Product Management Archives - Page 20 of 21

29/10/201229/10/2012

Expect a Microsoft, Google or facebook out of India? Won’t happen unless we THINK BIG!

When VCs from the US flooded into India about 5 to 10 years ago, they were expecting to invest and make happen, a number of Microsofts, Google and facebooks!

They ended up buying shares of existing public companies and became more of Private Equity investors rather than VCs who could put in a 1$ in 100 companies and have 5 block-busters like facebook or Google that returned $100 each! That’s the nature of Venture Capital – taking risks on 20 companies so that one becomes facebook or Google or Microsoft and makes up for all the losses in those 19 other companies.

This is as much an indictment of Indian start-ups not being bold enough as much as VCs turning into Private Equity investors. They did not find enough companies that were bold enough or thinking big enough!

First, some disclaimers! If you are building an Indian version of a successful US company or targeting a unique vertical in India with your SaaS or Cloud solution or trying different Consumer plays, all success to you! You can still be very successful and thrive!

This is not an indictment of the Software Services business! It helped enormous numbers of Indians stabilize and improve their lives and others that depend upon them, building a huge economy around them. But we need to move to the next stage. The thinking needs to be different this time. When the first services companies like Infosys, Tata Burroughs and Tata Consultancy Services started, you needed lots of money to buy mainframes and minicomputers. Today, it does not take the same amount of resources to get started in the software business. The only thing that will make a difference now are Innovative Ideas!

This article is for people who wonder what it takes to build a global blockbuster like facebook and Google!

That has to do with NOT THINKING BIG ENOUGH! It does not mean just doing products for the Global Market or going for a huge blockbuster IPOs! That may come later. It has everything to do with going after BIG problems. Big What-Ifs! Big Experiments, Big Thinking!

This has to do with our general instinct to jump too quickly into “how do I make money” and risk aversion and the inability to postpone these questions and address some fundamental problems and find innovative solutions for them, not thinking about immediate payoffs!

Opportunities are everywhere if ONLY we stop being followers and start being leaders! In Consumer oriented startup companies, everybody is still dealing with information – work and social in many different platforms – smart phones, laptops, desktops. They are trapped in multiple formats that are incompatible with each other and causing endless frustration. Documents, status updates, photographs, videos, spreadsheets, presentations, databases are all still in many repositories leading us to waste enormous amounts of time just shuffling all of this!

On the enterprise side, Cyber Security is still a large, large problem! Nuclear facilities, Utilities, Government systems of every kind are subject to Cyber Terrorism more than ever before!

Companies are moving rapidly to the cloud; cloud security is even more scary than internal systems that can be cutoff from external access if someone suspects break-ins. Credit card information and online banking have only led to even less secure places to handle money.

Two days ago Amazon Web Services in Virginia ground to a halt because a monitoring system developed a memory leak and brought many, many companies’ servers to a grinding halt for hours!

Backups and Disaster Recovery are still problems that many enterprises have not found good solutions for yet, globally! There are technologies like Cassandra databases that can have three or four copies of the database automatically synched and updated. No need for backups – they are already backed up in real-time in multiple locations. You can almost build indestructible computing if you wanted to, if you choose cloud resources in multiple geographic locations, even across continents. The video streaming service NetFlix already does this with databases synched up across the Atlantic between US and European Data centers of Amazon!

Companies are just getting into collecting lots of Big Data – social media mentions of their companies, products, detailed information about what every visitor to their websites and online presences did when they are there and wondering how to use all of this information with customer and order information they already have in traditional database systems.

All of these are BIG PROBLEMS begging for BIG THINKING!

When Thinking Big, pick any of these above or other problems, they could lead to the next Microsoft, Google and facebook! It requires an obsession with ONE of those problems and a relentless drive to solve that, first.

When you solve big problems, you don’t need to worry about sales, investors and global blockbuster status. They will come as surely as night after day and high tide after low tide.

We have a tendency to equate technical knowledge, prowess and hacking with success. In software services they are important. But not elsewhere in the software business!

They are important tools but not your mission when it comes to building fast growing, large companies. You need to address problems and create innovative solutions that have clearly identifiable benefits. The benefits are the only things users care about. They do not care about Java or Python or Oracle or MySQL. They have a problem; do you have a solution?

The thing that is holding us back is our own thinking! Getting out of that box is the first step towards THINKING BIG! Thinking big takes the same amount of effort as thinking small but the payoffs are disproportional.

Think little goals and expect little achievements. Think big goals and win big success – David Joseph Schwartz.

26/10/201215/08/2014

Pallav Nadhani’s list of Top 10 mistakes entrepreneurs make…(Part 2 of 2)

Pallav Nadhani, CEO and Co-founder of FusionCharts, was just 17 when he started the data visualization product company in 2002. The company today is one of India’s most successful product stories and happens to be one of the first Indian start-ups to have caught the eye of the Obama administration. FusionCharts has a user base of 450,000 across 118 countries, and the company celebrates its 10th year of existence on October 22, 2012. In the second half of a two-part interview with pn.ispirt.in, Pallav Nadhani tells us about keeping a product relevant in the constantly evolving market, how he communicates with team members and what it’s like to work with teams from two very different cities in the country!

This is part 2 of the interview titled – Find out what inspired Pallav Nadhani to start FusionCharts on their 10th anniversary.

How do you manage to keep your product relevant in the market? How do you keep yourself in the game even after going through the process of scaling and maturing? Usually after this it’s a case of either re-birth or death, right?

For us a couple of things work well : there are nearly half a million developers out there who use our product, so we get more feedback than we can sometimes handle and implement. This is huge repository for us to understand where the market is going. There are some developers out there saying in a few months or few years we see ourselves using the product this way so we require this functionality. So there’s a lot of consolidated information that we get from both our existing clients and prospects, and we add some amount of research and gut-feel to this so that we can improve the different versions.

If you had to pick three functions in the company which are critical for a product company like yours, which ones would you choose?

I’d choose engineering and marketing together first. In our case, marketing and engineering go together because the value proposition and positioning done by the marketing team is done in consultation with the engineering division. Similarly, right from day one of product development, marketing defines the product features such as labels so there is a lot of interaction. I would choose the support function next, because ours is a B2B product so implementation does require some amount of support.

What are some of the tools and techniques that you use internally to keep communication alive? What are some the things that you do keep communication going right from the top to the most junior most employee?

