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Leading the fintech revolution | The humane approach

Let’s start first with the elucidation of a buzzword that is floating around a lot –‘fintech’. In very simple terms, it refers to new technology that aims to change the existing models (and/or processes) of the financial industry. Considering that financial industry by itself is huge and everybody is a part of it directly or indirectly, it is quite logical that the tech and business community is extremely interested in being a part of it.

The good part is that this domain is complicated and definitely tough to crack. Now some of you might be wondering that how exactly is this good?! And the answer for that is as per my opinion, the harder a problem is to solve, the better the solutions (and even more original) are, that come forward for it for the long term. This is enforced even more when I look across other sectors – viz Rocket technologies, Transportation, Artificial Intelligence and so on. Remember we are talking about products & services that aim for the bigger picture and not just stay for a short while.

The second aspect that gets everyone excited is the potential impact that this has on the complete economy, be it in a funnel up fashion or the typical trickle down manner. Being deeply linked with the pockets and spending behavior (in general) of the people, the growth levels in fintech sector tend to have a very deep correlation with the elusive economic development at a global level. So far so good, but is the current pace really radical and path-breaking or is it simply incremental? The answer varies but involves a very important element…

As part of our product development and iterations here @MyPoolin, we have come to appreciate something that many of the fin-tech players intuitively know (but don’t directly implement) – ‘the humane touch‘. We don’t really mean touch in the physical sense (as most of the solutions that we refer to are mostly software level to the tune of 95% or more) but in the sense of user experience for the end consumer. The primary aspect that makes this so significant is because in the past, the banking solutions have seemed too complicated and aloof to majority of the people. That is the main reason people still spend hours in their respective bank branches per week!

PictureforblogHence, our principle is simple – “Let people come in for the utility. Present it in the simplest manner. And let them discover the power of a humane touch”. 

Cheers to making amazing things happen in the financial world that actually seem a natural part of our daily lives, making them all the more beautiful ….

P.S. MyPoolin is a mobile peer to peer and social payments network. It is changing the way we all plan and share money with friends and colleagues.

Guest Post by Rohit Taneja, MyPoolin

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Satisfied customers – isn’t that we all want?

The other day on my regular Hyderabad- Bangalore flight I was reading this book titled Raving Fans by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles. The concepts in the book brought back memories of my experiences in building hardware and software products in a 30 year career. I also often deliver skills and tools for building “aha” products through my corporate workshops. There is a lot written about design and design thinking. But, in this blog I am sharing a proven product development process that often results in winning products and raving fans. Do leave a comment if you agree or disagree.

“Satisfied customers”, isn’t that we all want? Sure, Yes, – but what does a ‘satisfied’ customer really mean? What if your customers are only satisfied because their expectations are too low? Or the competitors are doing worse than you. These satisfied customers will switch the moment they find a better alternative.

What if they really just marked ‘5-5-5-5’ on the satisfaction survey because they were in a good mood that day or they just wanted to get through the survey quickly? Does a ‘good satisfaction’ rating really tell us how connected to the product they are? How excited about the product they are? You may fill out a survey after buying a gadget or software or a service and represent a ‘satisfied’ customer – but are you going to race out and tell all of your friends that they MUST go to this product or the service too?

If you are a small business that really wants to grow rapidly, you really must create raving fans – not just satisfied customers. Raving fans are so excited about the product and their experience that they want to tell stories, recommend the product to others. These are the folks who line up around the block to get their hands on a new product FIRST! They post long, detailed reviews about products on blogs and sites. They become big ‘Influencers’ for various products of your business. Each raving fan may bring 4 to 10 other customers and can produce exponential growth for your business. On the flip side – dissatisfied or disenfranchised customers can take customers away!

So, how do you create raving fans?

Before we go further we must bust two myths that perpetuate tech community. These are:

More features = happier customers. How many of you try squeezing in as many features as you can? A product built to satisfy everybody will not satisfy anybody. Do not spread your resources thin over a broad product vision. Instead, narrow the scope, narrow the product vision. Then delight a customer narrow segment within this narrow vision. You can repeat this process with other customer segments over time. The other customer segments might wait based on what they hear about your product from other raving fans. Or they may be ready to switch when you release product for them. Be wary about adding features to your product.

Clever technology leads to better customer experience. A vision of a perfect customer experience is rarely fulfilled with technical innovation alone. A clever product will fail to delight customer if even one thing does not work the way it is supposed to.

Five steps to raving fans

I have distilled five best practices to create Raving Fans. These practices are pro-active – they start from product visioning and cover the entire product life-cycle. I believe that the work done upstream has enormous effect on the downstream activities!!!! These are –

  • Develop a customer-centric vision
  • Establish key metrics to measure customer delight
  • Select a well-understood initial customer set to focus on
  • Create a regular rhythm of engagement early on
  • Structure customer feedback process for 3As

We now discuss these steps in detail.

