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How to debug a product startup idea ?

You may find it useful to read the previous post on importance of ambiguity tolerance and questioning for an engineer transitioning to a product guy before reading this post.

When I was first tasked with writing new features for an existing product that contained thousands of lines of code I earnestly started reading through the documentation & code to understand how it is structured and to figure out the APIs to use. My then engineering mentor said to me

” Reading through the documentation & code you will spend days or even weeks forming mental model which you will learn may not be accurate as you implement your code later on, leading to a lot of wastage of time and redoing.  Instead setup your environment, load the code inside a debugger, put a breakpoint and run it through. If there are specific areas you want to learn  then ‘step in’ to that function. This way you will learn about it faster, more accurately and spend less time redoing “

I found this advice to be a great insight and I think it extends in many places.

As a product startup one always start with an idea and then forms mental models around that (business plan or business case studies) and then build things based on these models to later realize they were not accurate thus wasting a lot of time. In the harsh world of startups you don’t get another chance to re-write.

You have to know very early if your idea will work before you can commit a lot resources on it. Things that determine if your idea works are some of the following –

Will it be adopted by users,

Will it talked about to friends,

Will it paid for by someone,

Or even celebrated & craved.

Essentially will it create the impact for you and the world that you dream it will.

MVP – your Idea Debugger

To know if your idea will work you should run it through a debugger that can tell you that the logic of idea will lead to its intended impact.

Enter the Minimum Viable Product (MVP), a term first coined by Frank Robinson and further popularized by Eric Ries.  Today it is a term that is quite loosely & liberally used and at times even abused.  MVP is a misnomer in the sense it is not the stripped version of the product but it is really a tool about learning & risk reduction around customer & market.  It is employed to uncover critical learning of your idea.  MVP is best thought of as the debugger of your product idea.

Before we start getting into the details of an MVP, let’s examine the anatomy of an idea first

Idea Anatomy

An Idea consists of the following elements

Anatomy of an Idea
Anatomy of an Idea

Vision – A new state of the world that will be in place if the idea becomes successful.

Problem – A friction that is coming in the way of job that a beneficiary is trying to get done

Solution – A proposed alternative for removing the friction

Beneficiary (also called as Customer* or a User**) – Someone who is going to benefit from the idea

* Customer is one who writes the cheque for the service consumed.
**User is someone who uses the product or service

 

Example:

Let us take an example to illustrate. Suppose you came up with an idea for creating a mobile SariApp that shows how to drape a sari.  It could be dissected the following way.

SariApp Vision:  More women in the world  in touch with their Indian traditions (or traditional Indian dressing)

SariApp Problem:  Would like to wear a sari for attending an Indian function but have no past experience or knowledge of draping a sari.

SariApp Solution:  A screen by screen illustration of each step of sari draping.

SariApp Beneficiaries (customer):  Women who have been fascinated by this Indian dress or those who who grew up outside of India never bought a sari before.

Once you do this you realize that problem, solution & beneficiaries are all at best guesses or assumptions that you make.  The task of debugging your idea thus becomes one of converting each of these guesses into verifiable facts that either proves or disproves them.

How MVP clarifies Idea logic

After you list down the things that are big unknowns in your idea you build something minimal (your MVP) to question it. The interesting thing about the MVP is that you have to build one for every idea, the same debugger can’t be used for every idea and the same learning does not apply everywhere. You could design an MVP to test or uncover learning one element or combination of elements (about just problem or combination of problem/solution/customer segment in the idea).

An example of an MVP for the above SariApp could be a simple landing page that articulates clearly the problem statement, the solution and call to action (such as leaving an email address to get contacted when solution becomes ready). Responses from traffic directed to the landing page  will  help learn about the merit of the problem/solution. If there are high number of clicks on your landing page but very few clicks on call to action a most likely interpretation of that could be those who visited care about the problem but not the solution. If the visits itself was very few then it is most likely they don’t care about the problem itself as you have stated it and so on and so forth.

Few things to keep in mind

The fidelity of the MVP is very important aspect to note which describes the minimum-ness of the MVP and plays a key role (see diagram) on the learning and how fast you get it. You have to start with testing the value proposition (a concise statement of problem & solution together) of the idea and increase the fidelity to learn more.
Fidelity of an MVP
Fidelity of an MVP denotes the minimum-ness of the MVP

 In most cases MVP mostly tells what does not work rather than what works or even why it works. One has to iterate over changing the MVP and increasing the fidelity of it.

So what are the debuggers (MVP) you have built for your idea?

In the next post we will look at “Four critical stages of Product Startup Fitness” 

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7 Ways to Avoid Your Product Company Becoming a Services Company!

Product companies (especially those focused on the Enterprise) always face pressures, primarily that of cash flow in the earlier years, forcing them to take on more services components. This is especially true in countries like India where angel and venture investments are not as plentiful as in Silicon Valley. This is a trap that product companies will find it difficult to emerge from once they get into it.

Just to be clear – there is nothing wrong in being a services company! In many ways, it has better cash flow profiles in the earlier years enabling companies to ramp up with additional people and “projects”. But, you may not be able to make progress on your product vision, unfortunately!

How do you avoid this situation? Here are 7 ways you can avoid this trap:

1. Stick to your Vision, Test and Pivot: As we learn more about Lean Startups, one of the best ways to avoid becoming a services company is to make sure that your product is needed, clients will pay for it and you can build a company on it! You talk to potential clients before you build the product. Even then, you build only a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), roll it out and test your hypotheses by getting to revenues. If revenues are minimal or non-existent, you pivot and build something that someone will pay money for, and soon!