The advantage we have is that we are a really small company — we have a team size of about 60 people. So anything that’s happening gets communicated within the team quite easily. The next advantage that we have is that most of the team is based in Kolkata, and I like to say that the Kolkata team is more like family because of the inherent nature of the city! In terms of messaging, We’ve divided teams into functions so if a team needs to know something, we tell the team head and the trickle down effect just ensures the right communication. All the heads are supposed to involve their team members, and this is relatively easy because there are only four to five members per team. Then we have layers of communication protocols built over this, so engineering has its own system which is visible to everybody within the team. For cross-company communication its either face-to-face or I send out an e-mail — since this is quite rare (like once in three months), people do read them. I also ensure that I ask a question or engage the reader somehow so that I know who is involved. We also use Yammer, the enterprise social network. Another thing we do is celebrate birthdays, so this becomes a one or two hour event which does involve some discussion.

How do you manage the culture difference between Bangalore and Kolkata? Both the cities and their people are very different — Bangalore is more fast paced and Kolkata is not like that.

Like I mentioned, I tend to say Bangalore is the team, Kolkata is family! There are some inherent challenges : when we brought in some senior management in Kolkata there were some issues as most people were used reporting to me and suddenly it wasn’t the case anymore. Now the senior management is trying to put in more systems and processes so that that Kolkata team can work more professionally! There was some resistance, of course, but once they were able to see the value of the changes then things changed. Now there is data to react to, and today they are able to pin-point where things went wrong and fix it. Overall, I’ve not had any major problems. Initially, for the first six months I had to go to Kolkata once every week to act as a mediator. Now I go once in six months so I guess that really shows how far we’ve come!

So FusionCharts has now matured and you’ve been in the business ten years — what are the nuggets of information you’d give product company entrepreneurs out there?

There is nothing thats right or wrong. It depends on the context of the product your are building. A few things that you need to get right are even if you are a developer, you need to focus on packaging your product. Packaging and marketing has an important role to play as no product can really be sold on it’s own — there are only exceptional cases like popular apps which get downloaded millions of times. Team building is another important thing — once your product starts getting traction, your company will get split across so many different functions that you will require help with this. You’d like to believe that you can solve every problem, but it’s not very scalable. Specifically in India, an entrepreneur requires a lot of focus. If there’s a new product idea every week and there’s no focus on one thing, it can disastrous. For the last ten years, we’ve just focussed on data visualization — despite the audience we have and despite our capabilities, we’ve not ventured into other areas because we know that this particular category has a lot of scope and if we branch out into too many other things we won’t be very good at any one thing.

What is the leadership style that you employ? What do people typically have to say about your leadership style?

I would say mine is more of a laissez-faire style of leadership. It’s very different from the concept that people are not trustworthy. I prefer not micro-manage — I believe in giving people work and a broad outline and let them go about it. At the end of it I’ll tell them how I feel about what they’ve done.

Pallav Nadhani’s list of Top 10 mistakes entrepreneurs make

Not delegating early and enough for the fear of things not getting done correctly
Hiring senior people who don’t fit and have different expectations and lesser hunger
Not setting culture right – focus is more oriented towards result, than behavior. Also setting unreasonable deadlines which set the wrong culture.
Using the same team to deliver multiple products – bandwidth bottleneck
Not establishing clear communication channels and ownership between teams when moving from generic team members to specialists.
Not getting enough exposure locally for hiring — like the first 4-5 years I lived a cocooned life in Kolkata.
Not bringing in a sales team early — they bring in more deals to close and also free up your time
Losing focus in between — too many products and extensions
Not saying ‘no’ enough to many employee and customer requests
Building custom additions for a few customer along with the main product — upgrade issues.

Download the FREE copy of the book here.

25/10/201223/11/2012

How to Build a Great Product by Removing Barriers to Usage

Product creators often tend to think of products in terms of features. I’m not talking about the traditional myth of “more features is better” that got debunked a long time back. Product creators still think of features because they try to deliver a certain functionality. Instead, a product should actually be visualized as an answer to a pain point. Users don’t use products because they need certain features. Users use products because they have been trying to do something but were facing a barrier while doing it so far and the product helps lower the barrier.

A pain point can often be stated in the following terms:

I am a <USER DESCRIPTION>

Trying to <DO XYZ>

But I’m unable to do so because of <A BARRIER>

Products that lower (or completely remove) the barrier to getting something done tend to create entirely new market segments that had never existed earlier.

The Skill Barrier

Lack of skills is one of the biggest barriers to getting something done. We hire the carpenter, plumber etc. to get stuff sorted owing to the skill barrier. Products that help ‘unskilled’ users do something they couldn’t have done before break the skill barrier and open up a new segment of users.

WYSIWYG website creators and editors enable creation of landing pages and websites without the need to know HTML. WYSIWYG editors help non-coders launch landing pages with little effort and create a new market in the process.

Instagram lowers the skill barrier required to create arty pictures that earlier required photoshop prowess.

In all such cases, the lower barriers lead to greater adoption than would have come through direct competition. A me-too Photoshop competitor, even if it was free, would never have gained the adoption that Instagram did.

The Time/Effort Barrier

People are strapped for time. A value proposition based around time savings or lower effort is an attractive one. Bloggers needed to invest time and effort to write posts that would stand out. Twitter brings down that barrier and allows publishing with very low investment of time and effort. Since everyone has the 140 character limit and given how democratic the real time feed is, there is no humungous effort required to stand out anymore.

Another common theme that disrupts the time/effort barrier is aggregation. Platforms that aggregate multiple providers often provide a compelling value proposition as a one-stop entry point. In the early days of the web, Yahoo provided value as the home page of the web. As the web grew and portal-based navigation grew clumsier, Google emerged as the one-stop solution to accessing anything on the web. Meta search engines (e.g. Adioso) act as the one-stop entry point and allow a user to search across multiple providers, thus drastically reducing the time to get her job done.

The Money Barrier

Online services are increasingly trying Freemium offering a basic level for free to the more amateur producers with limited needs. These tools were only available for a fee earlier. Having them available for free creates an entirely new market. Users from the existing market also deflect towards a free alternative. Over time, some of them migrate to a paid tier. While lower price has never been a sustainable competitive advantage, completely free has the potential to disrupt an existing market.

Unbundling is another way the internet brings down the money barrier. Music was traditionally sold as albums. Users would have to buy an entire album even though they liked only 1-2 songs in it. iTunes disrupted this market by allowing per-song billing. In doing so, it made the market a lot more efficient and consumers who would ordinarily not have purchased an entire album to get a particular song also ended up buying the song.

The Resource Barrier

Let’s take an example closer home. Entrepreneurship has become mainstream like never before. There are several reasons that contribute to this phenomenon but one of the most important is the drastic reduction in the resources required to get a company up and running. One of the many contributors to this change is the rise of Amazon Web Services which lowered the resources and upfront investment required to get your service up and running. While a startup would have had to get a minimum level of infrastructure upfront earlier, it can now dip into Amazon’s vast resources on-demand.

