations & pivots can and do happen.  While this happens it is also important to keep in mind another stage though not related to the product but an important one.

Founder/Problem Fit

Sometimes founder starts with a big vision about the product idea however having to identify a problem that is truly worth solving can be highly iterative process and can look very different from what was originally envisioned. It is important for the founder to re-establish that the revised version is indeed something that continues to motivate to build.  This stage ideally should be post problem/solution fit and before user/experience fit.

This model is not an original one or not even the only model of thinking about stages of a product startup but it helps frame answers for many things.

    • Each successive stage marks reduction of uncertainty and better modeling of risks in product success journey.
    • Visits, Page Views, number of downloads are not good enough for product/market fit. It may be necessary but not sufficient.
    • Product/market fit success is not equal to business success. In my previous startup I built a mobile app (turn phone into webcam) with over 1.5 million downloads and very high daily active usage and along with an excellent NPS. Product was super success but with no business model ( in the pre iOS era  of no app store or mobile ads) the business did not succeed.
    • Early business traction is not equal to product success (not even problem/solution fit). Ex: Several of the Indian e-commerce companies.
    • Job of an accelerator is to help take companies beyond Problem/Solution fit. If the market structure allows smaller cycle feedback loop then it should even achieve User/Experience fit by the time startups graduate from these accelerators. Unfortunately many view accelerator as a way to get funded forward.
    • In India most of the product startups are stuck at just before reaching problem/solution fit and also just before product/market fit.

What are the mental map of your product startup progress ?

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Product positioning and sales strategy must be approached the way an army fights a war

To position the product, you must first have clarity on the addressable market and its breakdown in terms of different industries or user communities (let’s call both of them as ‘verticals’ for simplicity). Then analyze which of them can benefit the most from your product, where your maximum contacts are, and which has the least competition.

You can accordingly initiate preliminary sales efforts with well-known contacts in verticals that appear to have the best potential. Initial sales in a start-up are opportunistic—you take the business that you get. Yet, over time, you can only gain by firming up your target client base and tailoring your product to them.

Product positioning and sales strategy must be approached the way an army fights a war. It may not be easily apparent which verticals to focus on. In similar situations, armies launch probing attacks to detect weak lines of defence, before deciding on the exact battle plan. Founders can test the market with different customers, who would help them to develop insight into which industries, user communities or geographies have the best potential.

Once weak links are identified, choose initial battles to be on your terms. In the 1971 war, the Indian army avoided enemy troops that were concentrated in cities in East Bengal. They quickly captured the countryside, surrounded the towns, until the enemy surrendered. Similarly, a start-up must spend its limited sales budget to target the right customers.

Positioning and sales are influenced by different factors, some of which are listed below:

Target Market

  • Your product may have the potential to solve similar set of problems for different verticals. However, limited finances will stop you from ad- dressing all of them. Focusing on one or two verticals can result in a more specific solution, thereby increasing total value delivered by the product. This improves the probability of converting opportunities to sales.
  • The best target segments are not necessarily the obvious ones. For example, a vertical may be large but should be ruled out if it has entrenched competitors, less appetite for IT products, remote location etc.
  • Conduct some research by talking to potential clients in various verti- cals, industry experts and reviewing market surveys.
  • Sometimes, you may simply stumble on the right vertical. Initial clients provide the momentum and knowledge base related to a particular industry segment.

Delivery Model  

  • Sales strategy depends on the kind of product: enterprise software for companies, consumer software, web downloads, hosted solution (SaaS) with subscription fee, or an ad-based ‘free’ web portal.
  • Your product may support more than one delivery model. Thus, vendors may target big companies with full-blown enterprise software, while providing a SaaS version for SMBs. Many companies offer a free downloadable ‘lite’ version of the product, which can be upgraded to a paid full version. A free website may charge a subscription fee for advanced capabilities or special content. 

Initial Support

  • Does your product work out of the box with almost no support? Or does it need some customization and training? Is the product serving an obvious need, or does it require substantial education before a client decides to buy the product? The answers will influence the sales model.  

Geography

  • Is your product specific to India or global in scope? Even if global, do you plan to sell in India first? Does your city and region have sufficient opportunities to sell the product?
  • Except with SaaS, targeting and supporting customers outside India can be very expensive. It is best to follow an ‘expanding universe’ model, where initial focus is in your immediate area, followed by proximate locations, and then a global market.

Product positioning is closely tied to licensing model and pricing. We will consider each one individually.

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Quick Research / Usability Methods: Expert Usability Review

(Post 1 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.)

ProductNation in collaboration with a few like-minded design professionals, recently put together an informal forum for designers, engineers, product managers & entrepreneurs in the Delhi NCR region. The objective of this forum was to evangelize and encourage a dialog around Design Thinking among the start-up community.

I conducted a short workshop on this topic at the forum’s launch event – a day long interactive meet up – hosted at the MakeMyTrip office in Gurgaon.