Develop a customer-centric product vision

Product vision should be centered on the intersection of customer experience (through their eyes) and technological innovation – Not just how excellent a component or feature alone is! It’s also not just asking customers what they want or what their expectations are – it’s blending the two into this vision. Remember, customer experience is a function of their needs, values, views, attitudes. Model the feelings, emotions, behaviors to anticipate their reactions to your innovation.

Obviously, you can’t just ask customers what they want and build that – especially if you are building a never before innovation, things they never knew they wanted. But you can go observe them and listen to what they do not say. You can build customer empathy and feel their pain.

A common mistake every makes is – “I am the customer” or “I will put myself in my customer’s shoes”. With this approach only one guy has been successful – Steve Jobs. You aren’t Jobs, atleast yet. You are also not the typical end user of your product or service for a number of reasons – your values are different, your technical background knowledge is different, your attitude is different, your cultural context is different, your perception and knowledge of the tasks, problems, and scenarios is incomplete or skewed. For the same reason, your colleague or your VP is also not the customer.

In summary, you must drive your innovations from a customer perspective and ensure your business model and technology enhancements fit the vision of the customer’s great experience.

Establish key metrics to measure customer delight

Vision by itself is not enough.

Backup the vision with key metrics and customer-focused release criteria to measure if you are meeting and indeed exceeding your customer requirements and expectations. You must know this at every stage of the product development i.e., much before the product is shipped. Remember, customer perception of quality is very different from engineering quality that most tech entrepreneurs tend to focus on. If product does what the customer needs and is emotionally engaging, it’s high quality.

A good set of release criteria will include measures of functionality, experience and performance. These criteria must be benchmarked against best in class products and be traceable to the customer requirements. This means you will measure – does the functionality of the product meet the bar? does the user experience meet the bar? And does the product performance meet the bar?

You would also want to ensure coordination and buy-in across disciplines i.e., marketing, product planning, UX etc. You do this by involving all other disciplines from product visioning stage itself.

Select a well-understood initial customer set to focus on

It is very important to identify a set of customers you will depend on for product feedback apart. It is naïve to depend on only the common channels like loudly complaining customers, press reviewers and product support teams. These are often incomplete, insufficient, or inaccurate sources of user data. Consciously, methodically, methodologically create a model of the “end user” and gather data. Identify a right pool of customers for research, studies and early adoption programs. Customer Advisory Council (CAC), User Group (UG), Special Interest Group (SIG) serves such purposes. For example, CAC is a small, hand-selected group of customers that are willing to provide intimate customer feedback on product/service strategy and design issues. UGs and SIGs are volunteer driven groups whose members are most likely not affiliated with any specific company. They meet on a regular basis to discuss and share information on a variety of topics and can range in size from 5 to 1000+ members. The members of these groups are influencers and a direct and focused interaction with them can generate grass-root level feedback to improve your offerings.

Create a regular rhythm of engagement early on

If you involve customers early and often – and close the loop with them – then they feel you are actually taking action on their feedback. They feel that they have a stake in the development process – and that builds loyalty and trust. They feel a sense of relationship with the company that extends beyond the product. This sense generates feelings like –

“They really listened to me!” “I can’t wait to see what they do for me next.”
“I can connect with a community of people who care about the same things I do.”

Use a variety of tools for different phases of product development. For example –

  • Product planning phase – surveys, focus groups, customer visits
  • Product design phase – field trials, usability studies
  • Product stabilization – alpha and beta releases
  • Post release – customer councils, newsgroups, blogs, automated tools

Publish your blog atleast twice a weak. Talk about what is happening at your company or in your product. Interact with the customers who reply to your blogs

Structure customer feedback process for 3As

Customer feedback will come in from multiple sources and at multiple levels. All this feedback must be captured, analyzed, categorized and prioritized. You must make this feedback accessible and actionable. Some of the feedback will result in customer requirements and product features.

Therefore, you must build a central feedback repository where the feedback can be easily be found and have a process to convert feedback into requirements that are traceable. That means someone is accountable for the requirement.

The feedback should be characterized by three top 3 A’s: Accessible, Actionable and Accountable.

Key challenges

Finally, this article still leaves you with some challenging questions. Share your answers to the questions given below. If you look for deep dive please do not hesitate to contact the author!

Starting a new sprint or a milestone? How do you find and use customer data already collected before? Where do you go to get new customer data? How do we ensure you aren’t asking the same customer for the same feedback multiple times?

How do you validate vision, plans, designs, etc. – how do you select right people for feedback at different stage of the product development? What if you need quick customer feedback to inform a decision?

Should you entertain significant design change requests after the Beta?

What are the metrics of customer expectations that you must measure throughout development?

What are the chances that your product will meet customer expectations prior to release?

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Kamal Rajini Analogy : Entrepreneur vs Intrapreneurs

RajiniKamal

 

There is heavy pressure in our industry for everyone to get on the train of entrepreneurship or startup, startup mode is on, Govt is supporting this, communities are on it, and now even banks are starting fund startup. This is all great news.