The Access Barrier

Platforms often disrupt gatekeepers by allowing producers direct access to potential consumers.

Most media businesses (publishing, performing arts etc.) are industries with gatekeepers determining which producers get market access. Platforms like Amazon Kindle Publishing, YouTube, CDBaby disrupted these industries to varying degrees by allowing producers direct access to a market of consumers tho whom they could market themselves.

This applies equally well to marketplaces. The long tail of sellers on online marketplaces wouldn’t have existed in the real world as they wouldn’t have had access to the niche market that would be interested in their product. eBay created a large segment of sellers which never existed previously by lowering he access barrier.

The investment community (angel investors, VCs etc.) is not necessarily an equal-access community and the right connections and introductions can open many doors that would otherwise not have existed. Kickstarter seeks to democratize access to investment by allowing anyone to set up a project, state funding requirements and raise money online.

These examples repeatedly demonstrate the fact that lowering barriers to get something done creates new markets for the product. Competition on the internet is no longer about fighting tooth and nail over price or features as was the case with traditional businesses. In today’s age, competition is about offering a value proposition that is offered by no one else and creating an entirely new market of consumers who had a latent need but no readily available solution to solve that need. Companies that do this effectively win.

The post first appeared on platformed.info

17/10/201218/10/2012

3 objectives your homepage has to accomplish

As a tech startup, your homepage is the first encounter a visitor will have with your business. The first real encounter. And as a business, what is it that you would like to convey during this encounter? Ideally, you would talk for 30 hours straight but then people have lives to live, promises to keep and food to eat. So what do you do?

Get your homepage to cover you on three simple grounds. Three primary objectives. Here they go.

What’s your promise?

Every company has a promise. The promise answers the question Why should I look at your products? and sets the expectations before the visitor takes a dive into your offerings. Are your products the easiest to use in the market? Most powerful? Reliable?

For companies having a single offering, it is the promise of that single product itself. MailChimp promises easy email newsletters as opposed to Campaign Monitor’s beautiful email newsletters.

For companies having multiple offerings, it is the common promise that runs along all the products, more like the promise of the company. 37signals’ promise is making collaboration productive and enjoyable for people every day while Atlassian’s promise is to help innovators everywhere plan, build, and launch great software.

However, if you have been chosen as the special one and different products of yours have different promises, it is best to stick to the promise of your flagship product.

Talk about your products
This is a drill you know all too well, so I will just focus on how this differs for a multi-product company from a single-product company.

If you are a company with a single offering, just talk about the benefits of your product liberally sprinkled with examples and use cases like FreshBooks does. For multi-product companies, it is best to display the most important products from the portfolio with a short description of them and link them to the respective product pages. Remember the homepage is not about throwing all the information you have in your visitor’s face, it is about sending them the right way in the right frame of mind.

Build credibility

Would you have dinner at a restaurant where you would be their first guest at 10 pm? Would you go to a concert that starts in 2 hours but has sold only 300 tickets till now? No. If there isn’t anyone else at the restaurant, or there aren’t thousands of people attending the concert already, it just isn’t good. Period.

Human beings are social animals, and for us to be convinced that something is worth our time and money, we need to be told that other people have used the product earlier and found it to be food. We need to be ascertained of the credibility. And as a tech startup, you establish credibility using customer names, testimonials, success stories and press coverage. If you have all of them in aplenty, the world just gave you a standing ovation. If not, a couple of them work fine too.

However, building credibility is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. A prospect will become a customer only if he can see a customer list, and you can have a customer list only if prospects convert to become customers. In cases like these, get customers to invest emotionally instead — tell them the story of your company, show them the pedigree of your founders and give them a behind-the-scenes peek.

Final words

Of course, you can get creative with the order and medium of the obejctives I mention above. You can have a 90-sec video, an illustration where your mascot does all the talking, screenshots of the product itself or wax eloquent in good old text.

What’s your take? Do you think there’s anything else that a product homepage has to have?

Cross Post – PokeandBite.com

15/10/201216/10/2012

Let the world know about your software product

You’ve spent months and days and hours conceptualizing your product and then taking it to market. You’ve won the first few customers who are now stable and you’re thinking about what next…if you’ve achieved this, it’s time to show your product to the world.

The NASSCOM Product Conclave LaunchPAD is the place you should be to demonstrate your product and recount your journey from CONCEPT to REALITY. We’re inviting a select community to hear about you and your product. Won’t you come?

A day before NASSCOM Product Conclave kicks-off in Bangalore (November 6, 2012), we are pleased to host an exclusive interactive session with the media, blogger and analyst community where you have the opportunity to launch your new product and enjoy your moment in the spotlight. Last year we had some of the crème-de-la-crème of press attending the event and reporting it in the print and online media.

Who is eligible?
If you are an Indian software product company that has a software product in the market for at least six months and has at least one revenue generating (not beta!) customer, then you are eligible to participate. Apply for the Product LaunchPAD here before October 25, 2012.

What happens next?
NASSCOM shortlists eligible companies and informs them by October 30, 2012 Present your software product to the media at an exclusive event.

Publish a booklet containing information about your company and software product which will be circulated to the media and available online on the NASSCOM Product Conclave website. Opportunity to interact with a focused group of professionals and hear their feedback on your product.

Some of the folks who will help us short-list some great Products are:



Amit Somani,	Arun Katiyar,	Suresh Sambandam

Need further help?
If you need advice on how to structure your launch pitch or presentation, then please do let us know. Also we have many curated sessions at product conclave to help you take your software product initiatives even further. If you haven’t registered, then do so NOW!

See you at the NASSCOM Product Conclave – the place to connect with Indian Products Ecosystem.

14/10/201216/10/2012

Do not decide what your REAL Product Strategy is until you have Version 1.0 ready! Be Ready to Pivot!

In 2006, folks at the company Odeo were brainstorming ideas for a new software product that they wanted to develop. They came up with the idea for “Twtr” for sending SMS-like messages to groups of people who may be interested in receiving it. Then they hit upon the word “Twitter” that stood for chirps from birds that also stood for “spreading inconsequential information”! That’s how Twitter was born! For a long time, Twitter was made a lot of fun of, with many people denigrating it for exactly the same thing – useless stuff for people who have too much time on their hands and not much to do!

Fast forward a few years! Try telling how “inconsequential” Twitter is to the thousands of people who sent huge numbers of tweets from Egypt trying to highlight atrocities committed by Mubarak’s people before he was overthrown!

As you read this article, Twitter is being used in Syria by both sides in the conflict to get news, pictures and other information about the conflict that is happening there to their own supporters worldwide, in real-time!

It is no longer inconsequential and has become a real-time, short, quick mechanism to get information, images out to those interested. If you have lots more information to convey than 140 characters you place them on sites and send the URLs out! Now you can send it to additional people by attaching tags!