During the workshop, I introduced participants to the concept of Design Thinking and touched upon a few design research and usability methods that they could use to support design thinking within their organizations. A brief recap:

Design Thinking is an approach to design rather than a specific technique or method.
A core principle central to supporting design thinking is iteration. A ‘prototype and test’ focused approach fuelled by empathy for the people who will ultimately use the product, is recommended to be followed throughout the product development lifecycle.
There are several user research methods that can help companies connect to and understand their end users better. Guerrilla Research techniques in particular, are especially useful  in context to the start-up environment – Where time is of essence, budget is limited, teams are small, people are typically multitasking and playing multiple roles.
Guerrilla Research includes research techniques that can be done more quickly, with less effort and budget, as compared to formal or traditional user research techniques. Remote  / Informal Usability Testing, Man on the Street Interviews, Micro-surveys, Fake Doors, ‘Design the Box’ and Personal Inventory are a few examples of quick research techniques that can be learnt and implemented fairly well by a newbie researcher / anyone on a start-up team doubling up as a researcher.

In this first post, I want to introduce a discount usability engineering method called the ‘Expert Usability Review.’

Like Guerrilla Research methods, a Usability Review is an effective way to quickly identify usability and ease-of-use issues on a product. However, unlike user research, this method does not involve talking to end users at all.

What it involves is ‘expert evaluators’ reviewing a product, to identify usability and ease of use issues across different UI areas like Navigation and Structure, Layout, Visual Design, Interaction, Error Handling, Content etc. The experts are able to identify issues by drawing on their own experience in the areas of design and usability.

Subjectivity is minimized and issue validity maximized (or attempted to!) by ensuring that issues identified map onto existing and recognized design guidelines / principles / best practices or heuristics.

The issues identified through review, can then be fixed as part of an iterative design process. The kinds of issues that a Usability Review typically identifies are the ‘low hanging fruit’ or obvious usability problems.

Doing a review helps to highlight any aspect of an interface that violates usability and design principles.

The issues that surface through a review are different from the type of issues that come up while using user based methods like Usability Testing. So a review is a good complement to other user research techniques that may also be employed.

(More on typical issues found through Heuristic Evaluation and Usability Testing vs. Expert Reviews)

To demonstrate the type of issues typically found through a Usability Review, I evaluated the ‘Submit Ticket’ function on Freshdesk. Freshdesk is an online customer support software, targeted at small and medium sized businesses looking for a cloud based solution.

Here are some of the issues that I found:

Note: This is not an exhaustive review of the ‘Submit Ticket’ page, but a few example issues that help illustrate the type of issues that may be found through a usability review.
The products selected to be used as examples in this series of posts are products that are well designed in general. This highlights the importance of iterative design / the type of issues that can be unearthed even in well-designed products, by using various usability and research techniques.

issue observation 1issue observation 2issue observation 3issue observation 4issue observation 5issue observation 6The examples shown above are just a fraction of the issues that a Usability Review could highlight.
The success and effectiveness of this technique is dependent on the experience and skill of the reviewer. A review is typically done by three or four experts in the field of usability and design.

This method is best suited for start-up’s who have access to skilled and experienced usability / design professionals who can conduct a Usability Review.

Post 2 coming up soon, will introduce a related technique called ‘Heuristic Evaluation’.
With similar goals to an Expert Usability Review, a Heuristic Evaluation is a relatively easier starting point for novice researchers – Ideal for start-ups who don’t have a formal design / usability team in place, but want to try their hand at usability evaluation.

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 methods that you used.

We also 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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6th iSPIRT Playbook RoundTable: Challenges in building a global software product company from India

In the continuing series of Round Tables product veterans Samir Palnitkar, ShopSocially and Jatin Parekh, AirTight Networks took the participants through a journey of discovery about why they want to go global and taking a critical look at the challenges they must overcome.

It takes a guy like Samir to lay the foundation for such a Round Table, having stoked the discussion with his experience and adding fuel by way of eliciting ideas and experiences of others. There’s no quick formula but the session did throw up some easy mantras to achieve those Global ambitions…

Some interesting takeaways from this session :

TEAM:

–       Hiring for overseas is always a challenge and you can’t be careful enough

–       Get a co-founder with a sufficiently high stake in the game, and one who is ready to adapt to the call of the hour.

–       If you know the person from earlier, nothing like it

–       Stay away from expensive consultants and retainers. Find someone who will take less cash (and therefore has had a prior successful exit / financially secure)

–       Write down the issues, objectives, compensation, way things are done, who does what, 5 year vision, etc. These discussions need to happen 

Experiences of those present:

–       One of the RT participant founders even camped in the US for 3 months to find the right guy, interviewing over 15 persons identified through various contacts. They evaluated trust, skill and cultural fit before deciding.