2. Build Features Based on How many Users Ask For Them:  In one of our enterprise product companies, we had a simple rule – If one client asks for it, it goes into the backlog list. If two clients ask for it, it goes into the next major release. If three clients ask for it, it goes into the next sprint!

3. Turn Custom Components into Product Features if you can: Try not to build components for any one client. Parameterize the client’s requirement into a more general idea and make what they are asking for, a specific case of that! For example, if they require your product to work with a certain brand of a reporting tool, think of how you can generalize it so that it can work with most reporting tools. You may need to build additional components but it will be worth it when the next client needs your product to work with another brand of a reporting tool!

4. Line up Services Partners Early:  Large product companies deliberately price their professional services much higher than their service partner ecosystem does. For example, if you were to source Oracle product expertise from Oracle, it will be an order of magnitude more expensive than obtaining it from a service partner of theirs. That’s how they prevent themselves from being sucked into spending too much time on services and away from their products. For small product companies this may be difficult to do, but if you find service partners who are also service partners for related products, they may be interested. It will involve sharing your revenues but that’s the tradeoff!

5. Line up Product Partners Early:  Products have natural boundaries and it’s good to recognize them early on and bring in product partners that do those things better. For example, if your product addresses a specific vertical with a core solution, line up product partners for related needs like reporting, social media integration, telephony integration, etc. You cannot be everything to your clients and identifying related product partners early on will help you avoid the trap of reinventing all related wheels all over again! Of course, you need to architect your product in such a way that it can easily integrate with other solutions!

6. Refuse Non-Core Competency Opportunities:  This is easy to say but tough to follow in real-life if you are a product startup. If a client offers you money to do a related thing but not quite what you were hoping to sell, you may need to refuse it! But that’s exactly what a product startup needs to do to stay true to its vision. If three clients ask for this other thing, that’s a Pivot! Take it and go forward!

7. Plan ahead for Cash Flow Pressures: Product companies are not for the faint hearted! Do not embark on even writing one line of code before you talk to potential prospects about your ideas, show them sketches of what you were thinking about, and finding out what they are willing to spend for such a solution. If you are already well into having two or three clients and it is a case of scaling, you may need to pivot to products that could scale up better, faster.

It pays well to remember that with product companies the goal is to write code once, get paid many times. With services companies, you write code once, you get paid once! Very rarely do you get to write code and retain the Intellectual Property that is general, and can quickly be sold to other clients, unless you subsidize the initial development substantially!

Again, there is nothing wrong with being a services company. It has its plusses and minuses, but without paying attention to strategy, proper architecture and partners, you could end up becoming a services company when you want to go the other way!

I already am a product – Lady Gaga
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Whats your product – Dabangg Or Paan Singh Tomar?

Image courtesy - graphicleftovers.com

As a part of my product management training, I insist on the importance of understanding of behavioral science while managing products. I am both puzzled and irritated when a participant, that is mostly an MBA educated product manager tells me – Viveck, can we skip to the section of how to write a PRD as these principles are only relevant to my boss, VP – Product Management. On the contrary, designers and engineers hardly have ever raised such a moronic concern and are solely focussed on learning. Another, one such idiocy MBA product managers display is the need for ‘certification’. More about certifications in another blog.

Irrespective of your level as a product manager, its important to know about these behavioral principles as only through constant practice can you become adept at applying these with ease when you reach higher levels. Contrary to the mythical belief of our MBA product manager, knowledge doesnt descend down from heaven as soon as you are christened the VP of Product Management. It takes hard work and consitent practice to apply what you have learned

Why is it that I insist on understanding behavioral science especially w.r.t Internet Product Management?

Internet is about dealing with market risks

If you were to rate the risk for an Internet related business – one of the highest risk will be that of the adoption of the market. Internet is rarely about creating a ground breaking technology like the search algorithm of google and is more about marrying the existing technology with that of a market need. Dropbox did not create new technology, neither did twitter or  Facebook – all they did us marry the market to the technology. Here is one of the good diagrams from Steve Blank.

Market is about understanding people

Understanding market is about understanding people. More importantly, their irrationality. Here is an example of product – market reaction

One of my favorite examples is Dabangg, the Salman Khan starrer in the year of 2010.

The movie was one of the biggest box office hits. In a recent flight journey, I was reading an interview of Akshay Kumar who (along with the folks from the industry) was extremely puzzled at the overwhelming success of this otherwise ordinary masala movie. It seemed that there was no takers from distributors for Dabangg post watching the initial promos. Make no mistake – I am not saying Dabangg is a bad movie, I am just equating

the unexpected success that the movie enjoyed with the usually storyline. 

09-paan-singh-tomar-090312

 

Contrast this with the year 2012, the relase of Paan Singh Tomar. Well scripted, extremely gripping and real.  

The box office nos are noway close to what Dabangg is. Dabangg did a collection of Rs 105 Crores in the first 10 days whereas Paan Singh Tomar did not more than 9 Crores. Isnt this confounding? Werent we taught that a better product, in this case paan singh tomar, should outdo their otherwise ordinary counterparts in the market? Isnt that how rational audience had to react?

The answer is the audience wont and more often they dont. The understanding of this lies in the tenets of behavioral science. I will cover this in my next part of the blog.

Why did I choose Paan Singh Tomar against Dabangg?

  • Similarities of a rural setting
  • Both revolve around an inconoclast – in this case the leading male character
  • The lead character is a rebel in both the movies in their own ways
  • Lastly one of the good movies in the recent past

Whats your take on this?

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How a much needed niche banking product was born – The iCreate story.