But should everyone having a entrepreneurial spirit, become an Entrepreneur?

Not necessarily. Many prefer to be, but different circumstances in career, money , family and culture make them not venture into that. So whats the option for them.

Here is where I would like to introduce my Kamal and Rajini analogy. I am sure most of you know about these cinema stalwarts from south india. They both had a completely different style and both were successful in their own way

Kamal , the startup guy – Entrepreneur :  Kamal Hassan always tried like a startup guy, tried new things, ventured into unexplored territories, ahead of times, reinvested most of earnings in his movies, and his movies (product) appealed to a certain set of audience (market). Lot of his movies were commercial failures when they were made , but when you go back and watch them after several years, they are gems. He is like Jeff Bezos, not caring about short term, about profits, but only the long term impact his movies creates.

Rajini, the commercial superstar – Intrepreneur : Rajinikanth on the other hand mostly went for the trusted entertainers, big banner , big investment movies, he built his unique differentiation with punch dialogues, style and tricks, and many movie themes were already successful themes elsewhere. He partnered with big cinema houses who would bank on him for delivering what the audience wants, a mass market. Most of his movies were commercial hits.

Having provided this analogy, I often can relate to each of us, with an entrepreneurial spirit, mostly falling into a bucket of Kamal Hassan or Rajinikanth – and we can learn from how these personalities carved their path to success for so many decades.

While most of us have lot of understanding on the Entrepreneur part, I thought of spending more time in Intreprenuer journey. How do you identify them.

In a Forbes article, its nicely highlighted as “those highly valuable executives and team members who will perhaps never become a company founder, but who have learned to apply the essential principles of entrepreneurship to the roles they fill within a company.”

 

Understand Money : Intrapreneurs -while do not put in their money into the business, they think like its their own business, and strive to make every rupee or dollar count. Often they are the pillars for success of the company. Also they expect to be rewarded well for this

Idea mongers – Greeehousing : Intraprenuers are often thinking like owners when trying to carry the ideas forward, the ideas never goes away from them, they make sure that they can deliver on them or bring in the plan /action to do it

Into the future : Intraprenuers are forward thinkers, thinking what’s next, not satisfied with what is today. They are someone the founders and leaders love to brainstorm and take guidance for investing.

Disruptive thinking : Intrapreneurs are out of box thinkers, often challenge the conventional wisdom, often carve out the next course of investment

Don’t miss these great articles on Intreprenuers in Forbes and HBR from where I picked some of the attributes.

So in conclusion, Stay happy as an Intrapreneur – you have lot of company – and if you are the owner, please take care of your Intraprenuers  – and think about success of Rajinikanth 🙂

rajiniKamal1

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Top 10 Mistakes Startups Can Avoid

Being a consultant and a coach for companies both large and small gives me the opportunity to learn of challenges first hand at several places, situations and from talking to colleagues. I also have been dedicating a part of my time in mentoring startups in India. I have participated in several mentoring sessions organized by Google Launchpad, TiE Boot Camp, TLabs here in Bangalore over the past few years. Many of the startups have tremendous opportunity ahead. However, due to various reasons including their background or skill set or lack of exposure to business, they tend to carry baggage that slow down the speed of growth. After working with several startups and discussing with fellow practitioners, there seems to be a common set of problems that keep coming up from time to time. Here are the top 10 mistakes early stage startups can easily avoid. These are common mistakes that one can easily watch out for and may even serve as a ready made checklist for early stage startups to determine their course and take corrective measures.

Here they are:

1. Not enough understanding of the business model

Several startups have found their original idea is not big enough or not exciting enough anymore or will not scale or will not work for various reasons and now they are looking for direction literally on what to do with their startup and where to go next. It’s a big predicament because their current product is not bad but either they are operating in a mature market or the technology has become a commodity diluting their original value proposition. They had the grit and guts to set sail from the land but now they are adrift in the open sea with not a sea gull in sight. Now what? There are only 3 options – to double down on your current business model, pivot or close down. But the bigger question, how can we avoid getting to this space? It’s a really tough one as you will find convincing cases of success on either sides of the debate.

I will share my perspective of evaluating market opportunity more from user demand initially. What most marketers forget to consider is something that I call “user fatigue”. User fatigue is what users go through while fulfilling their goals with the currently available solutions. For e.g. job search, house search, school search etc. If your solution is not 10x better than currently available methods, then you are not moving the needle on user fatigue. Hence even if it’s marginally better with a different UI or UX but still saddled with the incumbencies of marketplace dynamics, you will soon face saturation. I found this situation commonly in markets where they were mature with lot of players already entrenched in the market or the value proposition was not strong enough.

A good starting point would be to flush out the business model using Alex Osterwalder’s original business model canvas or Ash Maurya’s Lean Canvas. If you need a link to any of the above or a copy of my adapted canvas, let me know.