–       Most people do not want to be the lone member of startup in the US because all decision making would happen in India. One of them had a member already selling remotely so were thinking of moving that person to US.

–       If there are 3-4 co founders, there is enough mental bandwidth to get one person to US for 6 months to set things up.

–       Get partners to sell for you, they front end and sift thru the leads. May be encourage one of the partners to join you, as did one entrepreneur who had a good partner in E&Y front ending and finally robbed E&Y to get his co-founder !

–       In a nutshell, don’t compromise on this first hire. 

PREPARED TO TAKE THE FLIGHT ?

–       Start selling globally only if you can fund the sales cost for at least a year

–       It’s ok to do some services revenue to generate some cash. But this is also the biggest pitfall, if you end up doing too much customization that cripples you later. 

Key considerations:

–       You have to learn how to sell if you don’t already. Thumb rule is – if you can’t sell your product, nobody can.

–       You should have a sufficient funnel and regular flow of enquiry / conversion / sales and cash flows. Ok that’s a lot to ask but then that’s what it needs !

–       Prepare the Sales play book. A new person cannot invent the playbook to sell in US for you. 

PRODUCT MANAGEMENT

–       Do you want to keep Product Management close to the customer or close to the R&D team?

–       Typical challenges in this are the ability to be aligned. Clear internal communication is crucial in motivating the team for the higher purpose

–       Delivery teams are usually in India, however you need to deal with the challenges of motivating team from a distance and account for cultural differences

The practical Product Manager:

–       Understanding the higher purpose and communicating it again and again is very important. If engineers are in the same office as sales guys then its easy, motivation happens. But if teams are physically separated then you have to build the channel to keep that communication going.

–       Communicate back to sales what problems engineering is facing.

–       Product Manager must have a regular travel plan and must meet customers if working at a distance from the market. This is crucial to get the alignment early on.

–       The PM cannot be note taker, taking customer requirements and giving it back verbatim to engineering to build. He must understand, negotiate and make intelligent distinction between features and requirements.

–       Priorities should be clearly published in writing.

–       Engineers should have the freedom to think and push back on features, but within boundaries. That’s when they can understand the purpose vs just coding.

–       Engineers must have first hand communication with customers, go for customer meetings, handle support calls etc.

–       When hiring engineers, set the expectation upfront that you have to do everything, and even learn outside your core competence. A Startup cannot afford to have people rigid within their own area. 

MARKETING

–       The biggest conundrum is in expectation mismatch, US teams being very “look” orinted and India teams being “fact” oriented

–       Interpretation of specs is usually different for each team, and quality of collateral needs to be extremely high to appeal to a US audience

–       The simple approach is to keep everything that requires a “handshake”, in the US and to teach India teams to be perfectionists.

–       If you need to get copywriting, don’t even think of getting it done in India. The lingo, the flow has to be completely American – leave that to an American.

–       Use a professional UX design shop if you need to

–       Use professional agencies for PR, like PRWEB, etc. 

SALES

–       Necessarily should be close to the customer. If the product requires a handshake, then you definitely need a US team member.

–       At the very least you need someone to stay up at night and receive calls

–       Prospecting via Linkedin, using polls and doing cold calling from India are usually successful approaches 

Sales and Marketing in the US is a big discussion in itself. A lot was left to be discussed, perhaps deserving an entire session devoted to selling in the US market. Another day, another Round Table then. 

ProductNation is the Go-To destination for many a successful software product. There are several amongst us who have tasted success in the global market. Do share your experience right here.

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SaaS Pricing – the role of customer value proposition

The trend of pure-play SaaS providers and on-premise software ISVs diversifying into SaaS is on the rise. SaaS revenue for global top 10 ISVs forms 40% of all software revenues. According to Gartner, the SaaS revenues will grow annually at 17.5% to form 24% of all software revenues in 2016. This would amount to USD 22.5 billion up from USD 14.5 billion in 2012. While SaaS makes a perfect business sense in the long term, in the short term, SaaS providers face unprofitable business for two or more years among other challenges in marketing and product management. SaaS has given birth to new ways of pricing like fixed-fee or usage based pricing, pay-as-you-go, freemium model and so on. Pricing is an important aspect of SaaS business.

I will be covering SaaS pricing through a series of blogs on topics like concept of value pricing, role of segmentation and tiers, pricing structure, metrics, managing pricing over product life cycle, competition and product positioning. I start with concepts of value and role of segmentation.

A Google search throws up ‘n’ number of SaaS pricing models. But success of any pricing model is always rooted in a sound value proposition of the offering. Cost plus pricing is common, seems financially prudent thing to do but is known to leave a lot of money on the table. Also remember, even when offered free the customers would not pick up your offering if they do not perceive value in it. The first step in pricing strategy is to ascertain value of your offering.