ProductNation caught up with iCreate Software co-founder Naren Santhanam, on what went in to the making of a successful product.

It was circa 2006 when Naren met Anup while they were consultants on the Banking vertical at a technology MNC. They knew from experience that banks had a challenge in accessing information across different systems and there was potential in pioneering something exciting. Over a series of extensive debates they decided on developing a decision enablement product exclusively for the banking sector b leveraging the best of Business Intelligence and Data Integration technologies. 

At that point in time Banks which wanted to have BI & analytics had to develop a customized solution over the available tools, employing the services of an SI. The banks functional team would provide the business requirements. This resulted in substantial lead times apart from higher costs; even then, id guarantee the desired results. 

The big idea

The iCreate idea was based on the founders’ expertise with the functional nature of systems that banks used and other transactional systems. They conceptualized a product that could connect with the bank’s ecosystem quickly. 

This ensured the product could be up and running powering the bank’s decision needs in a fifth of the time conventional approaches take. Also, ideated were new versions/modules of the product that could be rolled out quickly, making the product scalable and customizable to a bank’s requirements.

Both Naren and Anup were confident that banks in emerging markets would see most value in their product as they were still in early phase of technology adoption and competition was low.

Between then and 2009 they invested substantial efforts in understanding the intricacies and pain-points faced by the banks in emerging economies before deciding to focus efforts on them. 

Naren does a quick flashback, “It was an early stage in my career and life, when I had an abundance of energy and not too many strings attached, which made it easier for me. We were clear on the direction, given our past lives in the banking technology space. The big idea was to create a banking-specific decision enablement product”. Since it was a capital intensive proposition, they agreed to embark on the consulting route and then deploy the insights in shaping the product. Naren continues “Yes, there were several challenges of staying afloat and not losing focus on the long-term goal of creating a product company. The last 7 years have been the most fulfilling and exciting ones- something I wouldn’t have ever experienced in corporate life”.

On high octane

They began providing high-end banking technology consulting to select banks in Africa. In 2009 they approached the prestigious National Bank of Kuwait (NBK); while the product was still in its infancy. It was their domain knowledge and technology expertise that won them the account. NBK signed up iCreate to play a pivotal role in their ambitious enterprise transformation initiative, which is lauded as a first-of-its kind for a start-up. By late 2009 iCreate was well entrenched in the banking decision support space. This was around the time they received their first round of VC funding from IDG Ventures India.

By then the product had started taking shape and was christened ‘Biz$core’ – a unique name that encapsulated BI, Core of Banking Systems, Score for Scorecards, Biz for Business and the $ sign signifying money.

iCreate began quickly onboarding the best tech brains to work on the product. They also put together a global GTM team with a ‘whatever-it-takes’ DNA to take Biz$core’s unique value proposition to banks worldwide. By then Vivek Subramanyam was onboard as CEO to pilot iCreate’s growth and revenue strategy. 

Proof of the pudding 

With the change in strategy, the journey started getting more exciting and iCreate found itself in an accelerated growth mode. iCreate’s banking customer count today stands at an impressive 22, of which 16 were added in the last year and a half alone. From a revenue stream comprising 25% product sales and 75% consulting services in early 2010, the split reversed to 70% product sales and 30% from consulting services towards close of FY 2013. 

iCreate’s early stage  banking customers from across diverse geographies, played an active role in in defining their products into a well-rounded ones. Naren explains “Leaders like HDFC Bank and IndusInd Bank with complex business processes, trade finance specialists like Ghana International Bank, Metro Bank – UK, progressive banks like East West Bank, Philippines helped us tremendously with their insights as we were developing our product.” 

Mission to achieve the vision 

iCreate today boasts of five banking-specific products that span critical areas like decision enablement, risk, compliance, regulatory reporting and Basel; and has plans to launch five more during the next year. The recent series-B funding from Sequoia Capital and IDG is expected to help them further expand their product portfolio and foray into newer geographies including North America. 

“Our focus on emerging markets like Asia, Africa and West Asia continue, and we have already established our presence in markets such as Egypt and the Philippines. There are two promising deals in the offing from the UK as well. Most importantly, there is that sense of pride of having created a product that completely changes the way banks look at information management”, remarks Naren. 

iCreate’s road map definitely looks interesting and seems to be aligning well with their vision statement what they call the ‘Vision 5:50:250’, i.e., to be among the top 5 in BI for banking space, win 50 strategic banking clients world-wide and touch Rs. 250 crore in revenues by FY 2015.

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Managing business is about having the right data at your fingertips

Hindsight, they say, is 20/20.  The advantage of hindsight is that all the data that affects a decision has been revealed and is known.  Unfortunately, real life never works that way.  As an entrepreneur, you have to operate on a combination of one part data, one part intelligent guesses, and, if we are really frank about it, one part luck.

Managing a business, when broken down into its simplest form, is about making a series of decisions. And how those decisions are made can make all the difference.  Most entrepreneurs have a lot of faith in their gut or instincts. And why not? The decision to become an entrepreneur itself is one that is based on passion, the belief that you have a winning product or service idea, and the unquenchable desire to do something on your own. Just look at the words – passion, belief, desire. Not really things you can measure and make data points about. But, combine or guide your gut feeling with the right data at the right time, and it could lead to better business decisions.

The trick, of course, is to have access to the right data at the right time.

The data that you need to make decisions while managing your business, in many cases, is about your business itself.  It is about how much you spend, how much is due to you, what is your inventory situation – seemingly simple things. But if you are able to have this information at your fingertips, accessible whenever you want it, it makes your decisions not just faster, but more sound as well.