 2. Doing everything your first big client says

This is a major issue with several startups that struggle to get their first big break and still find their two feet to stand. Startups need to get smart at how to handle their first big client. Even though the startup may be dealing with a large brand, you have to look at the visibility of your offering in your prospect’s organization. The key thing to watch out for and push back is the tendency of investing too much into a proof of concept. If the conversation is not yielding good results with a quick show down of your value proposition, understand why and make future bets. Opening up your technology platform to changing scope in the hope of getting a contract without explicitly having a pricing agreement is very risky.

This is also one of a mindset issue where we confuse requirements from a prospect with willingness to buy. As a product vendor, remember it’s still your prerogative of what to build, for whom, why and when. There are two aspects to this situation; first, the eagerness to close the deal and generate revenues and second, understanding whether your value proposition is resonating with your first prospect. The pressure to generate revenues is so high that we tend to entertain splitting the current business model into services and products, in an instant. As a result, when the prospect says “what you have is nice, but can you do this, this and this?” we jump on it and agree to everything. Is this really necessary? Building custom solution is like playing devil in the product’s world. Yes, you are thinking, sometimes a known devil is better than no revenues (read salaries and food on the table). It’s a tough call to make. Whether you consciously build custom solutions or not, if you want to build a product what you need to do is to understand why your prospect is interested and estimate the size of the market or aggregate need for each request coming in. Then take a call to build it or defer it or trash it.

3. Going for the big launch without any real customer input

There are several startups that are going for the big launch without any customer input. “The product is not ready for customers yet” is an oft-heard phrase. What we need to shoot for is a good enough product that builds on the core value proposition as layers. And, with so many online services for creating landing pages (e.g. instapage.com) and A/B experimentation (e.g. wingify), it would be very risky and expensive to launch before seeking real customer input. There is also an aspect of maturity in how we handle rejections from customers. Just being open to their feedback and working on it will result in wonders than trying to assume our limited understanding of any customer. It’s a natural tendency to make up requirements sitting in our offices, assuming we know our customers. I love the quote “Answers don’t lie in the building”. Doesn’t matter if we are a consumer or an enterprise shop, talking to customers and getting their inputs with an open mind should be a top priority for any organization.

 4. That is one helluva MVP!

Minimum Viable Product or MVP has become a buzzword and also a highly misinterpreted and abused term. Everyone has their own definition on what is a MVP. MVP comes from Lean Methodology where it actually began to describe the first version of the product that tests the most important assumption of the idea with minimal effort for maximum validation. Other variations based on MVP I have heard are Minimum Compelling Product, Minimum Desirable Product, Minimum Sellable Product. I guess there is a lot of confusion around first what we mean by VIABLE. As a result there are several features added to the first few versions but still gets referred to as MVP. Doesn’t matter what you call your product version. There are two simple things you need to consider. First, validate your problem statement; Second, validate your solution to the problem so you can achieve problem/solution fit. To validate the problem statement, you don’t need to write a single line of code. To validate the solution, you need to demonstrate how the product could work and hence need to build something minimal so you can get maximum and quick validation. Once you achieved problem/solution fit, go out and build the rest of the product.

5. That is one helluva MVP – Reloaded

A common situation is to know when to stop calling the product MVP. The reason is we are not sure what to call the product beyond MVP. For some reason, we like to use the term MVP even if our product versions are at 3.0 or 4.0. If you look at the stages of a startup, they go from problem/solution fit to product/market fit and then start scaling. What lies between problem/solution fit and product/market fit? I’d like to combine frameworks at this point to bridge the missing piece. Geoffrey Moore’s framework of Core product and Whole Product is very interesting.

The Core Product demonstrates core value proposition. The Whole Product makes the product available for customers. A very simple example is the automobile. Nobody buys an automobile without warranty and most don’t buy without financing. In software, often the core value proposition is the algorithm. The whole product consists of user interface, user experience, delivery channels, API for partners, communities, ecosystems etc. After the MVP, it’s time to think about and build the whole product towards achieving product/market fit.

6. Designed for yourselves

Design has taken center stage. It’s suicidal to compromise on user experience design even in the first version of the product.  Especially in mobile if the user finds your app confusing to use for some reason he/she is not going to come back. Most startups when feeling the crunch for good designers tend to design themselves. Similar to making up requirements, designing without the user in mind is disastrous. We need to unbox our minds and step in to the user’s shoes. Coming up with personas and understanding user behaviour through ethnographic studies can be very useful here.

 7. Going after too many things

When you are a startup, you are open to a lot of opportunities and many of them are right around your original vision. It is very enticing and sometimes tiring to entertain these various possibilities because at the end of the day, you have limited resources and time. So, instead of going after too many things that may spread the focus too thin, the top management needs to develop a continuous process of evaluating business ideas and arriving at quick decisions whether to pursue, defer or trash. Using the business model canvas is a good way of doing due diligence for every opportunity. Trying to open up multiple lines of the already cash starved business in the hopes of hedging can be counter-productive if you are a startup. It may work for large companies since they may need to diversify to grow. Even then, remember what Steve Jobs said on what he is proud of. He is proud of the 95 things out of 100 that he had to say no to than the 5 things he said yes to.