Demonstrate value of your offering

The economic and emotional values are the primary drivers of purchase decision. The economic value of your offering is has two components – price of the next best alternative and the value of what differentiates your offering from the next best. You have no control on the competitors’ price. Therefore differentiation is the way to go to provide better overall customer value and better price. Sometimes customers may not perceive the value. It is critical your marketing communication ensure what is important to customer, specially differentiated features and benefits come to the buyers’ notice. So develop your value proposition and communicate it clearly to the customers.

A simple equation for the value proposition is (Value = Benefits – Costs). For this, you must quantify the economic value of your products features together with the emotional and psychological value. One way to do this is to quantify impact of your offering on customers’ revenue, productivity, profitability and so on. Here is an example of computing economic value of a feature.

A midsize software product MNC in India was considering moving to Google Apps. Google Apps offer benefits to two entities in an organization – IT and end-user. The IT benefits include cost savings on licenses, IT infrastructure and operations and maintenance. The end user benefits include – 1) productivity gain due to improved email search, spam filtering, archiving and improved response times, 2) quicker issue resolution and decision making thru shared editing of documents and 3) improved response time to customers and partners. Let us see how we can calculate productivity gain from just one benefit, say, and faster email search. Assume –300 employees, 5 day workweek, 50 work weeks, average per hour employee cost of $10, average 1 hour email usage per day, and a 10% saving (estimate based on previous implementations). This translates into an annual productivity gain worth 300 x 1 x 5 x 50 x 0.1 x $10 = $75 K.  The total benefits (productivity gains + IT cost savings) for three years operations worked out at $81K, $111K and $123K. Total subscription costs in this period were $18,900 (300 x $63 per user) per year. There were initial costs for transitioning from legacy system, testing, pilot and training amounting to $5K.  The overall risk adjusted net present value of benefits (including several other benefits like archiving, SPAM filtering, threading, IM etc.) was $205K. The customer went ahead with the purchase.

Segment your customers

All customers do not have same needs, value perceptions and the willingness to pay. Targeting the whole population with one product and one price is not the way t best financial performance. It leads to leaving money on the table for some customers who are willing to pay higher and losing out another set of customers who can’t afford the price. Thankfully, the customers can be sub grouped or segmented based on certain similarities. Value based segmentation helps create pricing commensurate with the perceived value by those customer segments.

Segmentation requires creativity in addition to analysis. It must reflect your marketing strategy. For example, Zoho, Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365, compete in online document management area (word processor, spread sheet, presentations, email).  However, Zoho Docs views the market in three segments represented by personal, standard and premium licenses priced at $0, $3 and $5 per month per user. Office 365 has more complex view of the same market. It segments it into seven segments, namely small, midsize and enterprise business, education, government, professional and home with fourteen different licenses ($0 to $20 per month per user)! In contrast, Google Apps has just one offering at $5 per month per user. So, why does Microsoft has seven segments and fourteen price points? A closer study would reveal that the breadth and depth of features / functionality offered by Office 365 far outstrips Zoho docs and Google apps. It allows creation of diverse bundles of features and pitch them to different segments at price points that meet respective value perceptions. By doing this Microsoft is able to capture the students segments (low paying capacity) while maintaining premium pricing for the enterprise. Microsoft would lose both lot of money and a large chunk of market if they decided on just one segment with one price. Interestingly, it is possible to create segmentation and variable pricing without bundling different sets of features i.e., on an identical offering. For example, railways transports grains at much cheaper rates compared to manufactured consumer goods in the same wagon. There is very little difference in the inputs that go into transporting the two items. I have yet to see this in software or SaaS.

One more point in favour of segmentation is as follows. In a high fixed cost industry like software and SaaS, it is a good strategy to capture the large volume of customers in the long tail with a price that is just equal to the offering’s variable cost. This is good for revenue. Generally, more segments the better. The factors that limit number of segments are complexity and sales administration cost, smaller differentiation between the offering for adjacent segments and customer propensity to select the lower priced segment when differentiation is small.

I will close this blog with a quiz. Given below is the old pricing page of Serverdensity (http://www.serverdensity.com). Serverdensity is a provider of cloud based server monitoring. They have tiered pricing based on number of servers that a customer has. What is good, bad and ugly about this pricing?

Please look for the next blog on SaaS pricing metrics.

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Fifth iSPIRT Playbook Roundtable: Product Manager, the Skill in Demand

It is a cliché to say product management is both art and science. The product manager’s function encompasses a range of tasks, only limited by the company’s vision. Deep Nishar, Senior VP, Products and User Experience, at LinkedIn, told the audience at Nasscom Product Conclave 2012 that, “product managers should have brain of an engineer, heart of a designer and speech of a diplomat.” The product manager with such an expanse of skill set is hard to find in India. With the intention of bringing experiential learning and to ignite conversations among product entrepreneurs so that they learn from each other, iSPIRT, the think-tank for startups, is organizing Playbook Roundtables that facilitate transferring of key knowledge through an open discussion. In the fifth Playbook Roundtable organized at Chennai by iSPIRT, Sridhar Ranganathan, who has rich experience as a product manager, shared anecdotes quoting from positions he held at Zoho, Yahoo, and InMobi to define who a product manager is.