Documentum was a document management company that was started in 1990 and grew solely as a US FDA drug approval document and workflow management company. They had their first version ready and found that pharmaceutical companies in the US were needing a system that centralized all drug approval documents, and provided document versioning when many folks, distributed geographically, needed to contribute and edit others’ edits.

Documentum was a FDA document management software for a long time before they penetrated other verticals and became a general document management software company!

Our own company started out as a Real-time Business Intelligence software company. When we showed our partically completed first version to some Business Process Outsourcing companies in Chennai just on a lark, they said that that was exactly what was needed to process their BPO SLA monitoring activities. So we became a BPO and Call Center Analytics company from a Real-Time Business Intelligence company!

From our next version, the software was dedicated to having the features that was tailored specifically for that purpose, and took a different course!

What are the lessons from all these examples?
If you are passionate about solving some problem, go ahead and implement something first. Show it around, gather users, have them use your product, and gather feedback. See where your sweet spots are – whose pain does it solve? Does it solve that pain immediately? Is the pain large enough for them to pay something in some way immediately (or monetization in case it is a consumer oriented software product like facebook or Twitter)?

If you get the same kind of positive feedback from some subset of your users consistently, you have found your sweet spot! Focus more on that market, be ready to pivot your direction towards that for a while forgetting all other markets! You can always come back to those other ones, once you are successful in that market.

Product startups may not be able to completely predict accurately who exactly might use their software and result in revenues for you in some way, right out of the gate! So get something out early, sign up users and get feedback and observe!

And be ready to pivot towards where you are finding your sweetspots! As a young startup it is very easy to get distracted and start going after all markets and all directions, but paradoxically the right strategy for rapid growth is always narrower focus! Focus in one area, one market, one group of users. Make it successful there, and then you can explore the other areas.

It is very easy to invest too much of your ego in your original direction and get stuck. This is especially a problem with technical founders. If your objective is just to do some hacking and have some technical fun, that may be OK. But if you want to build a successful business, you need to keep your ego in check and be ready to change direction nimbly, especially in the beginning.

13/10/201216/10/2012

New generation of solutions will emerge in coming few years that will change our lives and it’s an opportunity.

Most organizations are built to solve customer / citizen’s problems or service customer needs, whether it is a non for profit or a small private business or a big enterprise. Some of them directly solve customer’s problem, some indirectly by enabling customer facing organizations through technology or raw materials. Technology role over the period of time has been changing from organizational efficiency improvement to business enabler with a remit of solving business problems and changing user behaviors.

We are living in a complex world in which we are increasingly getting dependent on technology for everyday things. This trend is irreversible. In 2009, at the IBM impact conference in Delhi, I 1st heard about Smart Planet initiative and the concept of System of Systems. In his Keynote Neeraj Chandra, doctor get’s previous history information about the patient at real time; doctor write the prescription and the medicine get’s delivered to the patient at his residence and so on. It’s a world where various systems from diverse set of organizations are working together seamlessly to provide a simplified experience to the citizen of this smart city. Smart Grid is another complex technology solution which is now a reality. Organizations are now taking initiatives in building technologies for Smart Buildings, Smart Rail, Smart Water and so on.

A few years back this article in NewYork Times “The Power of the Platform at Apple” caught my attention. This article interestingly defines platform as a combination of hardware, software & services and also shares insights on how companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft and others have been able to create a long term sustainable competitive differentiation for themselves. The author goes on to say that “Successful platforms aren’t confined to the technology industry. America’s interstate highway system, built by the government, could also be seen as platform. The more that people traveled it, the more opportunity it created for businesses and towns linked to its transportation network”. As technology is becoming pervasive, we will see more and more organizations investing in building platforms for multiple organizations to come together to solve citizen’s problems like the IBM Smart City, Khan Academy’s educational platforms and others.

Our world is changing at an incredible speed. Challenges such as globalization, pressure on driving efficiencies, power of the consumer, power of employees, changing world economy, individual’s dependency on technology, have driven the need for radical innovation in order to differentiate. Technology is changing faster than any other factors to a point where it is now challenging organizations current business models. Last week at Gartner’s Symposium the Keynote speakers Chris Howard, Partha Iyengar, Peter Sondergaard introduced audience to the nexus of converging forces – social, mobile, cloud and information and how it is and will continue to transform user behavior both within and outside of our organization to creating new challenges and business opportunities. Gartner’s 2012 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies chart includes many fast maturing disruptive technologies like Social Analytics, Cloud Computing, Big Data, Mobile Payment and others, leading to significant scenarios that enterprises and governments can leverage to deliver new value and experiences to customers and citizens. Every forces in the nexus has it’s unique challenges and it brings opportunities for businesses. For example internet penetration trend and social media adoption/consumptions patterns differs from geography to geography and demography.

Entrepreneurs will leverage these new set of forces and challenges to innovate and create new solutions, services and business models. There will be a flood of solutions based on one, two or all of the forces solving point problems, but the winner will be the one who will take a holistic approach to invest in creating the platform that will enable and help participate in the ecosystem created by various enterprises, governments, other institutions and the internet.

10/10/201210/10/2012

Why aren’t more developers creating serious Mobile App Products?

These are the times, when every third person that you meet in Technology world has an idea for an App. It could be every alternate person if you’re hanging out in geeky groups or among heavy Smartphone users.

The Industry trends suggest a phenomenal surge as well. According to Gartner, Mobile Apps Store downloads worldwide for the year 2012 will surpass 45.6 billion. Out of these, nearly 90% are free Apps, while out of the rest of 5 billion downloads majority (90% again) cost less than $3 per download. This trend has a strong growth curve for the next five years. (See Table 1. Mobile App Store Downloads, courtesy: Gartner)

Another report suggests that 78% of US mobile App Companies are small businesses (based on the Apple and Android App Stores based research). The typical apps that dominate this market are games, education, productivity, and business.

This comes as no surprise. There is a huge divide between the Enterprise Mobility (dominated by the Enterprise Architecture, existing platforms and mobility extensions to the platforms that ensure business continuity) and End-User (Consumer) Mobile Apps dominated by the App Stores supported Small and Mid-size App Development Companies. The barriers to entry in the Smart phone Apps Market seem pretty low with the supporting ecosystem from Apple, Amazon, Google, and Telecom carriers.

However, let’s get back to the fact that majority of these Apps “do not” generate direct revenue.

While the entry seems without barriers, there are multiple hurdles on the race track:

1. Developers need to focus on the User Experience. The smartphone apps pick-up is highly skewed toward Apps that offer a good user experience even for minimal functionality. After the initial success, the App makers end up adding functionality for sustained interest, but the User Experience tops. It’s difficult to focus on UX while still trying to do everything right at the underlying architecture level for long term.