The first step to having the right data is to collect it.  Do you have systems and processes that ensure that every important piece of information is captured? It could be your CRM, or your financial management software.  Unless the data is captured and categorized, it cannot be utilized to distil useful information. Because raw data is just that, raw; and what you need is the analysis to make an informed decision.

When you are managing a business, you have to have your eye on the ball at all times. And that means having all your data accessible in a form that makes it easy for you to interpret and make decisions.  For example, if you are able to track overdue payments as soon they become overdue, or are able to see the payment pattern of a specific customer with a bad payment record in just a few clicks, it makes it easier to track and take remedial measures.  Having anywhere, anytime access to the right data empowers you with knowledge, and helps you monitor and manage your business with complete and up-to-the-minute information. The closest you can get to the 20/20 vision that hindsight promises.

Which brings me back to my starting point. I have found that the more relevant data I have, the more intelligent my guesses are. And the more confidence I have in going with my gut feeling.

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Building profitable and sustainable software product company

What common principles underlie success of software product companies such as Newgen, Nucleus, Tally, Polaris, Srishti, Mindmill, Quest informatics, Druvaa, Infrasoft, Zoho etc?. Kim and Maubrogne (1997) in their analysis of high growth companies found that these companies focus on bettering themselves, continuously let unprofitable customers go, and shed commodity resources/skills. Collins (2001) in his widely acclaimed book “good to great” identifies, the value of executive leadership, getting the right people, focus on what a company is good at and creating a culture of discipline, as the core principles of great companies. On the product development side, Reis (2011), Brown and Eisenhardt (1998) have brought out the value of building core (Minimum viable product or MVP) to reduce time to market and patching modules against market opportunity.  In this article, Browne & Mohan consultants synthesize their learning of working with software product companies.

Market selection
While many product companies start off as services companies and later productize-their services, successful ones are those that operate in markets with periodic changes in regulatory requirements, witnessing newer investments to scaling and growth of enterprises in the industry and operational friction exists due to proprietary approaches or tools. Long term sustaining software product companies also look at markets where large MNC products exist, product acquisitions are on raise and MNC’s are unable to address non-behemoth companies in that sector.

Strategic Imitation, not Innovation
While it is fashionable for academics to talk about first-to-market, most successful product companies are strategic imitators. They allow the first-mover to discover the key features, educate early customers, but ride on a me-too quickly to capitalize on the market growth. This helps in lower S&M costs and improved ROCE.

Seek ideas fly from all; focus on what not to do.
Successful product companies seek ideas from multiple sources, beta clients, product demo teams, end users, etc. But build the product looking at where the friction is highest, pain is unbearable and intension to pay is highest.

Design a product for reuse and as platform
Design the product for big picture, but strip down to basic version to design first and market test. Later modules must be used for versioning and bundling. Build modular products and products that could be used in cloud or on-premise environment. Focus should be on minimizing customization, and reduce variety at early stage to benefit from low code, feature and support variety.

Invest in multiplicative Ecosystem.
Successful product companies must learn to exploit the product ecosystem. Whether it is the technology OEM you have an ISV relationship with, analyst relationship, or a sales partner, they are good levers to reduce investments in your set-up (people and other paraphernalia). Align your sales resources to maximize the self-interest of partners. Align with OEM account manager to acquire new customers and “sales focused” no product companies in international markets to expand. Partners and resellers help in market coverage, delivery and post-deployment support. Invest in marketing and vendor management resources, processes including training and certification realised better results. Use every platform provided by technology OEM to brand and reach out to market.  Academic institutes and interns are a good platform to explore open innovations. Ideas for new products, GUI modifications, market research, pricing and competitive intelligence and in fact product development can all be areas where qualified resources can be employed to your company’s gain.

 

Keep sales structure lean and mean
Successful product companies need sales teams where the client opening meetings may happen through marketing events or resources on street, closures can only happen if they have sales team that can inform and influence at senior levels of organizations.  Named account strategy will work if the client organizations can be identified a priori, they are far and few and the sales team has the ability to penetrate those accounts at all levels.

Invest in sales operations
Successful product companies invest in sales operations units, often led by a visibility into last mile was high and the sales teams were mean and lean.

Credible and Consultative Pre-sales
To be a successful product company, invest in pre-sales who enjoy problem solving and consulting. Use various platforms to positions them as solution providers, thinkers, etc. Arm them with couple of certifications, it helps to open many a closed minds in many parts of world. 

Profitable license sales
Many companies do not have the mix of license, support and deployment worked out in detail and with sales pressures may accept clients where the license fee has been abnormally discounted. While winning reference customers is a must, not all clients must be treated as referential. 

Right pricing, adopt versioning
Use versioning or hosted vs. on-premise or CPU vs. instance prices appropriate to the product environment. Create sufficient variants to allow customers to do self-selection and a feeling of control.

Limited budget, Impactful Marketing
You do not have to splurge a lot to be noticed. In fact, many a business papers have paucity of good stories to tell on innovation, India based product or E-governance product. Invest in couple of resources to engage actively with media and also create appropriate noise on social media.

Many successful product companies have HR talking about the culture, what is unique and so on. Brand all aspects of the company. See in what way your unique induction program can become a business case study or women employees returning from maternity or other long breaks can immerse into the organization becomes an impactful article.

Hire for attitude, perseverance and initiative
Successful software product companies do not need hire noble prize winners, but committed people who would embrace common ambition of the firm. They come with openness and curiosity to learn, improvise activities within their control and innovate over time.

While academic degrees and honours may matter initially, what matters is positivism and attitude. Choose employees who are keen to dirty their hands, shoulder a bit of other roles and open to unlearn.  Incentivize employees to attempt, appreciate failures and set them for win.