8.  Not having a real vision

I ask a lot of startups what is their vision and most of them give me a roadmap. Very few get what a vision is. A very simple way to describe your product vision is to imagine how the world would look like after everybody on this planet who could use your product is using your product. What would that world look like? It takes time to develop a strong and real vision, sometimes going beyond your original target segment. For example, my design consultancy’s vision is to “Live in a Thoughtful World”. And how are we going to achieve that vision? By helping our clients with designing thoughtful experiences!

9. Not having a clear monetization strategy

While it is true that if you are a consumer startup you will spend a lot of time, money and energy on building the user base before monetizing on them, it does not and should not preclude one from having a good idea about how you will monetize and from when. If your value proposition is so compelling that the customers would be willing to pay, you should go ahead and charge them from day one. If you are an enterprise startup, it is imperative to begin with a revenue model and a few well tested pricing plans before reaching out to your customer segment. A recent survey indicated that the more your web site visitors spent time on your pricing plan page, the more they are likely to convert.

 10. Not measuring product usage

It’s disappointing to see several startups not tracking product usage; especially when there are free and powerful services like Google Analytics.  The old adage “that which you cannot measure, you cannot manage” applies to every business. Knowing how your customers are using the product is critical. The other part that startups need to strongly consider is get serious on measuring customer satisfaction routinely. Customer satisfaction scores should be part of the executive dashboard that the top management should look at every day. The success metrics of a product should be defined and measurable goals set before launch of the product. This reinforces the belief in the product. If the success metrics and goals are transparent and exciting for the whole product team, it makes a lot of difference!

Hope this helps build powerful and thoughtful products!

Season’s greetings and wishing success in the years to come!

Good luck.

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Design thinking Playbook Roundtable by Deepa Bachu

desk-931928_1280

The core idea of a startup is to tap into the previously unexplored markets, identifying unsolved problems and bringing to the market innovation that disrupt the existing eco-system. It’s about understanding complex problems and coming up with innovative, disruptive solutions…a process that requires understanding the consumers’ requirements and behavior patterns to create a well-thought out solution for the customers’ benefit.

While most entrepreneurs spend weeks brainstorming about the idea, they often ignore the key ingredient to innovation : design.

Design /dɪˈzʌɪn/ (noun) – do or plan (something) with a specific purpose in mind.

The Design thinking Playbook Roundtable organized by iSpirit and conducted by Deepa Bachu from Pensaar helped startup founders understand the importance of design thinking and integrate design into their workflow. Here are some key takeaways from the Playbook Roundtable held at the head office of Instamojo in Bangalore:

Design thinking is not just about the graphic elements, UI or tools. It is a creative approach to a problem. It is a problem solving methodology – whether it is blueprints for a building, a beautiful graphic design for a brochure, a sleek UI for a website or a comfortable piece of furniture, design helps to solve any problem, visual or physical.

While it is important to engage a professional, it is crucial that everybody on the team thinks DESIGN. Entrepreneurs should be able to step away from their immediate environment to look around and view their idea from the perception of the consumers, a process that requires creative thinking.

As a good product manager, a startup founder should be able to connect the dots in non-obvious ways to come up with a unique and innovate solution for the consumers. It is crucial for entrepreneurs develop a deep insight of the problem they are seeking to solve and be passionate about it before coming up with a solution. More startups focus more on the solution and forget the initial problem statement. You must never lose sight of your problem, constantly revisiting it while fine-tuning and tweaking the solution.

A product is valuable only as long as the consumer users it. It is thus important for entrepreneurs to understand customer behavior in order to make their product user friendly. Usability studies though interesting, aren’t always reliable. Startup founders thus have to seek out customers and work with them closely to understand what they need, what they think, how they use the product and how they feel about it.

Customer behavior v/s customer intent – it is important to understand the difference between the two. While a user may want to do something in the ideal world (intent), she may not be able to do it in the real world (behavior). As entrepreneurs it is important to differentiate intent from actual behavior. If this is geographically impossible, startup founders should not hesitate to use data analytics to tap into the users’ behavior patterns and modify the product.

Design thinking allows entrepreneurs to look at their idea holistically and come up with the best possible solution for their users. Design after all enables people to create and come up with the unimaginable and unexpected designs.

 

 

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Design Thinking: When creativity and process come together

Design Thinking as a mindset and process that is starting to get its’ due attention in the US. In India however, it is lesser known and in most cases, an after thought.

What is Design Thinking, you ask? It is a creative process of building products that people simply love to use! Products that not just meet but beat customers’ expectations and bring in the element of unexpected delight!