Sridhar’s naval architecture career did not last long. A chance meeting with Sekar Vembu, founder of Vembu Technologies, landed him a job at AdventNet (all three Vembu brothers, Sridhar, Sekar, and Kumar were part of AdventNet then). He was placed to manage a team that was working on a product. Not a geek, he took three months to understand Java Script. A management shake-up at AdventNet properly designated him as product manager. Then began his tryst with product management. At Zoho, the discipline of product conception, execution, and delivery was practiced with a high level of checks and balances. With a small team and margin for error almost non-existent, Sridhar learned to work with constraints to deliver software products. Moving on, he headed the team working on Maps at Yahoo. This proved to be challenging as managerial oversight was nonexistent but any senior level meetings thrashed any feeling of achievement. Sridhar by now had crafted the art of product management and he had an excellent team to work with. Then at InMobi, his challenge was scale. He was able to successfully navigate through the phase where InMobi’s ad impressions went up from 50 million per month to 2 billion per month.

The product culture

There were 15 participants from OrangeScape (Suresh Sambandam and team), Fresh Desk (Smrithi, product manager), Kallos (George Vettah), LPCube (Lakshman Pillai), Array Shield (Vasanthan Kumar), ContractIQ (Ashwin), Twenty19.com (Karthikeyan Vijayakumar), RailsFactory (Mahendran), Fix Nix (Shanmugavel and team), Social Beat (Suneil Chawla), and Humble Paper (Vivek Durai), represented by its mostly founders. Suresh was keen to know how with a small product team (Zoho instituted a culture of a seven-member team to work on a product), Zoho was able to recruit college drop-outs and train them to work on products. Sridhar said if the company is big enough and has a strong culture (such as escalation of wrong codes, build times, and customer complaints to the highest level if not done within a set time frame), such experiments are possible. In Google, you know the person who is going to work because of the recruitment process but at Zoho, you have to groom the person.

Sridhar strongly emphasized that data plays a big role in product management and went on to say that “if you build technology products, your core data model and technology stack determines your business model.” He listed various challenges faced by organizations such as SalesForce to remove duplication of data. For example, to change a primary key, Zoho needed 14 months. George Vettah added that Ramco had to reengineer its offering after SAP effectively took away its market share. Sridhar gave away one more of his product philosophies: “If there is a constraint in the product, and if you have the market, you could only pray that the market does not go away till you reengineer the product.”

Education to Product: the product continuum

Through a graph, he illustrated the various stages of the product continuum: Taking problem complexity on one axis and scale or impact on the other, he said, for low problem complexity and low scale, education (of the customer to tell them why your product) is needed. At the next level, process needs to be defined (to quote an example, the process of how to apply for a passport online), Still further, at the higher complexity and more users, you need to define the procedure (how to fill in the form of the passport application), and still at a higher level, you need to provide a solution to the problem. But for a very complex problem with the highest impact (nonlinear), you need a product. So by understanding the need and the impact, you can execute your product strategy.

The product manager

He said that the fundamental role of the product manager is to identify the product that has the maximum probability of success. “The success metrics of a product determines the product manager’s action,” he added. This was followed by an interesting discussion on how the founder passes the baton to the next product manager as the company scales up. Kaushik from OrangeScape provided a fine example. The product manager has to work on three aspects: hygiene, spoiler, differentiator. A hygiene part of the product is not impactful but without it the product wouldn’t work. The spoiler is beating the features of the competition, and differentiator is the difference that your product makes. Further, at the first level, the product manager has to find users for the product, at the next the user level should be scaled, say from 2000 users to a million users, and further at the next level, if there is a drop in user level due to competition, the project manger has to devise ways to retain the user level. These three different stages require product mangers of different skill sets.

Finding the right product manager

Finding the right product manager is a challenge. Sridhar said the right product manager is identified by his ability to align with the vision of your organization and should have the potential to grow with the organization. For him, the hiring decisions are not done in a day. Sometimes it stretches to two months as he engages in long conversations with the potential candidate. Then an interesting discussion on organization structure where most of the times the product manger is asked to “influence without authority” was discussed. “The product manager has to be temperamentally strong,” stressed Sridhar. In many organizations, the developers and engineers are not direct reports of the product manager. Engineering team is headed by a senior engineering head. But your input on the engineer decides his grading. So at most positions, product managers have to work with teams that don’t directly report to them. By telling the team the importance of the product and by selling the vision (by exercising influence without authority), you need to get the work done. Smrithi, from FreshDesk, said influence without authority was one of the attributes looked for in a product manager in her earlier employment. George Vettah added that research has shown that for product managers did not possess strong right brain thinking (creative) or left brain thinking (analytical), but somewhere that balanced both.

