Product Management Archives - Page 19 of 21

13/12/201215/08/2014

BrightPod makes collaboration for digital marketers simpler and faster, much faster

Synage Software, more popularly known as the DeskAway guys, are on to their next thing and they are calling it BrightPod. Sticking to their expertise of developing collaboration software, BrightPod is a collaboration tool built specifically for digital marketers. I got an early peek into it and while the the product and the segment they are going after hold promise, it needs work on the interface and a big push on the adoption side.

Just like any other collaboration tool, you create a new pod (a fancier term for project) to get started. But that’s where the similarity ends. Now instead of adding individual tasks to it, you choose a workflow from the existing ones or you create your own (coming soon).

Most common marketing projects like an email marketing campaign, a Google Adwords campaign and a social media campaign are covered. Select the email marketing workflow and all the tasks that it needs are automatically added to the pod. Just assign a client, set deadlines, add team members and you are good to go. Digital agencies, who run the same kind of campaigns (at least structurally) for different clients will find this a huge time saver.

I tried two of the workflows – Google Adwords and email marketing. While the Google Adwords workflow was well defined, email marketing had me lost. The team would do well to reduce the number of tasks or mark the ones that not everyone bothers about as optional. Another challenge going ahead with the workflow would be that a large company works very differently from a startup, who would overlook a lot of the tasks to push the campaign out of the door as quickly as possible.

Moving on, BrightPod has another two more very interesting features. Focus and Round Up. Focus, as the name suggests, helps you focus only on key tasks and drown out the others. Temporarily from your mind, I mean. Marketing, unlike other functions in a company, is typically about a lot of small things coming together to form the complete piece. Star a task that is important, and it will appear in your Focus tab to allow you to, well, focus, on the task.

Before we get to Round Up, you need to get this. BrightPod is meant for marketers, with workflows and terminologies that marketers feel at home with. But marketing never functions in isolation. You have design involved, you have the web team involved, you might have other agencies involved and if you are an agency yourself, you need to get the client in on the project. This is where Round Up comes in. Just throw in the email address of the person you want involved in the conversation and they are in. They don’t have to get on to yet another app, they can just reply to that email and it will get added to the pod.

So far, so good. Now the things that BrightPod needs to improve. Simplicity is one of the main principles BrightPod is built on and while it delivers on certain counts, it doesn’t have the same kind of simplicity that Asana (something I have used extensively) or Trello (something that I have seen in use around) have.

The BrightPod dashboard, the first thing you will see each time you log in, has an activity stream of all the active pods. Every task added, every comment added, every milestone added, every task completed. For me, that was plain overwhelming, given how each workflow adds 20-30 tasks straightaway. When you log into your collaboration tool first thing in the morning, you want to see a list of the tasks that are due, the overall state of different projects and the important tasks for the day. While tasks due are presented in the dashboard, they are on this section on the right that doesn’t catch your eye first thing.

Also when you click on a pod to make additions and modifications, the navigation is different from that of the main screen, again leaving you a little lost. While these are small things that a user can get used to in a week of working with the app, these are things that typically come in the way of getting the buy-in of the whole team to move to a new application, or even earlier during the evaluation phase.

The biggest challenge BrightPod will face with adoption is getting companies used to the idea of having a specialized collaboration tool for marketers. Organizations like to have the same tool for everyone in the organization, so it would be interesting to see how the company solves this challenge.

All said and done, the product is still in alpha phase, so a lot of these things will get better with time. If you are digital marketer, go ahead, sign up for a BrightPod invite and let us (and the BrightPod team) know what you think.

12/12/201212/12/2012

Forget coding. Startup founders should focus on Product & Design.

Last year (2011) learning coding was hot, may be it still is. Sites like Code for America came up; startups like Codecademy, Learnstreet, Udacity, etc came up that were focusing on building products that enabled others to learn coding in an interactive way. Then it looked like a kind of movement, a revolution in making.

Being a startup founder some of those effects trickled down to India – that made me seriously consider coding. And there were some other reasons as well. We started Wishberg by outsourcing product development to another company. As deadlines were missed repeatedly, this whole ‘founders should be coders’ effect started growing on me.

During this phase I did two things a.) started hiring our own engineering team b.) learn coding inspired by this noise. I started learning very enthusiastically to an extent that my bio read that I was learning to code. Going through multiple forums, registering on these websites, taking lessons on LAMP stack and so on. A bit of background, being a engineering student (though Mechanical) – I had some basic coding background. Few years back, I even built some basic websites, did a bit of javascripts, etc.

As we started hiring engineering talent I asked myself two questions –

Will I ever come up to the level of proficiency that matches our engineering team?
No. I was no where close to them.. while I was doing ABC of coding, our team was super involved in deploying code, implementing Redis / Node.js, building scalable architecture, mobile infrastructure and so on. I didn’t want my team to tell me I suck on programming (which I knew I did anyway). More importantly, I wanted the team to focus on building our product and not spend timing teaching me code or correcting my code.
Will I ever hire anyone who has learned programming through online sites?
No

I also checked with few technical founders who raised investments; few agreed that being a tech founder was probably a added advantage while raising money. But many of them also mentioned that post investment they spent more time finding product-market fit, doing business, improving their product, user experience, managing investors (many a times!) and eventually spending lesser and lesser time on coding themselves.

Eventually all startup founders end up focusing only on consumption side of product (front end user experience, improving funnels and conversion metrics) than the one under the hood. This is when I gave up my decision to learn coding and started focusing on learning design (user design and user experience) which is as core to product as technology is. I started spending more time understanding design tools, design patterns and implementing them on Wishberg. I am no where saying underlying technology, architecture, speed, and scalabilty are not important.

For online businesses, there is no doubt scarcity of good engineering talent; but there is more scarcity of product designers and even much more scarcity of product managers. Startup founders knowingly / or unknowingly start getting into product management role.

I have been a product guy for about 7 years and now feel that I should have learned design long back. Our team not just gets product documentation from me, but also product designs including all scenarios and exceptions. There is a certain clarity of thought which engineers appreciate and exactly know what is to be built – which save lot of time while shipping code / features. Every month, we look at data, un-design by removing clutter, remove additional clicks and aim to improve conversions on every step.