There are several versions of the design thinking process, having practised design thinking for ~10 years now, here is my interpretation of it.

Design Thinking → insight . dream . disrupt

INSIGHT is all about developing a deep understanding of the customer as well as the environment in which they work. Then, connecting the dots in non-obvious ways to develop clear insights into the customer needs.

DREAM helps you think about many, out of the box solutions before you choose one solution that really solves the customer need you identified. But, you wont stop till you build in unexpected customer delight.

DISRUPT helps you push your thinking beyond what is easily possible and iteratively test your ideas with your customers (no surveys, real experiences tested with fake-o-backends)

Design Thinking in India: Most, if not all individuals creating products in India tend to be engineers by education. I think of this to be a huge advantage. “It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” — Steve Jobs. Given the engineering background in India, we naturally focus on how things works. As such we need to use this advantage and focus on converting new and wonderful technologies into products that people simply love. However, we tend to be guilty of not stopping to understand the problem and simply focus the solution right away. Fall in love with the problem, not the solution — one of the many things, I learnt while at Intuit is something I think we should all apply more.

I believe this has to do with our lineage and how we’ve grown into a country that’s going in the path of a technology revolution!

IT progression in India in the ast 30 years

My message to all product and experience creators is just this…it is not enough to have designers think about customers, everyone in the company should foster design thinking.

Be AWESOME, BY DESIGN — start with discovering those deep insights, dream up solutions that push possibilities and finally create disruptive solutions that don’t stop short of delivering unexpected delight.

I’ve shared examples of insight and dream previously. Do share your own design thinking stories and challenge mine.

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Does Mobile Only strategy point to lack of Design Thinking?

The runaway success of Indian e-commerce show is driven by the single biggest attraction of hefty discounts available almost on all products! More than any other value proposition of e-commerce such as more choices, convenience, 24×7 availability, payment options and faster deliveries, the Indian customer was lured to e-commerce by the sheer scope for discounts she would not get elsewhere! The intense competition over market share among the e-commerce players ensured that there is always a counter offer for any blockbuster offer from one player. The eternal discount chasing customer is smart enough to sense this opportunity to compare prices of every item on offer with other vendors and settle on the maximum discount offer. While this was the modus operandi of the average online buyer, e-commerce players were sweating out on how to better their offer by attempting to do enormous scales that would only push their quest for profitability farther and farther.

Gme Changer or - Image_1As the dog fight continues to grab market share, e-commerce players are trying to outdo one another by introducing newer business models and innovations; the latest being Mobile Only format. Though there have been many successful experiments that defined the online buying culture in India such as Cash on Delivery, easy hassle free returns and EMIs, the latest experiment’s success is not pronounced yet, while many of the digital enthusiasts are upbeat about it.

Sorry, Mobile Only -Image_2Here comes the Mobile Only strategy!  While all the arguments for Mobile Only strategy evangelize the potential of the native app technology and innumerable values it promises to the marketer, an honest assessment of the anticipated compromises on the side of the customer is yet to come i.e what possibilities it takes away from the customer in order to cut short longer sales cycle.  Ironically, the deterrents for marketers to sell more are also the very value drivers for the consumers to buy more!

What is undisclosed about the real motive behind the Mobile Only strategy? Is it just Customer apathy?

During the years Indian e-commerce players took their baby steps to entice the buyers, this space also spawned innumerable deal aggregators and price comparison sites in empowering the value hunting customer to gleefully snap the best deals in the online space because of customer’s sheer capability to compare and choose across multiple vendors offering products of same specification. While online customers enjoyed this newfound freedom and capability, e-commerce players dreaded this unfettered nature of competition. This had made e-commerce players’ life a nightmare and the only possibility to woo customers was to settle for lowest price and provide faster delivery – both demanded extreme back-end efficiency and truckloads of money to operate at wafer thin margins; if not at loss.  Every e-commerce vendor had been eagerly looking for an effective way to fortify his customer from being weaned away by a better offer from competition. In these circumstances some enthusiasts find the Mobile Only format a perfect antidote for limiting customer’s newfound capability.   Lets look at how the Mobile Only format plays out!

  • In a Mobile Only format, the ease and speed of operation make the customer blind to the loss of the market options- i.e. to compare and weigh the market offers and to arrive at his maximum discounted vendor decision!
  • Deprived of option to compare the customer would be less confused about product choices with other competing products – the bliss every marketer longs for.
  • Customer decision cycle will be relatively short and quick compared to an open market situation like many players offering competing and comparable products as in the case of web.

Thus, effectively marketers are trying to cage customers to the controlled environment of their app and subtly cut off customer from the open market and invisibly condition and constrict his buying behavior for the benefit of the marketer, hoping that customer would fall in place as per their design!

However, what boggles the mind is the unpredictability as to how the customer would react to this stealth move by marketers!

The Mobile Only format yet to sink into the customer mind!