Rein in service cannibalizing product
Service revenues that come with product installations can be very tempting and wean away the focus away from the product if strongly not reined. Many successful companies find themselves in service cannibalization over time and lose their long term sustainability. Limit your services play and consciously promote partners to support roll out and de-risk yourself.

Risk Management
Product companies that grew and sustained momentum measured the risk and impact of their actions, though mostly subjective.  Senior management insisted on developing an approach to estimate risks, their impact, however rudimentary across organizations. Explicit identification and evaluation of risks helped the companies question their assumptions and prepare for back up plans.

De-risk, invest in R&D
Product companies must de-risk from technologies, products, markets and customer segments. Look out for related product usage areas where the product could fit, refurbish the features appropriate to a specific industry and monetize extension of the product knowledge across different customer segments. 

With inputs from Pratibha Sharma

Bibliography Brown, S.L. and Eisenhardt, K.M. Competing on Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos, HBS Press, Boston, 1998. Collins, J. Good to Great: why some companies make the Leap… and others Don’t, Harper Business Press, New York, 2001. Garud,R. Kumaraswamy, A and R.N. Langlois, Managing in the Modern Age, Blackwell, Oxford, 2003. Hagel, J and Brown, J.S. The only sustainable Edge: why business strategy depends on productive friction and dynamic specialization, HBS Press, Boston, 2005. Johnson, R. and Soenen, L. Indicators of Successful Companies, European Management Journal, 2003, 21(3), 364-369. Kim, W.C and Mauborgne, R. Value innovation: the strategic logic of high growth, Harvard Business Review, 1997, Jan-Feb, 75(1), 1012-112 Kopitov, R and Faingloz, L. Ways of transforming aims into results at Successful companies, Technological and Economic Development of Economy, 2008, 14(3), 312-327. Kotter, J.P, Leading Change, HBS Press, Boston, 2008. Leonard, D. Wellsprings of Knowledge: Building and Sustaining the Sources of Innovation, HBS Press, Boston, 1995. Morgan, M. Levitt, R.E and W. Malek, Executing Strategy: How to break it down and get it done, HBS Press, Boston, 2007. Schnaars, S.P. Managing Imitation Strategies, Free Press, New York, 1994.

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“Great Designers Steal”

Picasso Cubism

Picasso is purported to have remarked, “good artists borrow, but great artists steal.” He probably did not mean it in a literal sense. He wanted to inspire us from great works of arts and re-interpret or re-imagine them in a different way. Here are some references that have inspired us to become better designers.

 

Balsamiq Screenshot

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Balsamiq: Its simple sketchy interface evokes a sense of nostalgia of our playing with crayons as children. The clients don’t get distracted by little details allowing us to focus on important things such as navigation, content prioritization, quantity of content, and what a screen does. You should definitely use this to visualize and share your vision before writing a single line of code. This is also a great tool to communicate user stories within the agile framework.

PatternTap Screenshot

 

 

 

 

 

 

2. Pattern Tap: Its a collection of crowd-sourced design inspirations for all page types and devices. The designs are categorized by facets, so search for “login” to be wowed by how a simple screen can be so beautiful. 

TheNounProject Screenshot

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. The Noun Project: “The mission of The Noun Project is to collect, organize and add to the highly recognizable symbols that form the world’s visual language so they can be shared in a fun and meaningful way.” The symbols are free and delightful. You have see them to believe.

Smashing Magazine Screenshot

 

 

 

 

 

 

4. Smashing Magazine: An online magazine for designers and front end developers, to stay current with the ever evolving tools and techniques. It also has a great compilation of books and ebooks that could be references on your next project.

365psd Screenshot

 

 

 

 

 

 

5. 365psd: 365 psd, needless to say, means one high quality psd file a day. A great resource for free UI kits, page templates, and icons to get you started or help get over the creative block. And do sign up for a freebie everyday.

Google Web Fonts Screenshot

 

 

 

 

 

 

6. Google Web Fonts: Are you still married to times, arial, and helvetica? Here are hundreds of open source free fonts to help design great looking yet highly readable sites.  Don’t forget to look at the “pairings” feature. It recommends best complementary font pairs to add that extra zing to the design.

So go forth and steal, and please keep adding to this list.

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Why More Indian Software Product Companies will Emerge

Any discussion about building products from India is lost in the hype and din about India as an IT services powerhouse. However, the mostly unnoticed surge in product start-ups marks the beginning of a new movement, with potential to re-invent the Indian software industry. Emergence of globally recognized Indian product companies will represent the final step in the software value chain. If India can become the hub of the world’s most successful IT services as well as product companies, it can truly lay claim to being a knowledge superpower.

Building products requires a mindset, capabilities and an environment, which is very different from delivering services. Achieving this final frontier won’t be easy and Indian entrepreneurs face major challenges. There are very few role models who have built successful product companies, which limits access to mentors, who can provide guidance. Access to market requirements is difficult, since major consumers of software products are in Western markets. IT spend- ing in India is growing but still limited and global vendors are preferred. Finally, early stage funding is a major problem, and getting engineers to work in start- ups is a big challenge.

An increasing number of motivated entrepreneurs are working to overcome these handicaps, just as founders of services companies did in the early 1990s. A convergence of factors is ensuring the emergence of successful Indian product companies:

  • A large pool of talented engineers and managers who have worked at global companies in India and US
  • The rapid growth of local market and increasing adoption of IT with India-specific requirements especially for consumer facing apps
  • Technology disruptions including the emergence of cloud computing, which make national boundaries irrelevant, and reduce cost of global sales
  • Flair for innovation and risk-taking amongst a generation that has grown up in post-liberalized India
  • Self-confidence that comes from an economy that is the second fastest growing in the world
  • Weakening US economy that is motivating an increasing number of experienced software professionals to return to India

Since services culture dominates Indian IT, the book will continue to high- light how software product companies differ from their services counterparts, and the specific challenges that they must overcome.