Geek Example – The 2012 Formula 1 Season had 12 teams of which 4 had the winning Renault RS27-2012 engine on their cars. Yet there was only one winner – The Red Bull Racing team. The original Renault team (now Lotus Renault GP) which manufactured and supplied the RS27-2012 engine to Red Bull team stood fourth in overall 2012 championship. In fact Red Bull won the championship for last 3 seasons with the Renault engine. What really mattered – the product RB8 chassis. More importantly the people driving the product, its team – drivers Sebastian Vettel & Mark Webber, Team Principal and Chief Technical Officer.

Concluding Notes:
What engine you have under the hood (technology) matters. What car / chasis the engine drives (the product) matters more. But what matters most is who is driving / leading it. Don’t get over obsessed with technology, focus on product & design.

So all those who complimented us on Wishberg‘s product design & usability… need a hint on who was the person behind it? Yours truly.

Contributed by Pravin J, Wishberg

11/12/201210/12/2012

Who is your customer?

Get this right and you have taken the first step towards success in your software product venture, whether on the web or on-premise.
As a corollary, if this is not clear, then no matter how sophisticated your product is, it will always be a struggle.

As many entrepreneurs are aware, the success of a product depends on the product itself, the pricing, the promotion and the physical distribution as defined by the 4 P’s.

Even in this era where pricing is irrelevant given the Free or Freemium business models, one needs to spend money to get signups or visitors and that will be wasted if the target customer profile is not defined properly.

In a software product business, getting the customer profile right is the key even to start because the specifications would depend on the type of customer. The design and the development would follow.

Let me illustrate this with an example.
A friend of mine asked me to help market his POS Retail Software Product that he had already developed. To better understand his product and strategy, I asked him a single question “Who is your customer?” He looked at me as if I was an alien and said “Obviously a retail business!!”

Undeterred by his tone, I asked a follow-up question, “What kind of retail?” and by this time he was convinced that talking to me was useless. Just to humour me, he said “Any kind of retail shop will benefit from my software”. And there started the “Spanish inquisition”.

Me: “So the neighbourhood grocery store as well as big bazaar can use it? A shop selling Bengal sweets as well as Bata? All of them fall under the category of Retail”

And then he saw the point and the implications of lack of clarity on:

The Product itself:

The scope: The small grocery shop may need at best just the billing and the receivables whereas the chain might want to network it’s branches and would like to know the traffic pattern to have the right number of staff to meet the demand.
Hardware requirements: A small shop may do with an assembled PC and a strip printer whereas the big ones may want POS Terminals with scanners.
Security: Just a simple login would suffice for a small shop while elaborate security levels need to be defined for a large outfit with clearly defined responsibilities

The Price:

The shop owner might be willing to spend a small amount for the PC, printer and the software and he may not give too much credence to the software. You cannot charge him a few lakhs for the software alone.
In the case of a large chain, the price point must be much higher given the need for metrics, security, deployment at different locations, training, hand-holding etc.

The Promotion

If it is for the small shops then one case use mailers or approach a set of similar shops in an area to generate interest. One can also use local newspapers to create some awareness.
To catch the eye of the chains, one must advertise in industry journals, magazines and perhaps take stalls at industry events

Physical Distribution

For the retail shop, a one-one approach using the salesperson may perhaps work best.
For the large chains, one has to go with the hardware vendors or system integrators or retail IT consultants (I hope such a specialty exists given the explosion of retail in our country)

I know that this distinction is very simplistic but I have chosen it to give an idea. Having seen the importance of defining the target customer, we will look at some parameters to do it effectively, in the next post

07/12/201208/12/2012

How To Do Pricing For Enterprise Sales #PNMeetup

Pricing is a mix of art science. Most product startups have a hard time figuring out their revenue model (freemium or, paid only) and what they should charge. If you chose freemium, you have to be careful that cost of incremental customer is low and it will be great, if this customer also helps spread the word about you. On the other hand, if you choose paid, you run the risk of having minimal traction, especially if your sales cycle is long and complex.
In either of the business models, you need to have clarity on who your customer is, what they are really looking for, does it have a direct impact on creating additional revenue or, eliminate inefficiencies and what your competitors are charging and why. Is your sales cycle long or, short? In a product company, you expect to cover the cost from multiple customers and not just one. However, most businesses falter as they fail to take into account the cost related to acquiring paid customers and customer service.

All being said, do remember that for most companies, pricing is an evolution as your product is.

You will hear from our experts on how they went about pricing their products and what if any adjustments they made along the way based on their learning.

Speakers:
– Tushar Bhatia – (EmpXTrack) Saigun Technologies
– Varun Shoor – Kayako.com
– Prashant Singh – TheSignals

#PNMeetup is an initiative by ProductNation and is meant for Entrepreneurs, Product Startups, Product Managers in the NCR Region. Here you can share, learn and network with fellow Product Managers and also discuss new trends innovations, get feedback on prototypes and insights from experienced people in the industry.

The objective of #PNMeetup is to provide each attendee with practical skills and knowledge that they can put into practice tomorrow to improve the products they bring to market, enhance their companys success and further their own careers. Some of the people supporting this initiative are: Amit Ranjan(Slideshare), Arvind Jha(Movico Technologies), Jainendra Kumar(Pitney Bowes), Pawan Goyal(Adobe), Rajat Garg(SocialAppsHQ), R. P. Singh(Nucleus Software), Vivek Agarwal(Liqvid eLearning).

These meetups will be done on Third Saturdays of the month and will include an opportunity for professional networking. If you would like to volunteer and make a difference to the Product Eco-system in NCR, do send us a mail at volunteerpn.ispirt.in

Supporting Partners:
– Indian Product Management Association, Institue of Product Leadership, Delhi Startups, TLabs, The Hatch, Startup Saturday. Ignita

Registrations:
Limited seating and registrations is strictly for Product Startups and Product Managers. No onsite registrations will be allowed. Register Now to avoid disappointment. This is a closed event and If selected you will get the confirmation for the event.