Hostile UX- Image_3
The inevitability of Mobile Only customer experience

Despite all hype around personalized content spiced with data analytics, the user experience remains the single largest bottleneck for going Mobile Only format. A large section of online users, especially those who have access to PC still consider viewing the products on large screens and doing one’s own market study before placing orders. A lot of online buying is driven by such consumer behavior born out of web format capability, but this turns out to be a huge challenge in Mobile Only format as SEOs are still at nascent levels in indexing app pages effectively to provide actionable comparison. Moreover for the user it becomes quite tricky to compare different sites considering the smaller screen of mobile device, while for the marketer app based approach opens up plethora of possibilities. That brings us to the cross roads in deciding how to navigate between marketer opportunities versus customer centricity?

The behavioral profile of online buyer and the Mobile Only format – a case of mismatch?

  • One of the main characteristics of online buyer is his appetite for best deals with maximum discounts available across vendors.
  • He also derives satisfaction that the deal is actually the best by comparing it with other offers. Therefore he is a value hunter and much less brand loyal.
  • Similarly, the app only promotions may not entice the buyer as buyer may feel the buying experience to be incomplete without going through this essential buying process or may remain non impulsive to respond to a targeted notification in the app.
  • The idea of enhancing personalized buying experience and brand building may be misplaced here, as there is a mismatch between vendor offering and customer expectation.
  • Majority of the mobile Internet users have been using online buying just recently and are yet to realize the compromises they have to make while on a Mobile Only format. Eventually they would conclude that the benefits of web may outweigh those of the Mobile format.
  • When the buyer realizes that marketers are effectively limiting the possibilities of the buyer, the disenchantment may lead to a lot of anguish in the minds of customer and eventually she may look beyond Mobile format.

While we have so much pointers to customers’ buying process already on the table, a complete disregard to customer behavior and expectation will have serious implications in winning a pie from the increasingly discretionary customer participation. On the one hand all the leading e-commerce players claim that 70% to 80% of their total orders come through their mobile platform; on the other hand they admit that 25% of these orders are originally discovered in PC platform and the mobile platform was used only at the clinching stage of order execution. Hence ignoring this huge market will be destroying the value they have hopefully awaited over the years.

Thus, only time will unfold whether Mobile Only format is a game changer in delivering value or a big value destroyer? The early reports suggest that Myntra had mixed response to their app only strategy. Interestingly Myntra’s parent Flipkart has put on hold Flipkart’s app only format originally scheduled from 1 September 2015. In the just concluded Big Billion Day sale in October 2015, Flipkart continued the web format and was heavily promoting the app platform by offering app exclusive launches and additional discounts on app based purchases indicating that despite all the best efforts to push consumers to app only format there is considerable volume coming from web format and marketers cannot ignore consumer preferences.

Going by Flipkart’s main competitor Snapdeal’s founder & CEO Kunal Bahl’s admission, Myntra’s app only strategy has greatly helped Snapdeal’s fashion business ever since Myntra shut down the website from May 15, 2015.   Is Myntra’s case a straw in the wind vis-a-vis the Mobile Only strategy? Industry is watching this space very keenly for more signals!

If Mobile Only is overkill, what is the right balance?

Given the growth of Indian Internet users at YoY growth rate of 32%, the 375 million users (as per IAMAI November 2015) augur well for e-commerce players. More than 60% of these 375 million users are mobile Internet users and the share of mobile Internet users are set to grow at faster rate given the continuous reduction in smart phone prices and more and more 3G & 4G network availability. Apparently, this paradigm shift in net access point very much endorses the idea of going Mobile First strategy. However the Mobile Only strategy is self-inflicting to all categories of products especially for high involvement category products. Categories those are low involvement and completely transaction based and used frequently such as taxi hailing services, bill payment services, travel booking sites, event ticket booking and restaurant services may have a case to go Mobile Only at the risk of losing a small portion of their business, as even those category demands multi channel access points simply because of heterogeneous customer behavior.

Mobile Only, does it sound lack of Design Thinking?

According to IDEO’s President and CEO; “Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.”

Where does Mobile Only falls short in integrating needs of consumer and requirements of business with possibilities of technology?

Understand your customer really well: There are many reasons cited for going Mobile Only such as better maintainability, cost savings, huge data mining capability which in turn can power data analytics driven marketing functions like greater segmentation, contextual targeting, user engagement and rapid personalization at scale. While all these are the possibilities for the marketer to embrace the new format, the same possibilities turns out to negate the possibilities of the consumer that is essential for a sustainable growth of ecommerce category. Mobile Only enthusiasts seems to be missing the plot by ignoring customer decision journeys to understand what motivates people and what puts them off and apparently loses opportunities for creating delightful experiences.

Empathize your customer with customer advocacy: While more and more businesses are waking up to the real world business need of ‘empathy’ mapping by putting the customer at the center of problem solving equation, the Mobile Only format looks highly skewed towards the marketer. Apparently we are still not finding a holistic reason for Mobile Only format apart from the ulterior motive of customer confinement, rather born out of customer apathy or total disregard for customer preferences. Building this wide gap requires rallying customer advocacy and customer centric empathy across all functions of business to deliver value and keep customer experience as the most important metric.