2. Marketing is important. Getting the early eyeballs is key for the App developers. Any serious App needs an immediate initial take-off, and among the things that they need to do to make it happen is to market the App beforehand and to get the authoritative reviews in place.

3. Initial Take-off is just the first hurdle. App needs to be able to handle traffic bursts, it needs scale with increased traction, support virality & social connects inherently, and also build an effective User ecosystem. None of these may seem like the core functional features of the App, but are most critical for the broad-based success.

4. The Freemium model is very popular, but it can kill the business if the marginal costs are not sustainable. The paradox of the Free model is that unless the 10% paid users are able to pay for your 100% costs, every additional user takes you closer to the grave. With this come in two questions – how do you keep the infrastructural costs low, and how do you build additional revenue models around the app.

IaaS can solve some of the infrastructural headache, but doesn’t provide you with the other functional layers that every App needs. You need to still build them. PaaS providers provide the scalable platform for building Apps, but you still need to build some of the functional features such as Gaming Rooms support, Messaging, User Authentication & authorization models, and so on. Mobile developers are still doing a lot of repetitive work across the smartphone Apps that can be consolidated into a framework.
Supporting the additional revenue models require integration with external Ad-services, Payment systems and more importantly the bandwidth to deal with this even more fragmented set of agencies.

5. The End-point device platforms are fragmented and getting even more so. A typical model for App developers is to develop an Android App, iOS App or a Windows App and then support the other platforms as they go along. However, keeping up with these multiple platforms is only getting more and more difficult with the speed with which Apple, Microsoft, and Google keep rolling out the OS. There’s tremendous pressure to release the App within the 1-3 days window of the release of the underlying platform.

Hence, while there are millions of people developing smartphone Apps as we speak, there are only a fraction that get built at serious level, and even smaller fraction that gets built for sustainable business success.

And considering these hurdles, the arrival of the Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) is a blessing for the App Developers. Forrster’s Michael Facemire refers to them as “The New Lightweight Middleware”. He goes ahead and lists out some of the basic tenets of what makes a Mobile Backend as a Service, but I see this list evolving as the vendors offer more and more functionality to the customers leading to en ecosystem.

And the term “ecosystem” is going to be the key. That’s because a successful mobile App doesn’t stop at the user starting the app, using the app, and leaving the app. A successful App creates an ecosystem for the viral growth, user engagement, social functionality, in-built broad-based connectivity for multi-user interactions, and more importantly the ability for cross-platform usage. In a Gaming scenario, the user interactions and the relevant immediate feedbacks are paramount. Most successful apps build an ecosystem. Instagram, 4Square, Pinterest are the common household examples today.

While Michael lists out the usual suspects in his post, most of them in the Silicon Valley, there is a very interesting player in Shephertz’s App42 platform, right here in India. The ecosystem approach that they have taken seems pretty much what may be required for serious app developers that need a robust backend provided as a service, so that they can focus on the app functionality, user experience, and more importantly the marketing aspects of the App.

Now why, still, aren’t more and more developers building even more serious mobile App products? Why shouldn’t they be? I think, they will!

07/10/201208/10/2012

Product/Market Fit and Why Startups Should Care

Most successful products go through two distinct phases 1) product/market fit 2) growth/scale. There are a large number of startups that fails before achieving product/market fit and therefore, it is important to understand what is it and why it matters.

What is product/market fit?

Product/market fit is a phase where you try to establish that you are in a good market and have the right product to satisfy the market. Generally it involves developing a deep understanding of customers, running several experiments and iterating product several times to create the right fit between customer needs and your product.

It’s amazing how imporatnt the concept of product/market fit for startups is and how often it is ignored. Focusing on growth before achieving product/market fit can be counter productive for startups. Therefore, it is critical to know when you have achieved it and when to start focusing on scale.

How do you determine product/market fit?

So how do you know that you have achieved product/market fit? Which metric or target you focus on?

Sean Ellis’s definition is perhaps most objective definition for determining product/market fit. Sean devised below survey:

How would you feel if you could no longer use [product]?

1.     Very disappointed

2.     Somewhat disappointed

3.     Not disappointed (it isn’t really that useful)

4.     N/A – I no longer use [product]

As per Sean if more than 40% of your customers respond that they will be “Very disappointed” without your product then you have product/market fit. You can find more about Sean’s definition in this post.

Famous VC Mark Andreessen describes a more subtle method. As per Andreessen, you can always feel when product/market fit is happening. Your product usage would be great, customers would be happy, key metrics would grow consistently so on and so forth. More about it here.

Product/market fit is essentially having an engaging product that users find valuable. This can be measured by metrics that are critical for consumer engagement. Take social networking products for example. Key indicator of engagement is what percent of registered users use the product every day and every month. A good standard for engaging social networking product is that at least 30% of registered users are MAUs and at least 10% registered users are DAUs. So it is safe to assume product/market fit when you hit those metrics. Exact metric differs based on nature of product but the essence remains same that how engaging and valuable product is for consumers.

How to achieve product market fit?

1) Focus on engagement features

Typically features fall into one of the below quadrants:

Prioritize features that improve engagement and retention and de-prioritize every thing else till you achieve product/market fit.

2) Experiment and iterate fast

Iterate quickly through features using build-measure-learn model that Eric Ries describes in The Lean Startup.

The core idea behind build-measure-learn feedback loop is to consider product development as an iterative process of learning while minimizing the time through the loop. Many startups fail because they build product on assumption that they know what customer wants. Build-measure-learn model requires you to constantly test your assumptions by quickly building features while constantly measuring to determine how those features are resulting in real progress.

Finding product/market fit is an iterative process but bottom line is to establish key metrics that define product engagement and focus on those metrics relentlessly. Anything that doesn’t contribute to moving those metrics upward is not important before product/market fit.

Original Post By Rajat Garg, BubbleMotion and can be accessed here.

29/09/201219/10/2012

The weight of expectation

How many times last month did you use Power Point? Most would have used it at least a couple of times. Power Point is one of those products that seem so natural and effortless to use. And when you think about it, Power Point acquires its muscle from its core ability to dumb down a variety of thinking processes. What were its creators — Dennis Austin and Thomas Rudkin – thinking when they were writing Power Point? Could they imagine that within 25 years their creation would be installed on over a billion computers worldwide?

Ironically, Power Point was designed for the Macintosh and was the first venture capital investment that Apple ever made. Forethought, the company which created it, was bought by Microsoft in 1987. With such a rich history and possibly the only company to have the two software behemoths in its DNA, we may well ask, “What have Dennis Austin and Thomas Rudkin done after Power Point?” Austin created some average-to-middling clip art (Screen Beans) and Rudkin worked for Microsoft in Silicon Valley, turning Power Point into a product with $100 million in sales. Why could Austin and Rudkin not create another great product?