Building the product, managing the team

The ideal way to enforce build discipline is to have a release ready after every build. This is practically impossible but if achieved, gives the product management team an edge on product release. This also makes sure that the product isn’t broken. Several R&D prototyping needs to be done before the product is handed over for completion to the engineering team. Once the product is fixed and passed to engineering team, it’s difficult to tweak again. So spend as much time in R&D rather than “release early, release often.” Sridhar said managing multiple products only requires you to have user interface and data operability aligned.

The product manager has to find the right time to pivot. Sridhar asked the participants to read Lean Startups by Eric Ries. The author has dwelt at length on pivoting. Failures are part of product management but how the product manager negotiates such down moments counts. The product manager has to be mentally strong. For any of the product manager initiatives, winning the trust of the stakeholders is key, stressed Sridhar. He added that the satisfaction of seeing the product completed after your visual thinking on it is immense. He said that the product manager’s role is cerebral as it involves a lot of thinking.

There were intense discussions when each of the issues was discussed among the participants. Vivek Durai, who is now solely developing a product, said his priority listing has changed and his to-do list has a lot of elements to add up to. Kaushik said his respect for his previous product managers had risen after this discussion. Suresh felt some more improvements can be made to the discussion format. Suneil felt that the discussions were insightful and opened his world to product management. Karthikeyan Vijayakumar said he would implement a lot of stuff from the discussions.

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Aurus Network CourseHub: Delivering on the promise of classroom-in-the-cloud

Aurus Network was founded in 2010 with the vision to make quality education accessible to masses at affordable prices. It is revolutionizing the way distance/online education is delivered. Aurus offers CourseHub, its flagship product, which is a cloud-based solution for educational institutions (higher education, test prep and training,schools, etc.) to capture, store and deliver (live or on-demand) lectures online. The company has been funded by Indian Angel Networks and is the recipient of Microsoft Bizspark 2012 Startup Challenge in cloud category. This is a review of their flagship product CourseHub and the company.

Introduction

When I was in college and bunked classes (which was fairly often; it was hard to get up for 8 am classes), what usually got me through the course were the notes photocopied from one of the studious guys of the class. It was not the best solution, but was good enough. Then, in my 3rd year, my college introduced a special studio classroom where one of the course professors used to hold his lectures – a sound-proof, sanitized room where the professor used to write on a paper with marker which would show up on screen for us, and for recording. The recording was supposed to be available as a bunch of video cassettes (yes, I am that old!) in the library. It was painful to attend these classes because they felt so unlike a classroom, and of course, it was too complex to watch these recordings so I never watched any, and photocopied notes continued to save the day.

I was 15 years too early! If it was 2013, I probably would be sitting in a regular classroom whose lectures were being recorded, and recordings were available right after the class, on my course portal online, in an easy-to-consume format on the various devices I own. Recorded (and indexed) lectures would allow me to have lectures-on-demand, which is so cool.

This is what Aurus Network offers through its flagship product CourseHub. It is a cloud-based solution for educational institutions (higher education, test prep and training schools, etc.) to capture, store and deliver (live or on-demand) lectures online. CourseHub is also offered to corporates to manage remote training sessions and schools for capturing their classes.

Aurus Network was founded in 2010 by Piyush Agrawal and Sujeet Kumar, and is based in Bangalore. 

The Product

Usage Scenarios

There are 3 primary usage scenarios for CourseHub:

  1. Lecture Capture: A lecturer captures his/her lecture for offline viewing by students or for creating blended learning content (for MOOC or other delivery mechanisms).
  2. Self-paced learning: A lecturer’s class is recorded to be viewed later by students to allow them to review the content at their own pace. Lecturer can edit the video and add pop quizzes and assessments online. This is usually used by universities.
  3. Extend the classroom: In this scenario, a lecturer’s class is streamed in real-time to remotely located classrooms or students. This allows the lecturer to have a very large classroom and have it closer to where the students are, without spending time in physical travel or money to build a single-location large classroom. This is usually used by training and test preparation centers.

For all of these scenarios to work, the capture device needs to be set up in a studio or classroom, which is a 1-time activity.  This is typically done with a server class machine connected to internet via high speed broadband connection (higher the speed, better is the quality of video streamed and stored) and a capture device (HD camera and microphone) connected to the machine.

Development

The product was conceptualized in Nov 2010 in response to the problem posed by their first client. Their V1 was released in Nov 2010 and V2 in Feb 2011 with the first deployment and roll-out to 10 centers across India. Their tech team comprises of about 10 people, who are working on various technologies like video compression, video streaming, computer vision, large scale load balancing and engaging front end technologies.