Venue:
Kunzum Travel Cafe: Address: T-49, GF, Hauz Khas Village, New Delhi, Delhi 110016

04/12/201205/12/2012

Platform Play Versus Product Play in an Indian Scenario-Part 1

From the beginning, we at Ozonetel had always wanted to build a platform. Initially, we did a VXML platform with off the shelf hardware. But VXML was not sexy enough and there were not a lot of takers. So in 2010, we did a pivot and built our own custom hardware( PRI cards) and built KooKoo and top of it. KooKoo was our attempt at Telephony Platform as a Service play. Once KooKoo was opened to the developers it took off and we got good traction. A lot of innovative telephony apps were built on top of KooKoo and telephony became cool again.

After 6-8 months, we started to think about building products and do a product play. A couple of things influenced our decision to do a product play. First was that though innovative telephony apps like connecting experts, water alerts, appointment reminders etc were being built on KooKoo, core telephony apps like PBX systems and call centers were not being built and there was a huge market opportunity. Second was that, being a bootstrapped company, market forces made us to look at alternative sources of revenue as the customer turnaround time in a platform play is longer. They have to first build their apps, market them, make money and then only they pay us 🙂

So with that, we separated out a product team in Ozonetel who would go on to build two core telephony products, a PBX on the cloud called asBizPhone and a full featured cloud call center product called as Cloudagent. So now that I have seen both the scenarios of a platform play and a product play, I thought I would share some pointers in both(no particular order).

Platform Play:

Patience: You should have a lot of patience. Developers will take their own sweet time in building the application and marketing it. Many times, you will want to get in and help them develop. But that is not scalable. Though it will take time, it is better for them to figure out the solutions on their own as in the long run that will mean lesser support.
Documentation: This is the most important part. You wont believe the amount of support calls that are reduced by having some decent documentation. Unfortunately, this is one area where we still have to improve and thats why we still get support calls.
Logging: Your platform should explain what is happening behind the scenes to the developer through logs. It will help them in debugging the issue themselves before they reach out to support.
API: Think through what and how you want to expose your API. Because, once you open it to the public and they start using it, it will be really hard to take back and you will end up supporting multiple versions.
Evangelize: You should have a team of evangelists who should go to events, do live coding, help hacking communities etc to drive adoption. This is the hardest part, convincing developers to invest their time in learning your platform. It is much harder in India as the hacker community is in a nascent stage(though growing very very well).
Star products: Every platform should have some star performers. They are the ones which will help in people believing in your product. Identify your star products and put all your efforts in making sure they succeed.
Mashups and Blog: Build mashups on your platform yourself to showcase the capabilities. You know your platform best, so you will have to build very innovative and fun apps. After building mashups, blog about them and spread the word. Again, in India, its hard to build mashups with content from an Indian context. Till last year, we did not have a lot of APIs for Indian content. But now a lot of companies like Zomato have started opening up APIs and phone mashups can easily be built.
Support: This will make or break your platform. Developers have very little patience. If they send a mail to support, they better get a response within 5-10 minutes. Otherwise, they will end up Googling for another platform which will solve their platform. Luckily, so far at least we have been able to keep our developers happy with our support. Support does not just mean technical support. Many times we have actually had to mentor a lot of startups building on our platform. You should be willing to listen to their problems and suggest advice if you have any.
Developer events: You should conduct developer events and hackathons so that the new developers get to know about your platform. Unfortunately, being bootstrapped, we have not yet had funds to do this 🙂
Sponsor events: In addition to conducting events, another way of getting mindshare of developers is to sponsor events. We are continuous sponsors of Startup Weekend events in India and have also sponsored hackathons in colleges like BITS where students have built very innovative applications.

In the next part I will discuss my observations on the product play.

Guest Post by C. Chaitanya, Ozonetel

26/11/2012

Your Content MVP fails…. eh?

About a month ago, I had a very interesting discussion with Rajan from Intuit about why content is a product and how the lean startup rules should be applied to it.

Let’s get the definitions out of the way.

A minium viable product (MVP) in its simplest form, is the least number of iterations you’ve done on your product before presenting it to someone who you hope will pay for it.

Sure there are lots of loose words here – but I’ll come around to them in a minute. Keywords here are features and pay.

Lets take software first – we’ll talk about content later.

If your software has 2 features, you would obviously want to make sure that the 2 features actually work before you put the MVP out. You cannot expect a person who may buy your software (prospect) to ‘imagine’ what those features will work like. Naturally paying for it gets chucked out of the window.

If it doesn’t do its job – the feature is useless.

Content behaves exactly the same way. In this case the ‘feature’ correlates to ‘objective’.

WHAT is expected from the content piece? WHAT emotions need to be provoked by it? WHAT memories need to be generated in the user’s mind?

You get my drift don’t you?

If content doesn’t do its job – its design, look and feel is useless. The buyer (could be your mother receiving your call or your university of choice receiving your SOP) cannot ‘imagine’ what the infographic will look like. What the VIDEO will turn out like. And what the Brochure design will look like in print.

All they see – is the MVP. So the features better work.

Applying the lean startup rules to content isn’t impossible. It can still be done. However the build-measure-learn loop should now be applied to learning from each content piece. Not the activity of building the content.

So each blog post that you’re writing – can give you the report card that provides you with the right dataset for taking actions towards the next iteration. A better product or a better blog post.

Eric Ries’ and Steve Blank’s concepts around the Lean startup are fundamentals. But just like you’re applying them to your product and its features, think about applying them to your content and its objectives too.

3 tips to ensure your content is MVP ready:

1. Know thy emotion. If you’re presenting to your CEO – know what emotions you are trying to evoke in her – that’s always a good starting point.

I can’t help you if you’ve got a sucky CEO.

2. It’s wrong if it feels wrong. You’ll know when your content piece is doing its job. And when not. The slightest of doubts means its not ready. Don’t put it out. The content’s features aren’t working.

However diagnosing the problem is like fixing a bug. Helps when the herd doesn’t try to solve it.

3. Put in a premise. Before you demo your software, you present a ‘premise’ first. Do that with your content too. Setting the premise will allow your audience to tune-in. Much easier to etch messages when their minds are free.

What have been your most successful content pieces (features)? How do you know that (validated feedback)?