That’s because creating software products is not like building a home or a work desk. The problems that software solves are not the same as those which apartments and office cubicles solve. Software solves newer problems (hopefully!) each time. That’s why there are more failures in creating software products than in making homes and offices. Every time a software engineer sits down to write code, the end goal is different – and often the end goal doesn’t stay the same through the lifecycle of the product’s development (surely you are familiar with scope creep and change requirements?).

It doesn’t matter that the profession has its own set of guidelines and best practices to follow. There are languages and project management techniques. There are tools and quality processes. Yet, practically any software project you come across has seen time and cost over runs, has versions lying on shelves that have been discarded, and has bugs that cannot be eliminated before release (these are passed off as “known issues”).

Why is it that creating software products is such a random process? Why can’t success be replicated even though the team has experience and ability? In other words, if there is a lesson in the creators of Power Point, it is this: building software products is not like constructing a home or a table with raw material that is pretty much standard. Software products have to be built from the ground upwards. From the framework to the data types and structures, from how the data will be
managed and manipulated to the protocols and networks that will come into play and finally how human beings will view it, store it, share it and deploy it. Creating software products is an intensely unpredictable process. The industry may try to provide examples of how great products were created, the role of engineering and innovation, of time and funding, of requirements and usability, market studies and prototypes and a whole list of other imponderables. None of them hold fully true when you get down to solving a new problem with fresh code.

The point is this: if you are trying to create a software product, the top most problem you have is not your skills or resources, but the expectations that industry has about you getting it right first time. You can’t will that expectation away. The trick is to not let it weigh you down – or even dictate the course you are charting for yourself.

27/09/201208/10/2012

Five Paradoxes of building a successful product business

Building products is hard. Building a successful product organization is even harder. Start-up ecosystem is replete with ideas and prototypes. Few of them reach the market with a product and very few turn up as successful. And, a minuscule number of product businesses are able to demonstrate sustainable success. While there could be many factors why this is such a hard thing to do, it boils down to the fact that building product business is full of paradoxes. A successful product business requires effective navigation through this paradoxical maze, especially early-on and through the first growth curve.

I believe there are five basic paradoxes of building successful product businesses. There could be more, but these are my five!

Paradox 1: Self-Conviction | Customer Voice

Customer Voice, Market Research, A/B Testing, Surveys have been the tools for marketers through the history of business. However, we have plenty of examples of successful products that no one thought anyone would ever buy. These Black Swans look possible in retrospect, transforming the lives of the people behind the product. Then, we have Steve Jobs who, with his combination of clarity, conviction & genius has openly declared over and over again, with successful products, that he knows better than the customers themselves about what they want.

It’s easy to think, egoistically, that one can do what Steve Jobs did. However, reality strikes everyday in form of a customer complaining about a feature. It’s a routine tussle between what the customers think they want against what the business is planning to build. Even a scientific, and algorithmic approach to getting the features weighted out before inclusion in the product lifecycle, is not guaranteed to get the customers what they want.

The best way to get this done is to test out the hypotheses of Feature preferences as quickly as possible. It is also important to dissect the Signal from the Noise in such feedback. Many times, product teams get disoriented based on the feature requests from “free” users due to sheer number of such demands. On the other hand, a handful of paid customers who provide you cash cannot be ignored. In case of Enterprise products, the early customer weigh in heavily on the way the product shapes out, sometimes very differently from what Product makers envisioned. This is where the conviction of one’s vision is critical and should be used as the yardstick for deciding what to build. One useful approach is to Invest energies into building frameworks that help ongoing experimentation possible to validate the user inclination. A rapid experimentation, prototyping approach backed by strong analytics is a great leverage for any product.

Paradox 2: Personal Branding | Company Branding | Product Branding | Product Promotion
At the face of it, this may look like a no-‐brainer. Any activity that the business performs toward Product Promotion would enhance the branding of the Product and hence the Company’s. And, a lot of business owners actually leverage their personal brand for the Product promotion and vice—versa. The problem is that a Promotional activity is targeted to the Lead Generation and Conversion, while any branding activity is targeted to an emotion of enhanced value or an emotion of relatedness in the minds of prospects & customers. It’s only in some cases that a promotional activity also does full service to the branding activity.

Even more difficult is to judge whether the efforts should be subjected to branding of employees, of the company, or of the product. Every day in the life of a business is replete with decisions to choose one over the other. And the right balance comes only with the long-‐term clarity & conviction around what’s important. In Consumer oriented products especially, the product brand becomes more important than the Company brand. The branding of people behind the product happens organically, if at all. However, in case of Enterprise Products, the Company Brand and credentials are critical, and so are the people behind the product. Hence, a distinct & precise decision has to be made very early on in terms of where the branding focus should be.

Paradox 3: Keeping Options Open | Focusing Efforts

We all know that every product should be envisioned with solving a specific problem for a specific and well-‐defined target segment. While that is true, the process to validate and revalidate the solution against this target segment is not straightforward, and there are multiple adjustments and adaptations that the product as well as it’s positioning may go through before hitting the so called “sweet spot”. In the process, through the experimentation and iterations, however, the tangential options may emerge. Any of these options, unless validated are only hypothetically promising. Such validations require effort, while the main product path requires fully focused effort & resources in order to ensure that any invalidation of the central idea is not due to the lack of effort.

We often get disillusioned by the examples of successful enterprises – most of them end up having done multiple things over time. What we forget is that very early-‐on, the success was a derivative of strong focus on one area. Diversification happens after the central business is profitable.

At the same time, one cannot spend infinite time & energy in validating an idea. As they always say “fail fast or succeed surely”!

Paradox 4: Technology | Marketing | Sales

It’s intriguing to note that most businesses, once the product creation really kicks off, end up getting sucked into the Product Lifecycle and Technology aspects while that actually is the time, the Marketing needs to kick in with the same intensity. Even more awkward situation that most entrepreneurs face is that by the time the product is ready for alpha or a beta, the pressure to generate cash forces them to leverage “sales” efforts instead of marketing.

In the last year or two I have met plenty of entrepreneurs with a single question: How do I generate cash quickly today so that I can continue to pursue the dream of building what I want to, for tomorrow? And this question seems to be independent of the amount of time the company has been in business. Of course, I have seen and met some who have balanced this beautifully by doing certain things in the starting phase of building the product as well as the company. The right balance of Marketing, Product Development, and Sales efforts is the key, and you can do that only by developing a team that can focus on these areas as you grow. A Super hero approach falters and fails, since time-‐slicing is not an option, it’s about parallel efforts.