Most of the innovation in the product has been achieved by applying technically simple but important insights about customer behavior and preferences. For e.g., one of the USPs of the solution is that they are able to deliver almost HD quality videos at as low as 200 Kbps, while other conventional solutions (web conferencing, video conferencing) require atleast 1 Mbps or more for the same. This has been achieved by prioritizing the encoding parameters which matter more for the viewer while watching educational videos (like clear audio, sharp writing etc.) rather than doing a one-size fits all kind of video encoding.

Features

Some of the product features are as follows:

  1. Record video with any HD camera and microphone
  2. Enable automatic focusing on teacher with Intelligent software based tracker
  3. Teachers can teach in their natural style
  4. Schedule captures in advance
  5. Automatic archiving to create media library in the cloud
  6. Integration with client’s website
  7. Integration with Learning Management Systems like Moodle, Blackboard, etc.

Differentiators

There are a few standout features in the product which are well worth the mention:

  1. They can deliver HD video quality at 200Kbps, which makes this available to all students who have a broadband connection. Other solutions use much higher bandwidth (around 1 Mbps in some cases). The reason they are able to do this is because they can optimize their compression algorithms using their knowledge of what is important for students (clear audio and writing is much more important than clearly visible instructor for example).
  2. No human intervention is required (after initial setup) to capture, store and deliver lectures, they have fully automated the solution (including tracking the presenter, managing connectivity disruption, etc.).
  3. It is a cloud-based solution, so clients can try out their solution without any hardware setup.
  4. Aurus provides a home-grown Learning and Content Management System which allows their clients to manage users and lecturers, edit video lectures, and add quizzes and assessments to the videos. This means that the clients get a complete product.

Market Adoption

Typical market for CourseHub in India are test preparation and training institutes like Career Point, Career Launcher, etc. and universities. CourseHub is sold on a monthly/yearly subscription model, for example Rs. 20K a month can get you 500 hours of lecture time (1 lecture + 99 students in a 1-hour lecture will constitute 100 hours of lecture time) and 50GB of storage (500 hours will fit into 50GB). However, for someone in the market for such a solution, there are many options to choose from:

  1. VSAT based classrooms (Hughes is the biggest player) – These are expensive to set up and require dedicated hardware, but offer highly reliable infrastructure
  2. Internet-based classrooms (like Aurus) – Some of these require expensive studio setup, while others, like Aurus, can work with regular hardware.
  3. Ad-hoc systems: You can use youtube (or other video streaming sites), Google Hangouts and some local capture method to enable a large part of functionality of capture, store and distribute, and save some money. Operational hassle will be larger.
  4. No system: this is still not a critical need for educational institutes and a large number of these institutes just don’t have any solution in place.

For all these solutions, technology is an important piece, but so is the overall package (that includes setup, operations, essentially IT-free solution), since the clients are not likely to be tech-savvy enough to manage these technological solutions.

Currently, Aurus is the technology solution provider of type #2 – allowing their clients to create internet-based classrooms. They have about 30 clients out of which around 20 are actively using their system. They have a healthy pipeline of future deals, sales cycle tends to be long and seasonal (because of academic session dependency).

The Roadmap

With the goals of capturing more clients in India in different segments (Corporate, Training and Test Prep, Schools) and also expanding outside India, Aurus has an ambition pipeline of features and innovations.

Product Roadmap

Over next 12 months or so, Aurus intends to deliver the following to its clients:

  1. Launching a completely Do-It-Yourself version of CourseHub, which will allow institutes based out of India to use the product
  2. Launching more features to allow professors/trainers to effectively analyze student performance and take pro-active actions
  3. For professors, adding multiple ways to lecture capture in their classrooms – using a dedicated capture appliance, an android app or manual uploading

Technology Roadmap

Aurus hopes to deliver following technology enhancements in this period:

  1. Enhanced Capture – Enhance and decouple capture process from software so that the solution can work with any kind of capture device and hence can allow them to go global. This includes allowing the use of high-end camera (which ship with Android OS) and remotely controlling it from server through an Android app.
  2. Deep LMS integration – Current LMS integrations are very shallow since it uses LTI. Deeper LMS integrations will enable more complex use cases to be supported.
  3. API solution – Allowing API level access to the video catalog to enable integration into client’s portal will allow CourseHub to be more tightly integrate with client portals.

Competitive Landscape

Companies offering such a solution (capture, store and distribute – live or on-demand) are very hot in US. Echo360 is a Steve Case backed venture that focuses purely on universities and offers socializing the learning (learn in groups and collaborate using social tools) and flipping the classroom (use classroom to discuss and clarify doubts rather than lecturing). Sonic Foundry is a public company, and Tegrity is a McGraw Hill company, both offering solution similar to CourseHub.

One of the reasons for this space being hot is the fact that flipping the classroom is becoming the craze, and with MOOC (Massively Open Online Course) also being the next big thing; capture, store and distribute of video lectures suddenly seems like a key technology piece to allow everyone to offer a MOOC.