22/11/201215/08/2014

Best products are built, keeping its user experience in mind says Shalin Jain from Tenmiles…

Hypothetically speaking, if one was offered a job and the decision to accept or reject was based on how far one had to travel, would “Tenmiles” be a round enough estimate, to base a rejection on? The answer is locked away somewhere in this piece. Read on to find out…

Education, bunking and creation

Shalin Jain’s enchantment towards Internet started way back, when he was in high school and the thought dawned on him how powerful a tool it was for connecting people. Blog, as a platform for communicating ideas caught on early and he used WordPress as effortlessly and seamlessly as one uses notebooks to make personal notes. Doing B.Sc in Statistics from Loyola college, proved beneficial in many ways. It helped develop an analytical mind and the flexibility to work during those years. At the company that he worked for, Indchem Software Technology, Shalin learnt the ropes in design through ASP & JSP Applications. Submerged in work, college attendance was to take a nosedive. At the behest of the Principal and some paternal advice, Shalin almost took the brow-beaten path of doing an MBA. While still mulling over his future, one day he got a job offer from his old organisation. Though a seasoned hand by now, yet some parts of the student in him remained alive. The distance to workplace and back was approximately 10 Miles. He decided to chuck it. Tenmiles Tenmiles Tenmiles, the words reverberated – what could have been and what he chose.

The Brand Tenmiles

Instantaneously, his creative mind went on an overdrive. What if he started a company with a name like “Tenmiles” and live his dreams. A “no” to something is really about saying “yes” to something else. Thus was born the idea. Initially it was a garage-level operation and the focus of business was on Web Design & Flash programming. Functioning out of the domestic market is very challenging for a startup. The constant “back and forth” approach can be unnerving and puts additional pressure on time and deadline. It also did not help that there were many companies claiming to develop products.

Screenswift, creates installable Flash screensavers from any Flash movie, took only 16 days to develop. There were two versions: Personal edition & the Premium edition later in 2001. This product would gain huge popularity amongst design agencies. The desktop screensaver market was big towards the end of 90’s and early 00’s. Not off late. In 2005, Helpdesk Pilot, another very successful product was launched. In the first month itself, the product got in 11 customers and umpteen sales enquiries. It’s a platform built to help you provide excellent customer support effortlessly. HappyFox was another cloud based customer support software which got launched soon and now happens to be the flagship product. In the words of Shalin, the design element in this product was very good. In 2010, launch of DoAttend established the company’s reputation on strong customer driven focus.

SWOT Analysis

Self admittedly, the company did not have a structured approach to Marketing and only started investing in it, after the launch of DoAttend. Shalin gave the example of a painter, who paints not with “awards” in mind but what the painting is going to look like. Best products are built, keeping its user experience in mind. DoAttend was a very successful product and word-of-mouth marketing, worked to its advantage. The focus was the “customer” and never the media. This approach worked well and brought customers in droves.

The organisation also believes in lean staffing which in a way has resulted in optimising productivity. Shalin is of the firm belief that in case of a multi-product approach, each product must be self sustainable. A half-baked approach never works.

The company has been bootstrapped to generate funds.

Inspiration

In college, Shalin had a neighbour – another youngster who was only older by a few years. This was in the year 1998 – 99. Shalin was in a stage in life where he wasn’t easily distracted and thus had the opportunity to study his neighbour’s methods, his drive, passion. This was perhaps the single-most important trigger.

Building Successful Products

A product can be very good, but with average business scope, whereas it can also be average but with a huge business potential. Every product developer needs to figure out which market they would like to operate in. Here are some tips offered by Shalin for startups:

Have the end consumer in mind and build accordingly
Be clear on what is the exact problem you’d like to address by building this product
Trying to build too much. Too many functionalities might not be the right way
All great products have a solid focus on design and make sure you have one!

On Product Ecosystem

When he started in 2000, there was nothing of the kind. Developers at that stage, including Shalin were used to experimenting and working without much support. Having said that, it was important to get the right advice, inspiration and a direction. There should be a system in place to do a reality-check. Mentoring sessions usually turn out to be hype. The need of the hour was to get away from jargon-throwing and hand-hold some of the young boys and girls who are only equipped with a brilliant idea. And, there are many.

The country has huge potential and an opportunity to come up with top-notch products which can be world beaters.

21/11/201222/11/2012

Be a part of the journey to Product Nirvana!

There has been a huge upstart in the number of product companies in India in the last 12 months. 700% is the estimate according to Zinnov Consulting. Most of them, as one keynote speaker at the recently held NASSCOM Product Conclave 2012 said ominously or more from experience being in the Silicon Valley, “will fail”. Why startups fail can be due to any number of reasons but the chances of succeeding is unarguably high if employees get product management right! So, what is Product Management? It is the art and science of creating the right product for the right user at the right time and in the process create a successful business! It is the functional domain which asks the questions what products do we build, who is it for, why do they need it, will they buy if we build it and how will the product work?

India Product Management Association (IPMA) is a voluntary, grassroots organization that is dedicated to helping product management as a function grow in maturity and capability all across the country. It is mostly focused on IT products for now. IPMA is organizing, in its second year after launch, the flagship annual event which brings together industry veterans to speak about various product management topics. This year’s theme, built on the confidence in the growth of product companies is, Journey to Product Nirvana! Journey to Product Nirvana takes the attendees from dissecting the nuances of product management across platforms and products to highlighting successes to sharing advice on specific challenges!

All this in a few hours with networking over lunch on Saturday December 8, at Microsoft office on Lavelle Road, Bangalore. The highlight of the event is the keynote by Ram Narayanan, a product management veteran on “Building customer centric product strategy”, a craft, very few get it right! The event also features Mukund Mohan, Pallav Nadhani, Pinkesh Shah, Saran Chatterjee, Sanjay Jain, Sarit Arora, Dhimant Parekh etc on panels.

IPMA has chapters in Bangalore, Pune and one more coming up in New Delhi soon. Visit http://indiapma.org for details or better yet register for this annual event before the limited seating runs out: http://indiapmaannualevent2012.doattend.com/

The event is sponsored by Confianzys and Tally Solutions and hosted by Microsoft.