Reprinted from From Entrepreneurs to Leaders by permission of Tata McGraw-Hill Education Private Limited.

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Build it Right, then Sell it to Many (and Keep Repeating)

Building a software product is more difficult than doing projects or providing services. With projects, software is developed to meet the exact specifications of the client. Work begins only when the contract is signed.

The project scope can be defined accurately in consultation with the customer, and deployment happens in a controlled environment at client site, with known hardware and software. Support requirements are minimal.

Changes to specifications, or defects during development or after deployment, usually have limited financial impact. In T&M contracts, the vendor is paid regularly, based on efforts put in. Hence, changes and delays may in fact, bring in more revenue. Fixed price bids usually account for contingencies like delays. If specifications are changed, the vendor can ask to re-negotiate the price. Quality issues may cause loss of credibility, or at worse, project termination and denial of future contracts. 

A product, in contrast, will be shipped to thousands, or even millions of users. Specifications are based on the seller’s understanding of customer needs. Therefore, a deep knowledge of market and domain is required. Clients are not guaranteed, and marketing and sales functions are critical. Selling cycles are longer and more cumbersome.

Quality has to be outstanding, since the product will be used by a variety of users, and on a plethora of platforms and configurations, and not all of it can be anticipated in advance. As the diagram below shows, the cost of fixing a defect increases exponentially depending on when it is detected.

A post-release defect creates negative publicity and costs lot of money. A patch to fix the problem has to be developed and distributed quickly to the users. Even Microsoft has faced this problem repeatedly when hackers have exploited vulnerabilities in its operating systems. In another instance, a US-based personal finance company inadvertently exposed the private account details of several hundred individuals to other users. Such snafus can expose a product company
to expensive lawsuits.

A product business requires highly structured engineering and organizational discipline. Formal reviews are necessary at every stage (architecture, design, coding) to catch deviations from the requirements. Rigorous testing and quality assurance (test/QA) processes should be followed to detect defects before product  release. Test labs must replicate the myriad deployment environments that users  may have. This can become complicated for multi-platform products that support a variety of operating systems (Windows, Unix, Linux) and databases.

The installation procedure must be highly automated and work fl awlessly in all possible system configurations. New versions, patches, and future upgrades must install without any disruption to existing software and data at user sites. A strong support organization (on phone, email or onsite) has to be built.


Unlike projects, there is no end date for product engineering. They must  continue innovating and releasing new versions with more functionality and advanced features, to stay ahead of competition. Product organizations often have a signifi cant revenue component derived from services such as consulting, customization, integration and solutions. Unlike a pure services business, these are used to underpin and drive their product sales.

The ecosystem for products is more complex, consisting of engineering teams, product management, marketing, sales, consulting, professional services, distributors, system integrators, resellers and investors.

Reprinted from From Entrepreneurs to Leaders by permission of Tata McGraw-Hill Education Private Limited.

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How to go from an engineer to a product entrepreneur?

When you work as an engineer regardless of whether it is startup or a big company (in consulting services or products) you are always given guidance on what you should build. Even the most autonomous programmers when working independently has someone tell him what to do. However when you become the founder of a startup the most stressful thing you immediately encounter is ‘What should be built?’.

This decision is guided by what-if scenarios or even based on what is cool to build and show off to others. If you are somewhat disciplined then you document these thought somewhere before you start writing code. In software engineering language this is also referred to as requirements analysis document. Little thought is given to how does one know that this is indeed something needed by someone. To address this one of the best techniques known to engineers is applied – abstract it away. You decide to assume that whatever conjured up is indeed correct to help make further progress as sitting idle without any doing any coding is a waste of time.

When you were just an engineer working elsewhere the impact of such assumption is someone else’s problem but now the impact is on you.  Also given that you have limited runway the stake for making mistakes about that question is very high.

You thus face two scenarios which as engineers you may have never faced.

  •  To make a decision in the face of unknown 
  • To own the decision you make

Product entrepreneurs realize this situation and resist the urge to make any assumption and proceed with a learning mindset. They make decision to the extent to which they can learn. Infact the really great entrepreneurs mentally sequence their unknowns (assumptions) in the order of most negative impact and move forward to uncover them.

These are in fact the two key skills that a startup product manager should become excellent at – owning the decisions & discovery (learning) before making decisions.

In the next post we will look at “How to debug a product startup idea?”

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In discussion with the Founders of Qualitia

Today there are proven automation tools in the market from  HP, IBM as well as open source tools like Selenium, Webdriver but the success does not lies in just investing in to tools but putting right strategies, best practices in place.

Qualitia is a one of its kind platform which intern leverages these tools as an execution engine while enabling users to adopt RIGHT strategies, best practices, where in now test automation designing, test automation development and even detailed reporting happens in Qualitia. We interviewed Rahul Chaudhari(MD & CEO) & Sudhir Patil(Founder Director) about the company’s product development journey & their advice for startups.

Q)    What was the Vision with which you launched the company ?
Vision is to empower the manual test engineers to contribute to test automation worldwide. Which has been a job of the technology resources till today, but we see a larger opportunity to empower the 90-92% of the QA community who come from the domain background or functional knowledge background and empowering them to drive test automation way faster then any traditional way of automation. Test automation challenges are primarily attracting resources who were good in development technologies and then making them work into testing. Bridging the gap between domain and technology expertise to dramatically reduce the turnover time in test automation. This will empower the SME’s manual test engineers that are the existing strength of every company to drive automation themselves. Also to reduce the maintenance effort and cost  of enterprises to help them to invest into test automation.