Paradox 5: User Adoption | Cash Flow

There are going to be 45 billion App downloads from App Stores worldwide in 2012. Out of which, only 10% are going to be paid for. Out of the paid ones, 90% would have the price of $3 or less. With this ticket size, the marginal costs per user need to be drastically low. However, while this cost equation is easy to understand, more and more businesses are falling in trap of the Freemium model and burning cash and resources in the hope for another Heroku or Instagram. The examples of Twitter and Wikipedia, even though valid, sound misplaced to most businesses.

Any business needs to have a revenue model from day of inception. While, many companies got everything right and got a valuation for their efforts based on the user mass, we wouldn’t hear from people who close down the business and start off something else everyday. While there’s nothing wrong with the User Adoption game, cash flow is critical for the business. This cash could come in returns to the benefits any customers get or in returns to intangibles and futures that investors see for a while. But, a product eventually needs to be useful for customers that are ready to pay for it. Cash flow is what businesses need to run for, and that’s the number one priority that should drive the decisions in short term and long term.

PS: These are my five, I’m sure you’d have gone through many such decisions. Do you have any experiences that you can share?

22/09/201208/10/2012

Is your company dependent on Innovation? Grow the right Culture First! The rest will take care of itself!

There is a reason, Mark Zuckerberg sits right next to the Summer Intern from University of Waterloo (True Story – Daughter of an Indian friend of mine!). No separate office, no glass windows to look out of!

Sergei Brin and Larry Page are worried sick of “Not Enough Innovation” out of Google!

They all focus on building the right culture for their people so that they can out-innovate their best competitors in the world!

Netflix, Google, Facebook all encourage and even require their employees to engage about 25% of their time in some pet technical project of their own. Some of these turned out to be big money makers, many failed!

Their philosophy is that if you have not failed enough number of times, you are not trying hard enough!

It all goes back to the company culture you build from Day 1! I have done it a number of times putting together engineering groups in multiple companies in Silicon Valley and I have done the same thing in India! If anything it works even better in India, if it is any consolation! Employees loved it and so very highly motivated, especially if they came from other companies in India!

Do you view yourself as the Captain of the ship who just makes very high level decisions and leave your first officers and people who report to them alone to do their jobs? Do you trust them from Day 1 to make the right technical decisions, stepping in only to guide them if they are straying too much from your mission?

Many of us come from a technical background and as engineers, our first instinct is to jump in and make the right decisions for our employees. Wrong!

In other words, do you treat that employee who just joined you straight from college as an adult, expect a lot from them, make sure that they have the hardware and software tools and leave them alone to do their jobs?

High expectations does something magical! The same employee comes in on their own on saturdays and sundays to try out something they have been thinking about. It stops being work for them and becomes something they take ownership for!

Do you praise them in meetings for even minor accomplishments but correct things they do wrong in private?

Do you tell them everyday that you are depending upon them to contribute great ideas to the company, give them time to try them out?

Then you have the right culture for innovation!

However, there are other things that go into this culture working correctly! You need to spend a lot of time hiring ONLY the right people! Make no mistake – Silicon Valley, India or Timbuktu, only 5- 10% of any population are really really good and suitable for innnovative companies. Do you look through 100 resumes and filter out that 5 to 10%? The wrong people can make your innovation train go off the rails, right from the beginning!

You are saying – I am this small company in Chennai – I am competing for talent with Infosys, Wipro and others. How do I get that 5 to 10% cream of the crop.

Guess what? I have done that! Spread your search to Tier 2, Tier 3, Tier4 colleges. Go to Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai to hire. Simple science, really! If you are trying to hire the 5 – 10% of the best in a population, to increase your chances, you go to more populations. I hired two people from Delhi to come, work in Chennai. Did wonders for my employees. They learned how to help, interact with someone from another language, culture.

There is another reason how diversity helps your innovation. Men and Women think about the same problem differently. Punjabis think differently than South Indians. Assamese and Bengalis are different in thinking than Mumbaikars! All these differences are your real assets. Walk into facebook and Google, you will see employees that represent the United Nations. There is a reason to that madness! Innovation comes from thinking differently and people who solve the same problem in many different ways are your real assets, your keys to innovation!

If you encourage them, give them the broad direction, tools and step away to let them do their jobs, fail often but try different things nevertheless. Works in Silicon Valley, New York, Washington. Works even better in India, if you try it without skipping any of the ingredients.

You never realize how much the Indian work culture has borrowed all the wrong things from our British masters before us. Separate dining rooms for different levels of executives, the “Yes. Sir. No Sir” culture. This kind of thinking is more harmful to your goals than you think!

It can be changed. It all starts with a few companies that start doing it. I am sure there are many companies in India that already do it actively today and are seeing the results.

Culture is often pooh-poohed as something touchy-feely stuff and not suitable for a goal oriented, task oriented company. It is everything in a startup, especially one that wants to Innovate!

18/08/201208/10/2012

Do we really need a Product Manager?

Instead of a consultant’s usual response to things “it depends”, I will choose to give an enthusiastic affirmative – Absolutely YES! But before I give you my reasons for it, let me first give a context for this term Product Manager (PM).

For any product business that is trying to turn an idea into a successful enterprise the management team channels their energy essentially into two macro functions – building stuff and selling stuff. If engineering is primarily tasked with building and sales is tasked with selling somebody has to be focused for everything in between – that’s where the Product management role comes in!

Here are 5 basic reasons on why companies need somebody playing the role of product management

1. Bringing the Market Context into the Company
Successful companies build products that actually solve real problems. Somebody needs to identify the market problems through rigorous market research, qualify and quantify them and validate the proposed solution to ensure it indeed solves their problem and can be feasibly delivered to the customer. Product Managers ensure that we build products that ultimately people want to buy, they are the messengers of the market and represent the voice of the customer and prospects in all strategic decision making inside the company

2. Productizing Innovation
Engineering has come up with the most brilliant innovation – now how do you “productize” it? What segments of the market would this appeal to and would customers actually pay for it? What is the competitive landscape for the product and what alternatives available to that segment of the market? How should this be priced and packaged to turn it into a profitable business? What should be the primary route to market for such solutions? As you can see there is a lot more that happens between building and selling and somebody needs to be responsible for productizing innovation

3. Customer Research vs. Market Research
Companies, especially early stage, often fall into the trap of concluding what market needs by just talking to a few prospects/customers (usually friends!). The trap becomes even vicious when you find yourself doing custom work for each of those initial customers. If the business model is to focus on generating huge revenues from a few customers this model might work but for companies who want to be market driven, you want a champion that focuses on broader market research by talking to several customers and identifying a trend by normalizing one offs (even though they represent to be a very attractive customer opportunity)