20/11/201220/11/2012

5 Tips for creating a compelling product tour

In between that 90-sec video on the homepage introducing your product and a visitor actually signing up for a free trial, there is this glue that is required. The glue that helps visitors map the problems they are looking to solve to the features your product offers. Or the other way round. Back in time when men hunted for food and the web had animated star-shaped red-colored 50% OFF buttons all over, it was a lengthy page usually called Features. Today, when people are busier and the web richer, it has been replaced by what is called the Product Tour.

A product tour is an all-round summary of a product. An all-round summary because it has to bring out all aspects of your product but without going into details like how it allows the color of the error message to be changed from red to pink. It is a very important piece of your product literature, and I am going to talk about the best practices for creating a compelling product tour.

Sell benefits, not features

You have heard this a million times. Make it a million and one. But when it comes to a product tour, the importance of this point cannot be overstated. In fact, it is one the main differences between a deathly-dull-almost-useless feature list and a product tour. A feature list tells the visitor what a product can do, a product tour tells what the product can do for him.

Apple is a master at this, like at most things marketing. For the iPad, rather than listing out all the business features of iOS and the apps it comes along with, Apple just says how business users can be productive right from the start itself.

Write these benefits like you write tweets — simple and crisp, conveying just one point at a time.Mint does this really well with its product tour, a very important piece of literature for them given the sensitive nature of the product.

Make your benefits easier to understand with use cases. Don’t come up with problem-solution scenarios that everyone can directly relate to — they just don’t exist. Use scenarios 80% of your audience can relate to straightaway and let the others draw a parallel. It is better to hit the exact spot with a majority of your audience than try hit close to the spot for all of them. TheFusionCharts product tour, which I was a part of conceptualizing, uses examples in plenty to drive home benefits that would have taken otherwise taken multiple paragraphs.

Group similar benefits

Do not throw all the benefits of your product at once on your visitor’s face. It worked back in the day when the length of the feature list was as important as the features themselves but man has evolved now. Firstly, too much content overwhelms the visitors. These days, they digest it much better in bite-sized chunks. Secondly, for people interested in only a particular angle of the product, a page talking about that angle and around makes it much easier for them.

Freshbooks does this well by grouping benefits under simple action-driven heads.

Or you could group them in the sequential manner the product is going to be used in. With an email marketing tool like Campaign Monitor, a user will design the campaign first, then send it over and finally track its effectiveness, so that’s a good logical way of grouping the benefits.

Make it visual

Get your screenshots, diagrams and photos to do a bulk of the talking. Sure, copy is important and be sure to sum up your point really well in words but the visual is what will ultimately drive home the point. Also, visuals are much easier to scan through and remember.

FusionCharts, which is all about data visualization, has an open layout for the product tour and uses visuals in all shapes and sizes.

Get the visual to convey as much of the benefit as possible. If you can depict a complete use case with the visual, go ahead and do it. Don’t get Company A to work on Project 123 in the screenshot — use real data and real people, like Basecamp.

Do a complete roundup

Users don’t just buy a product, they buy a solution. Tell them what kind of documentation your product comes with. Do you also have demos that helps them get started quickly? What about tech support? MailChimp does this well in its tour.

Do you have an API for developers to create their own apps and add-ons? Is there a community developing them already? JIRA has a dedicated slide about add-ons.

And finally, it’s time to establish the credibility of your product.

Think your navigation through

Now that we are done talking about the content, let’s talk navigation. Where do visitors come to the tour from and where do they head out? What about the things in between? Since the product tour is a glue between attention and conversion, this is a very important piece of the puzzle.

Typically a visitor comes to the tour from the homepage or a landing page. Could the tour be used as a landing page by itself? After all, it sums up the product pretty well, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, there’s no clear answer for this. It depends on your product, the problem your visitors are looking to solve when they hit your website and the length of the tour itself. Just be sure to add the promise of your product right at the start of the tour if you decide to use it as a landing page, so the visitor has the right context before he takes a deep dive into the product.

What about linking to blog posts and videos for more information on a particular feature? Isn’t that a good addition? The products I have used as examples in the post are evenly divided on this question. MailChimp sprinkles links liberally throughout the content and after it.

Basecamp, on the other hand, keeps it all clean.

For me, internal links are not a good addition. The intent with the product tour is to give the visitor an all-round summary of the product and then send him packing to the free trial. Additional links only divert from the intended navigation flow.

If you have to have the deep dive resources, put them all together at the end of the tour. Interested people can check it out from there, and others can simply ignore it.

And now the final part. For product tours having multiple slides, more simply pages, what should you link to at the end of each slide? Rather what should you link to most prominently — the next slide or free trial signup? Again the thoughts on these are pretty mixed, but here’s what I consider best. The slides should have link to the next slide most prominently. Links to sign up for the free trial or register for the newsletter could be present but in lesser glory.

The idea is that if the visitor wants to spend more time understanding the product, let him do that before forcing him to sign up. For someone who figures your product will solve his pain point and wants to sign up immediately, he can always find that link from the main navigation or pick from where they are put out in lesser glory.

Over to you

Do you think the product tour as important as I make it out to be? What are other important considerations to keep in mind for a compelling product tour? Got good examples to share? Go for it.

[Helpful read: Behind the scenes of the FusionCharts product tour]

17/11/201223/11/2012

Destination Vs. Distribution: Why your Product should be where your users are!

User acquisition is a prerequisite to startup success. Startups often see user acquisition as an act of sourcing traffic to a destination and converting traffic to users.

Almost every web business has a destination: a website, an app etc. The destination is often seen as the product in its entirety. Talk to a startup about their product and they will often think of it as a website or an app that the user goes to.

However, the destination is just one manifestation of the product.

DESTINATION VS. DISTRIBUTION

An internet service can be delivered to users in two broad ways. It’s often important to think through both the routes to figure out how your user will best interact with your service. The two modes are characterized as follows:

Destination: How do the users get to where the product is?

Distribution: How does the product get to where the users are?

Any service can be delivered as a combination of these two.

DESTINATIONS

What are they?

Destinations are the online address of the product that users remember and visit.