Q)    How will the product help startups to scale up?
In terms of startups where the focus is primarily development and they realize the importance of test automation, some barriers exist primarily:

  • The competencies required to drive test automation.
  • The Cost of commercial licenses. 

We therefore provide the solutions through Qualitia where startups can get the licenses on subscription model at around 23% of cost of their QA resource with 200% increase in the productivity leading to huge savings for a Startup from day one. 

Q)    Which are the important markets which you are looking at?
India contributes the maximum of users, where as US contributes 60% to the buying space worldwide. Therefore a balance needs to be created between them therefore both are important markets for us. 

Q) What is the next 1 year roadmap for the company?
We would look to drive success stories in the markets/segments identified and anchor  customers in these markets. Since US is a mature market where we have been present for the last 2 years we would like to build on the success realised
 by customers there.  The target is to grow the revenues in double digits. 

Q)    What advice would you give to new startups?
For any product – The idea and its research is important keeping in mind ability to take the product to the market. Time is of the essence. Therefore it is very important to ensure that the fructification of the product on real time is very important. 

Q)    What has been your go to market strategy?
Identifying the focus clearly, and slowly expanding the market.

Guest post by Nakul Saxena, NITEE


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Zomato “gets” foodies, and it gets them so well

I am a foodie. And a big Zomato fan, no pun intended anywhere. Here, I am going to talk about everything we foodies love about Zomato and all the things it could do better.

For the uninitiated, Zomato is a restaurant discovery platform with 74,800 restaurants listed across 19 cities and 4 countries, and claims to have served 62.5 million foodies till date. More simply, it is about food and where to find the best of it.

So this is how I met Zomato. I was in college till 2009, and whenever I needed to know of new places to eat or hang out at, I just asked a couple of friends and I had more recommendations than I could handle. But once I entered the world of technology, everything in life started to begin with a Google search. But that’s not how I discovered Zomato. That’s how I discovered that websites of restaurants, when they have one, are completely useless. They talk about everything except what I need to know.

I got to know of Zomato in a rather funny way. I was looking for some kickass About Us pages on the web, and a friend of mine pointed me towards Zomato’s team page on Facebook. It spoke the same language I spoke, had this young and fun feel about it, quirky bios of everyone on the team. I loved it. Then I gave their product a try. And I uttered — “My precious.”

And we have been together ever since. It’s been a rather smooth relationship, and now I will tell you of all the things I love about it.

When do you look for a new place to eat at? Most likely when you are in the mood for some good Italian food but have been to little Italy thrice in the last fortnight. Or you are at a friend’s place in your shorts and floaters, probably a little drunk, and want food delivered to your doorstep? Hyderabadi Biryani has not been very kind on your stomach lately, so you want to go for someplace lesser spicy. Zomato delivers on both counts by allowing you to search for restaurants by fine dining or delivery in your city. There’s also catching up and nightlife if you are in the let’s-go-hangout mood. And if you like searches the Google way, then you have a simple Search bar you can throw in all your keywords into.

But that is no rocket science, is it? No it isn’t. Actually most of the things that Zomato does isn’t rocket science. It’s just that they do it well, really well.

Then you get your search results in 0.035 seconds in a beautifully laid out page with everything you need. Ratings, timings, cost for two, bar or no bar, cash or card, reviews from people you follow (more on this later) and more. And then you can apply filters like wifi, outdoor seating, buffet and whatnot to find that perfect someplace for you. Again, all of it in what I can only call a lovely interface.

Then you choose a restaurant, and are presented with all the details you need on the restaurant. Up-to-date scanned copies of the complete menu (which they go door-to-door and collect manually), photos of the place and food (not the best, but manageable) and most importantly reviews. Comprehensive reviews from foodies, big foodies and connoisseurs. The reviews tell you everything about the ambiance of the place, the service, the dishes to try and then they give you more photos.

The reviews were not always these helpful. Then Zomato decided to create a food social network of sorts, and there has been no looking back ever since. You can follow foodies, so every time they add a new review, it comes up in your notification bar. Passionate foodies and wannabe food critics use this as an opportunity to educate their followers about food and the best of it.

As the number of reviews you post increase and more people find it helpful, you go from foodie to connoisseur, and you also become eligible for the leaderboard which is displayed in each city’s homepage. The catch is you have to enter a review having more than 50 words, and when you are doing that, you might as well write a good detailed review. And with the recent Instagram integration in the reviews, you can add pics for other foodies to drool over.

Sounds like the perfect love story, doesn’t it? Well, almost. There are some things that Zomato could have done better though.

The ads. They are some of the ugliest ads I have seen on the web. Every time I search for restaurants, a bunch of these ads come up in the right panel. And every time I see them, my eyes bleed and a little part of me dies. I understand Zomato has to make money and restaurants work with shitty digital agencies, but there has to be a better way. Featured listings, photo albums, more details, whatever it is that they can make money from as long as the ugly ads can go out the window.

iPhone app. While it has seen big improvements over time, it still isn’t as good as the website experience. And the consistency is missing across the two interfaces. You can just search by location or cuisine on the app, not by delivery, dine out, catching up and the like. But an interesting feature is the instant recommendation that tells of you of a random new place near you — if you don’t like it, just shake the phone and a new recommendation will come up. I think I could use a variant of this on the web interface as well.