In India, it is still early days for flipping classrooms and offering MOOCs. CourseHub is primarily being used to extend the classroom, and make star lecturers available in remote classrooms, in addition to using it for self-paced learning by making recorded lectures available for later viewing. However, as Indian universities catch up to these concepts, Aurus seems to be well-positioned to be a leader in the space if it plays its cards well.

The Road Ahead

If I have to go to college again, I will probably bunk again (while managing the attendances somehow since they are mandatory now). When I do so, I will probably still go for photocopied notes because they are so brief and quick to go through. I would really love to look up appropriate pieces of short video clips of the lecture when I get stuck in the notes so having notes and videos cross-indexed will be so useful; also useful will be the ability to find other lectures on the same micro-topic and try to really understand it from different perspectives. Essentially, videos become any other type of content which can be searched, used and mashed up together to create learning assets that are reusable and easily consumable.

Aurus is a pure technology provider in education space. It becomes apparent when you go through their solutions, their brochure, or the cool features they showcase on their website – they are technology-heavy. However, education sector doesn’t yield itself well to pure technology players, primarily because technology is hard to use, and very few institutes have technical/IT teams on their rolls. So what they need is complete solution (including service, personnel, etc.) so that it becomes plug-and-play for them. Aurus needs to be on top of its clients’ complete technology needs and should be willing to offer various value-added services.

Blended learning holds lots of potential, be it universities, training institutes, corporates or schools. Aurus seems to be well poised to help them deliver on this promise through technology.

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Product Manager, or Product Experience Manager?

In my last post Experiencing the product, or productizing the experience?, I talked about my experience with SiteZ and how their overall experience left much to be desired even though the core product was good enough. In this post, I will try to analyze things that went wrong which shouldn’t have.

Here are 5 things that went wrong for SiteZ if I look from a customer’s perspective:

  1. They misled the user about the time it takes to register. 
  2. They didn’t allow the user to abort the registration attempt gracefully (which left the email address behind and created rest of the mess). 
  3. 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). 
  4. They exposed a feature to me (unsubscribe) which didn’t work
  5. They didn’t give me an easy way to delete my account – emails bounced, UI didn’t have a button to delete, etc. 

It is easy to jump to the conclusion that the feature designers have a malicious intention: somehow get people’s email id and keep spamming them. However, let’s assume that is not the case, and that this is a case of incremental features ruining a product. With this assumption in mind, let’s proceed to analyze how each of these situations came to be:

  1. Misleading ad – Assuming it was not intentional, there are 2 possibilities:
    1. Marketing person would have asked someone in products about whether it can be done in 30 seconds, and someone said yes.
    2. Marketing person asked to tweak the flow to make it finish (with basic details) in 30 seconds, but the development team didn’t do the work and instead reused the longer flow.
  2. No graceful registration abort – This is purely a feature design or prioritization issue, probably they didn’t think abort is an important use case.
  3. Spam mail identity – I think the assumption would be that these mails go out after user has agreed to be spammed, so they would know (this information is anyway mentioned at the bottom of the mail in small fonts.
  4. Unsubscribe not working – Again, feature prioritization issue. Not having unsubscribe button is probably illegal in such spams, so the next best thing was to not code the functionality.
  5. Can’t delete account – A feature prioritization issue. Account deletion is usually an expensive operation (complicated to implement and get it right, and heavy on processing) and so someone somewhere decided it was not important.

A question that comes up: are we talking about one feature, one product, or one experience? Should the feature designer of registration flow worry about spam mail identity? Aren’t these very distinct features?

Yes, they are indeed distinct features. At the same time, they need to co-exist peacefully, without causing troubles for each other. SiteZ is one big product, which has multiple features in it which need to plug into each other, and play well with each other. However, if we say SiteZ is a product, it becomes hard to explain #1 above: who should be responsible for advertiser misleading the user. This is the reason why I would like to think of SiteZ as one big experience. Advertising is just augmenting the experience, or in some cases act as the invitation to try the experience. If a restaurant’s brochure misleads the customer and entices him with a 30% discount, which turns out to be only 10%, it is still a problem for the restaurant.

So who is responsible for SiteZ product experience? Enter Product Management team (see this discussion thread too). I would like to think it will be Chief Product Officer or VP – Product Management who has ultimate responsibility for the experience. Is it fair to product management team to have such a broad charter? I think it is fair, because the organization needs it and there is no group better positioned to do this.

To recap, here is what we have established so far:

  1. SiteZ had multiple features and services dysfunctional which combined to give a terrible overall experience.
  2. Even though they are diverse features and services, in the interest of the customer, overall SiteZ experience needs to be treated as one big product experience.
  3. The group that owns this one big product experience is Product Management team. They are in the best position to do so

In the next post, we will see how a product management team should have operated so that such issues can be minimized/avoided. Stay tuned!