Manifestations?

Most common forms of destinations are websites, mobile apps and downloaded software (that syncs with the cloud).

Important because…

This is the go-to place for users to interact with the product. Whenever you think of Facebook, you have a site or an app to go to to use the product.

But…

Destinations are not always available in the context of the users. For example, Flickr is a great photo hosting service but it wasn’t available at the point of photo capture for a long time. A user had to click a picture and then undertake another series of actions to upload the picture on to Flickr.com. In contrast, Instagram’s service could be accessed right at the time of photo capture.
Destinations, by definition, require users to come to where the product is and this brings with it the challenge of user acquisition.

DISTRIBUTION

What are they?

Distribution delivers product functionalities in the context of the user making it easy for the user to interact with the product.

Manifestations?

Most common forms of distribution include widgets (Yelp), code embeds (Quora, YouTube), API provisioning , browser extensions as well as apps (especially apps that deliver you a feed from a product, for consumption).

Important because…

The product is available where the users are. Hence, it helps direct traffic back to the destination. Yelp used widgets very effectively to gain users by allowing users to showcase widgets on their blog. YouTube gained traction by allowing users to embed videos on their MySpace profile and directing traffic back to the destination. Flickr, similarly, gained traction by allowing users to embed pictures in their blog posts.
The product is available in the context of the user. This is especially true in the case of ‘curation as creation’ tools like ScoopIt. ScoopIt allows anyone to create a magazine by combining a set of links. The creator can either create the magazine by visiting the ScoopIt destination and manually adding all the links to the magazine or she can install a browser extension that plucks the web page she is visiting and adds it to the magazine. In the second case, the user never needs to leave her context to use the product. Evernote uses a similar extension. Social sharing buttons work on a similar dynamic and allow the user to share content without having to visit the actual social media destination.
Distribution helps engage the user and encourage repeat visits. Email updates have been used since the early days of the web to bring back users to the destination. In recent times, this tactic worked especially well for Groupon.

But…

More often than not, distribution is limited to certain functionalities. A news feed delivered to the user or a browser extension to capture a web page exhibit only a slice of the functionality that the product offers. However, that is the exact slice of functionality that is needed in the context of the user.

THE OVERLAP

Ultimately, destination and distribution are determined not by their physical manifestations (although that helps understand the difference) but by the use case.

Destination requires the user to move into the context of the product. Distribution enables the user to use the product in his active context.

While the two are different, there is an overlap between the two as well. For example, the Instagram app acts as a destination in consumption mode where a user can view photos and participate in discussions but it also fits into the context of the user (using the phone as a camera) in production mode. An offline downloaded software (e.g. Dropbox, Evernote) that syncs with the cloud serves as a destination (user specifically opens a software and uses the product within that context) as well as distribution (the native context of the product is geared towards online usage but the offline piece fits into the user context who might not have access to the internet at that point.

As shown by these examples, the manifestations overlap but the use cases are different. Hence, it is important to think through possible use cases and identify usage contexts where a destination makes more sense than distribution or vice versa.

In summary, when planning an internet product, it is important to consider the mix of Distribution and Destination that it requires:

List out the use cases. How will the user use it in production mode? How will she use it in consumption mode? It helps to separate the production and consumption modes because user contexts are very different in the two modes.
Are any of the use cases best satisfied in the existing context of the user?
For every action, are you making the user do extra work by coming to a destination?
Can Distribution direct traffic to Destination?

Often, distribution can be the difference between a product that is convenient and engaging and a product that is difficult to use.

How have you split your product across distribution and destination? If you haven’t do you feel some distribution touch points could help improve product usage?

The post first appeared on platformed.info

08/11/201209/11/2012

Product LaunchPAD: Putting the spotlight on 9 quality tech products

On day two of the NASSCOM Product Conclave, nine ‘Product LaunchPAD’ companies were announced. These companies were recognized for their high-quality, emerging products. The gathering, which took place in the ‘Agenda’ hall at the Vivanta by Taj, comprised representatives of the selected companies, industry veterans, the co-hosts of the event (Sharad Sharma and MR Rangaswami) as well as members of the online and offline media communities.

In a time when the product ecosystem in the country is gaining momentum, it’s important to recognize the efforts of companies like these who are focussed on delivering high-quality technology products and putting India on the product map of the world. As Sharad Sharma pointed out while addressing media at the Product LaunchPAD event, the considerable phase of acceleration in the Indian product space demarcates the ‘tigers in the ecosystem’ — but why is it so important for the product ecosystem to grow?

Let’s get some context.

There are two paths that lie in front of India today: either it can go the way the UK went — where globalization hollowed out the the SMB sector — or it can go the way Germany went — where it’s vibrant and thriving SMB industry shaped the development of the country. So what role does the Indian product story have in this situation? Well, the answer to how the Indian SMB story shapes up depends largely on what’s happening in the Indian SMB ecosystem today. And this means that Indian product companies have to embrace new trends like non-traditional business models and cloud-based technology which enable the availability of software at every available price point. Sharad Sharma highlighted the importance of this last point — he drew a parallel to the revolutionary Nokia phone that was priced Rs.2000, which completely changed the way the aam Indian communicated. This is exactly whats happening in the software world today. More often than not, software is the carrier of best practices in new environments, and this is what makes India uniquely poised to start a new journey of transformation. And this transformation depends largely on the ability of Indian SMBs to re-invent themselves around these new technologies.

Luckily for India, it’s economic structure is quite similar to the German economy. The data tells a strong story : 26% of India’s GDP comes from the SMB sector, which is growing at a much faster pace than the large businesses sector. For the overall Indian economy to treble, this Indian SMB sector has to not just double but treble — because the burden of the growth of the Indian economic sector is dependent on the growth of the SMB sector, which needs technology to help re-invent itself.

The Product LaunchPAD initiative provides a platform for these companies to showcase their products, which have been in the market for at east a few months.

This year, the judges received 54 entries and shortlisted nine companies after much deliberation. Reflecting the current trends in the industry, many of these companies showcased products and concepts revolving around the cloud, localization and location services, mobility, web applications, social media and script-less test automation.