The tags. A cafe is a cafe to me, so when it comes up in my search for Italian food, I start getting cranky. And this happens because under the cuisines tag, the cafe has American, European and Italian marked against it when it serves four dishes for each of those cuisines, and pretty bad one at that. Same with pubs having Indian, Mughlai, Chinese and Italian slapped against them. Of course, I have no qualms if the cafe or the pub serves really good food, but when I am looking out for good Indian food, neither a pub or a cafe or a restaurant having a total of three Indian dishes is what I am looking for.

Notifications. While I like to be notified when someone I am following posts a new review, why do I have to be notified when someone I follow follows someone else? I want to follow their food trail, but not every single thing they do.

All that said and done, I have to commend Zomato for everything it has done for us foodies, and for the industry as a whole. Only time will tell how it fares against the Yelps of the world as it expands into more mature markets, but it’s got an international product and the balls to take on the world.

I wish them all the best.

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Content Generation – The 10 commandments

Content Marketing is increasingly becoming a key strategy for product marketers. With prospects and customers ceasing to be passive and, on the contrary, actively gathering information, comparing product offerings and alternatives, product marketers are now turning to content marketing as a key strategy for their communication operations.

The purpose of Content Marketing is to create a scenario where your customers and prospects interact, react, engage and market on their own. Instead of publishing self-proclaiming ads, the focus has now shifted to providing content that the target audience finds relevant and resourceful.

The key question then is how to ensure you publish relevant and resourceful content for your target audience. The basis for any content marketing strategy is the content itself, and how you shape and mould your content can define your success. The following 10 Commandments of Content Generation will serve as an effective roadmap for your content marketing success

YOUR CONTENT SHALL NOT BE PROMOTIONAL
Your prospects don’t want to read self-promotional messages all the time. The key to winning your target audience over is building credibility and creating content that matters to readers.

YOUR CONTENT SHALL BE ORIGINAL
It does not matter how perfect you think your content is. The success lies in the appeal. The key to building brands and winning fans in the long term is creating content that is original, which is unique.

YOUR CONTENT SHALL BE RELEVANT
The content you create should be based on what your prospects are interested in and what is the most relevant in their space. Identify industry-relevant subject matter and popular topics before you create content. 

YOUR CONTENT SHALL BE STRUCTURED
Your content needs a blueprint.  Structure your message first and then create the content. Your prospects demand more than a bunch of loosely related words from you.

YOUR CONTENT SHALL BE DIVERSIFIED
Your prospects consume content in various forms – text, pictures, videos, etc. Your content must not be restricted to a single type. Instead, diversify your content to keep the interest high.

YOUR CONTENT SHALL CARRY A THEME
What message are you trying to push to your audience? Your content should carry an underlying theme that is aligned to your end objectives and goals.

YOUR CONTENT SHALL ADDRESS NEEDS
Most of your prospects and customers want to read things that benefit them. Your display of a deep understanding of the challenges they face can elevate your target audience from being interested readers to a highly engaged audience.

YOUR CONTENT SHALL BE EASY TO UNDERSTAND
The content, when it reaches your prospects and customers, must be easy to understand. If your target audience is forced to make an effort, there’s very little chance that they’ll go through your content till the end.

YOUR CONTENT SHALL BE ENGAGING
The aim of your content generation is to attract and sustain the interest of your customers and prospects. Rather than making it one-directional, make your content engaging by including calls-to-action in your content – comment, subscribe, share, register, etc. Customer communication management should be a priority.

YOUR CONTENT SHALL BE BACKED BY PROOF
In today’s world, information is just a step away to be found and verified. Publishing content without enough proof can backfire as you may end up losing the credibility you built. You should use information, stats, reports and trends to back your content.

 

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EmployWise: Improving the ROI in employee lifecycle management

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Product Business is Very Different from Services

What is the difference between software services and products? Why is it important for India to be developing products?

First Invest, and Then Reap

The business cycle in a services company starts with sales, and ends with project or product delivery. On the other hand, a product company must first invest in building the solution. Then begins a long and complex business cycle to sell, support and continuously evolve the product. This reversal of sales and engineering sequence has a profound impact on how product organizations get built.

Services industry provides manpower to build software apps and products, which belong to the customer. Typically, IT departments of retail, manufacturing, financial, insurance and other businesses require new applications, or enhancements to existing ones, for in-house use. They turn to Indian companies for design and implementation. Needing long-term support, global product companies establish extension engineering teams at Indian subsidiaries or services companies.

In services, clients own the Intellectual Property (IP). All gains (cost savings, productivity improvements, revenue) and risks are entirely the clients’. The service provider gets paid in proportion to the cost of development, irrespective of whether the pricing model is fixed cost or time and material (T&M).

This means that the services revenue growth is directly linked to number of engineers. The industry’s competitiveness is determined by cost of engineers. But the number of trained software engineers in India, cannot scale indefinitely. Even today, good talent is becoming scarce. Salaries are rising to a point where low-cost economies such as China, Vietnam and Philippines have started to compete. Nevertheless, superior talent, project management expertise, processes, and English language skills continue to provide an edge to India. However, others are catching up, thereby causing a slowdown in the industry’s growth rate.

In comparison, products have the potential to fetch non-linear revenue. A product business creates intellectual property. Once developed, the same solution is sold repeatedly to a large number of buyers.

The graph above shows the famed hockey stick revenue model for a successful product company. A services organization can have positive revenue from day one, and grow very quickly too, but the headcount-centric model will eventually become a drag.

Reprinted from From Entrepreneurs to Leaders by permission of Tata McGraw-Hill Education Private Limited.