4. Pricing, Packaging for Profitability
If the ultimate goal for the venture is to become profitable, this is probably one of the most important exercise that typically is owned by the Product Manager. While there are several methodologies to price a product and package it with others in the portfolio, they all revolve around a strong understanding of the buyer and user personas in the target market segment. Leavings this up to the builders (engineering) could be dangerous as they will be the experts on the cost side but not the value to the customers and leaving it up to the sellers (sales) to decide this is even more so dangerous as they would more focused on revenue and not profits! In the IT services sector where commoditization is in fashion, finding the next valued added feature/service in the packaged offering is even more so critical to continue to grow and differentiate the offering

5. Communicating values over features
Product managers are the defacto product experts which make them the perfect candidates for developing the positioning strategy for the product that sales and marketing can use to communicate values over features. Organizations typically have invested into marketing and communication functions like brand building, PR/AR (Press/Analyst Relationships) etc. to help sales but few in India actually have a more formal marketing department with dedicated Product Marketing Managers (PMM) to help with sales/SE training, generating leads, customer retention and acquisition, thought leadership activities, launch plans etc. Essentially helping the sales team to effectively sell with the right message that resonates with the customer becomes a function of the product management role in those scenarios.

Some companies have distributed these functions with different roles like VP Engineering, CTO, VP Sales, VP Marketing etc. and often the CEO is the PM of the company. Not only are there inherent risks in such fragmented execution, this model doesn’t really scale in the long run.

Different names for the same end game

Due to the versatility and the nature of the role for a Product Manager, different organizations globally have called this role differently. Titles like product manager (PM), program manager (PrM), product line manager (PLM), product marketing manager (PMM), Technical Product Manager (TPM), business analyst. Also due to the strategic nature of the role coupled with a lot of decision making, the Product Manager role is often found to be residing in different organizations – reporting into engineering, sales, marketing and often directly into the CEO.

Product management function in India is still in its infancy. Lot of MNCs have started hiring product managers in India to improve operational efficiency by tightly aligning a PM who decides on “what to build” with the engineering team actually building it. Lot of services companies and startups might not have a dedicated Product Manager but the role is split between different members of the management team.

I wonder that, as India Inc gets ready to build more products for the global markets and as global companies get ready to see India more than an engineering center, do we need more Product managers in the industry than what we have today?

We would love to hear from you so do respond with your ideas and quires in the comments below.

Original Post can be accessed at Adaptive Marketing

13/08/201208/10/2012

Want mass media coverage? Dumb down your story.

As a startup or small business, getting covered in The Economic Times or India Today can give your business the wings it needs. Investors take notice. Smart people working elsewhere look up your company. Team members thump their chest and show the coverage to their wives and girlfriends. You reach potential customers too if India is a part of your target market. Now, if you are in a sexy consumer business, getting covered is not difficult. Ask Zomato. Or those online lingerie people. But what if you are in a business your mom doesn’t understand a word of?

The thing with mass media is that they only cover stories that inspire, educate, entertain or piss off the common man. Your job is to figure out how to do that. Your job is to dumb down your story to fit the mould. Or sex it up, which is pretty much the same thing from the other side of the fence.

As a tech business, you have to be ready to take the product out of the equation and work another angle into the story. Was the company founded by two 16-year olds? Did you have 70 customers even before you had the product ready? How about having no HR member even with a 100-person team? The common man loves crazy. Was the company started from Shillong? Are you entering a game that Google has been playing for long? The common man loves underdogs. He loves drama. The smell of blood. Cleavage.

When I was at FusionCharts, we were able to generate some good press for ourselves and I will take you through one of the stories we created. If you really want to know, FusionCharts helps you create delightful charts in JavaScript. The common man doesn’t give a flying fuck about that. So what angle could we bring in? Turns out the angle brought itself to us.

One fine day we got to know that the Federal IT Dashboard, a project undertaken by the US government to track 600 billion dollars of IT spending, uses FusionCharts in plenty. How about we pitch that to the press? Interesting but no thanks. Just a couple of days later, we came across a picture of Barack Obama using the Federal IT Dashboard. Would “Barack Obama uses FusionCharts as a part of the Federal IT dashboard that tracks 600 billion dollars of IT spending in the US” work? 600 billion dollars is definitely impressive but what’s this Federal IT Dashboard thingy? Also the message was too long. After playing around with the language to make it crisper, we finally decided to cut it down to “Barack Obama uses FusionCharts.”

The story got covered in all leading publications of India. The press took the liberty of modifying it to suit their agenda as well. When Obama came to India in late 2010, we got to see coverage on the lines of “Barack Obama uses made-in-India FusionCharts in spite of his anti-outsourcing policies.” Over time, the story has gotten a little old but still no publication passes a chance to tuck it in some corner of a FusionCharts coverage.

Every company has a story. What’s yours?

Original Post can be accessed at Pokeandbite.com

06/07/201208/10/2012

CEO Attributes for Leading a Company from Launch to Success

Editor’s Note: InnovizeTech Software and its product, Sapience, is an early leader in India’s emerging software products story. Earlier in his career, InnovizeTech’s CEO and co-founder Shirish Deodhar founded two IT services companies, which had successful exits to Symantec Corp. and Symphony Services. Deodhar is also the author of the book, “From Entrepreneurs to Leaders.” In this article, he shares with SandHill readers his insights on personal attributes that are necessary for a CEO to lead a company from launch to mid-stage to success.

InnovizeTech Software is based in Pune, India, and started operations in early 2009. Its product, Sapience (meaning wisdom, astuteness and the intellectual ability to penetrate deeply into ideas), helps companies to increase work output by 15-20 percent – without requiring any change in existing processes. It’s a patent-pending, award-winning solution and the first such product that is designed for the enterprise. It gives managers the “big picture” about work effort while respecting and protecting individual privacy. Sapience is available in a SaaS model for SMBs and supports on-premise installation for select large customers.

Four key attributes of successful early stage CEOs

Success as a CEO is not guaranteed. The best CEOs may fail, and someone not as good may get lucky. Still, there are four personal attributes and mindsets that I believe are crucial for becoming a successful CEO.

1. Integrity and optimism

You will be selling your vision to co-founders, employees, investors and customers. The actual product may end up being very different from the initial concept. Earning and retaining people’s trust through the inevitable transitions is possible only if the CEO’s integrity is self-evident in his/her communications and actions on a continuing basis.

A successful CEO must be optimistic. This does not mean a blind belief that everything will go well or pretending that everything is okay when it may not be. It is more an attitude of “Let’s get on with things, know where we are, and change what is not working.” This requires honest and comprehensive communication at all times and ensuring that it reaches everyone.

Read the Complete Post at Sandhill.com