The nine Product LaunchPAD companies selected for 2012 are:

Qualitia Software Pvt. Ltd (Pune): Qualitia is an easy-to-use yet powerful test automation B2B platform which supports leading test automation tools like HP-QTP and IBM- RFT, including open source solutions like Selenium / Webdriver. This is a script-less test automation platform that transforms the way existing QA teams work in organizations. It empower existing QA teams and automated testing teams.

InSync Tech-Fin Solutions Limited (Kolkata): InSync’s product SBOeConnect is a simple, integrated and flexible solution aimed at Magento (an eBay e-commerce platform) merchants. The product enables fully automatic and bi-directional data synchronization between the SAP Business One ERP system and the Magento e-commerce platform.

The product is already being used by 80+ Magento merchants, as it fulfills a need that e-commerce businesses have which is a need for an integrated ERP system. The company recently launched a Windows 8 application.

Magnasoft Consulting India Pvt. Ltd (Bangalore): Magnasoft focuses on the geospatial industry, specifically on three segments: content (maps), enterprise (large software for corps) and consumer (child safety). Their product NorthStar caters to the third segment, as the company identified a sweet-spot in the area of child-safety in the K-12 ages. The product used Amazon’s cloud platform to offer a subscription based model to parents who pay Rs.50 a month to receive SMSs that tell them when exactly the school bus their child is on will reach the designated bus-stop. The system works with an accuracy of two minutes and focuses on improving the safety and accountability of school bus systems using the RFID system.

Ciafo (Bangalore): Ciafo’s product Frrole sees itself going beyond mainstream media to revolutionize the news industry. It relies on people enabling news to move faster, and champions the thought of news not being controlled by one single entity. With increased direct sharing and historically low trust levels in mainstream media, Frrole presents a revolutionary new alternative for users to discover news about and around them. By promoting citizen journalism, it also hopes to create a society with more symmetrical distribution of news and opinions.

Silver Stripe Software Pvt. Ltd (Chennai): Tour My App is Silver Stripe Software’s new product which aims to increase user engagement and trial conversion in self-serve web apps. When people sign up with web apps online, its important that they know how to use the app by themselves otherwise they lose interest. The product solves the “what should I do next?” pain point. It lets web application developers create guided tours inside their application on the Tour My App site.

Greytip Software Pvt. Ltd. (Bangalore): GreyTip’s product Greytip Online is a cloud based HR and payroll software (SaaS) that is suitable for SME companies who have between ten and 250 employees. It simplifies and automates most payroll and employee data management activities, including statutory calculation and reporting. With this product, the company takes automation to smaller companies in order to make them competitive, but uses Indian prices. It currently has a user base of 95,000 employees.

Pipal Tech Ventures (Bangalore): Pipal Tech’s application is B2C free application that aims at bringing Google like search capabilities for offline retailers. DelightCircle is the company’s customer engagement and location based marketing platform. The DelightCircle Smartphone app allows consumers to discover places to shop and eat based on their location and interests, and get rewarded for this. There’s also a DelightCircle SMS based app and a DelightCircle website that offer the same capabilities.

SignEasy: SignEasy is an iPhone, iPad and Android application that offers a a simple and quick way to sign and return documents securely from a device. It allows for multiple signers to accelerate professional transactions and close deals from virtually anywhere. The app also allows for text and image insertions and it can be linked to Box, Dropbox and Evernote for retrieval and archiving of documents. It supports several document and image formats and also offers the ability to set a personal passcode to prevent unauthorized access to signatures and files.

Selasdia (sales aid spelt backwards) is Aiaioo Labs’ product which is an intelligent sales assistant for brands. It is essentially a CRM system that has access to customer information, which it uses to listen to all that customers are saying on blogs and other areas online, and capture this information. It tracks blogs, understands the posts and lets brands know when it is relevant to them and the products they are selling. It tells brands what their customers’ interests are, helps them build relationships and helps them find people they should be talking to.

06/11/201206/11/2012

Commitment delivery percentage – an indicator of future success of startups?

Here’s an interesting new term for entrepreneurs to be aware of – Commitment delivery percentage. I dont know for sure but I think in a year from now, most startups will start to follow this metric more seriously than others. Some investors are already claiming this metric to be the #1 indicator of future success of startups.

At the Microsoft Accelerator in Bangalore, there are 11 companies in our current batch (Sep to Dec). Every week I send our reports to all our mentors with the weekly commitments that startups have signed up for and how many of them have met their commitments.

Since startup discipline is something I am very passionate about, it goes without saying that I track everything at the accelerator.

Commitments fall into 2 buckets – product and customer. Overall we focus on 3 areas in the accelerator –Product development, Customer development and Revenue development, but initially revenue development is largely ignored since most folks are building MVP and getting early adopters.

Each of these 2 buckets of commitments is not something the startup comes up with alone in a vacuum. I typically discuss the commitments at our weekly all hands and it is a fairly public affair. While some teams try to lower the bar for their commitments, most are aggressive with what they commit to.

Product commitments are delivery of new set of features, versions or changes per a customer / early adopters requirement. Since many companies have mobile or web applications, most startups at the accelerator become customers of other startups so the feedback loop is quick and immediate.

Customer commitments are a combination of # downloads (if mobile app), or active users, engaged users or user feedback. Since I fundamentally believe that nothing’s possible without customer’s (who have a problem) at a startup, most companies have customer commitments from the first week. During the early days it was mostly meeting customers to get feedback and showing mockups, wireframes, etc.

The weekly report I send out to all mentors (currently over 70 folks) are to people who are committed to helping these startups and are engaged with them every week, either making introductions or reviewing progress and trying their product.

As with most reports, I can tell quickly who has read the report and who has not. On average 30 mentors (less than 50%) read the reports each week. They dont take more than 5 min to read and review.

Most of the investor mentors were reading the reports (of the 13 investor mentors, 8 were diligent and even asking questions every week to clarify certain points).

Over breakfast and a few lunch meetings I had a chance to get & give some feedback to some of our mentors. One question most people asked me was:

What % of commitments were being met and which companies were best at meeting commitments?

The answer is a surprising 70% of commitments were being met consistently and 63% of companies were consistently (with 1-2 exceptions per company max) exceeding their commitments on both product and customer traction.

Most seed-stage investors in India have a revenue requirement (not all, but most) so I was surprised they were the most aggressive in asking me questions about commitments. Seems to me, thanks to the early visibility, investors, were willing to make earlier bets, but needed some sense of the team’s performance.

What better way to judge performance than see the team making commitments weekly and delivering on them?

Investors have mentioned to me the in their experience the #1 indicator of a venture funded startups’ success is crisp execution and if they are going after a large market, then fantastic execution makes a good team great.

So how can we help more companies get on this instead of just Microsoft Accelerator companies?

We plan to release a version of our startup connection system (internally called The Borg) to all Indian companies by mid January 2013. With this solution all companies (who opt to do so) can make their commitments and report them to over 250 seed and early stage investors, mentors and advisers. And yes, its free to all startups.

The next experiment is to see in June of 2013 if the improved visibility into a startup’s execution increases the chances of funding for entrepreneurs. We are currently tracking that as well, and will be able to report in an automated fashion.

03/11/201208/12/2023

Lean Experimentation as the way to faster progress in product startups

“It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory (idea) is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong” – Richard Feynman

Building a successful product startup is like trying to win a race driving a vehicle that has less than half its fuel tank filled, whose controls you don’t fully understand and moreover don’t know where the finish line is. What is known is the visibility of runway for next few meters and inspiration from stories of how many has won such race to gain riches.

While the analogy might look far-fetched but startups work under the circumstances of extreme uncertainty. They might herald around a great idea that they think will change the world there is many things that are unknown – the problem being solved, if their solution is the right one, they have the right team to make it happen and so on.

Risk

Risk is the common language that is used to describe and address the elements of uncertainty in life. There are few kinds of uncertainty that a startup has to eliminate as it goes forward on its road to success. Some of these risks are the following

Technology Risk – Can the startup build what it is planning to build with the current state of the art technology? In many cases this may not be a question but products that are at bleeding edge of technology has to evaluate this question. For technology entrepreneurs this is where the motivation for them to build the product would have first started and thus they start the journey here and spend their most of the time.

Product Risk – While the aspect of can build or not is one thing, the other element startup faces is what kind of feature to build first. What is must-have & nice to have feature.

Execution Risk – Is the startup staffed with right team to get things done. Are they able to pull off what they plan to do or are just paralyzed while coping with ever changing conditions on almost everything.

Customer Risk – Finally whether what the startup is building will be used by a set of users, if they will or somebody else will pay for the usage, recommend it to friends after they have used it.

Market Risk – This is aggregated customer risk, are there enough number of customers who will use, pay & recommend? Is there a viable way to reach to them, interact with them and also collect from them?

Resources

While startups address these risks an important law of life – “Resource are limited”

‘Time is limited’ – Startups would have setup or planned a certain time duration during which they wanted to try out their startup.

‘Money at disposal is limited’- Regardless of how financing is done (self or external) money is always in short supply

‘Energy is limited’ – Ask any entrepreneur who has been at it for couple of years and has not seen any breakthrough in progress, he would tell how jadedness and fatigue starts to set in.

‘Even a supporter’s patience is limited’ – In initial days many encourage to give support , after not seeing much tangible progress for a while there is degradation in their support in kind or even words.

Given that the resources are limited how startups approach addressing the risk matters.

99% of the time the following is how startups address risks

Many startups try to extend their resources by raising money. But that alone is not the resource that is limited. Moreover even after extension through infusion of money if startups can’t remove customer risk then the same fate applies.

A workable approach however could be trying to address elimination of customer risk first and also broaden it to market risk.

The most important thing for any product startup is to reach product/market fit .

By focusing on eliminating customer risk is the fastest way to reach there.

Over the last few years a lot of learning has been understood on how to eliminate customer risks, these learning are well documented as customer development and lean experimentation.

Few key principles of these are the following

All statements are assumptions or guess
All answer lie outside the building
Change guesses into facts using experiment with customers
Start by building uncomfortably small prototypes to test with customers.
Run those experiment and measure on the metrics
Incorporate learning into next experiment
Move through the loop quickly

01/11/201208/12/2023

What is that we have to build?

Every now and then, we hear people arguing about building “Microsoft” and “Google” of India. Companies like Microsoft, Google have built up incredible technologies and their contributions in improving our life is significant. When started, they started with big vision, a tough and relevant problem to solve, and brilliant team behind the vision. While I cannot look into minds of founders of those companies and say what they were thinking, the problems they chose to solve had enormous relevance and potential at their time and place.

When some people talk of building product companies, they want to build another “Facebook”, another “Google”, etc. And some people want to build “Valley” here in Bangalore or Hyderabad. If all we’re doing is trying to build another “Google”, replicate ecosystem of “Silicon Valley” here in an Indian city, sorry people. Your attempts are futile. Suppose we go to Kashmir, and like apples very much there. We come back to Karnataka, want to grow apples. Can we grow apples here? No. Climate, and soil conditions in Karnataka is different from that of Kashmir. If we are still trying to grow apples in Karnataka, we’re just wasting our time and effort. But Karnataka grows sandalwood. This is a tree that grows here very well. And we can grow best Sandalwood in the world.

Don’t mistake the analogy here. I’m in no way suggesting that Indians can’t build a technological giant such as Google or Facebook. What I mean is, we should not build product companies for the sake of it. If you can solve a problem really well without building a product, and build a great business out of it, that should be the way. When we’re building a company or building ecosystems, we’ve to encourage startups to be best in what they are building or doing. It doesn’t really matter after a point if you are building a product or offering a service, what matters is quality of your work. It should solve real problems of the people. In doing so, it only makes sense to utilize existing ingredients of ecosystem to the fullest.

What we should aim at is building a culture of solving problems and solving efficiently. To solve a big tough problem, if we’ve have to build a product for that, we’ll build a product. If we’ve to invent, we’ll invent. If we have to offer an innovative service, we’ll do that. Once we start solving big problems, once we start setting standards of excellence in everything we do, may be we’ll realize product companies are by-products.

Guest Post Contributed by Mahesha Hiremath, Boson Research