Device Option- Image 4Design to delight: Instead of Mobile only format, to fully capitalize rapidly growing net users the e-commerce players should repurpose all the touch points rather than limiting to only mobile touch points. Marketers should offer all options of net access points including web along with mobile, with all screen options and continuously reexamine the new touch points of value creation.

It is very important to explore all the digital channels for effective customer outreach when we are talking about bringing in all the 375 million net users to meaningful online purchases. A deep understanding of customer experience across all channels is just the starting block of the long process. To assume that customer’s interaction with a brand can be effectively managed only through an app (in an app only ecosystem as envisioned by Mobile Only enthusiasts) seems like an incomprehensive view as customers preference to multiple digital channels such as web & mobile advertising, email, search engines, social media and video are increasingly playing a decisive role in customers decision journey.   To capture the multiple touch points of customer interactions every e-commerce company should aspire to capture a comprehensive view of its customers, by implementing mature systems for collecting and organizing those deep insights. It is all the more important for ecommerce vendors of high involvement categories to provide a feel of the product through multiple and large visual interactions that is closer to actual physical experience to reassure the expectations of the product to user. Such affirmative and inclusive measures would increase the adoption of ecommerce at even faster rate.

The need is to remain attuned to customer decision journeys and understand how to use new capabilities to serve customers better. This is possible when marketers prioritize to understand each step of customer’s purchasing journey and design and deliver best experience across all formats. Every marketer’s goal should be to continuously discover efficient frontiers of value delivery without undermining superior user experience essential for occupying the numero uno position in customers’ mind space.

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Product Market Fit – Pre Event playbook by @Avlesh @WebEngage & Arvind Kumar, @attunetech

The morning of the SaaSx2 event saw a great pre-event playbook at the Attune Tech’s Office.

Playbook by Avlesh

Avlesh from WebEngage, Arvind from Attune Tech. and Suresh from KiSSFLOW came together to host the session and anchor the round table.

With a casual round of introductions, Suresh kickstarted the entire roundtable discussion with a question:

Who is your ideal user?

Identifying the ideal user for your product is the key to your entire product. Is it a product for developers? Is it for CEOs? Is it for mobile users? Is it for users of spreadsheets?

Once you identify your user, identify the ‘buying title’ and the ‘influencing title’. The ‘buying title’ would be the shot-caller whereas the ‘influencing title’ would play a major role in influencing the shot-caller to buy your product.

Sometimes, if your on-boarding process is straightforward, you can sidestep your segment. Figure out what’s happening, is your product gaining traction, etc., And then iterate your product.

Aligning Metrics – The key

This is when Avlesh (Webengage) (he was lost in the land of Chennai, damn the cabbie) joined the discussion. He stated a very crucial point, that sometimes entrepreneurs forget during their journey of building their product.

“Try aligning your product to your users’ metrics” was a great insight from him.

If you’re launching a second product, run it by your current customers.

Try answering these questions:

What’s that one thing that your user can relate to? What does he/she get out of this? What are you improving for them?

These are very practical and a data-driven points to consider before taking that step forward towards your market fit.

Instant Gratification -Connecting the dots

Arvind, connected these points to the psychological concept of ‘Instant Gratification’.  What pain point are you trying to address? What’s that ‘wow’ moment they get when they start using your product? Something as simple as what they do everyday and how you can help them do it differently. If users get an immediate result from your product, they would be hooked to it.

Stickiness. The sole determiner.

Suresh mentioned a very simple but powerful point to elucidate product market fit.

“People who like your product will help you in scaling your product. But people who love your product will be your early adopters. Will be your referrers. Will be your evangelists. And they will help you achieve your product’s market fit!”

He also spoke about how product fit is not necessarily a price fit but much more than that. If users love your product, they really wouldn’t mind shelling out some extra money to buy it.

If you had noticed, all these points have something to do with user engagement.

Users see. Users love. Users buy. Users stick on.

Product Market Fit: The process

Product Market Fit isn’t a destination you aim to reach, but it’s a continuous journey.

Here are a few pointers to follow before you set out to find your fit.

  • Understand your market.
  • Estimate the market size.
  • Don’t go after a broad range of things. You can’t be everything for everybody.
  • Identify your segment. Your niche. That sweet-spot!
  • Then, iterate your product. Strip/add features to suit the market.

Mohit from Jombay, who had some thoughtful points to add on to the entire discussion, mentioned about how it’s important to know what to focus on! Positioning your product is a prerequisite in obtaining a market fit.

Are we there yet?

When do you know your product has obtained a market fit? To understand the answer, ask this question. Are more strangers paying for your product? (not just your mom’s friends or cousin’s colleagues). Are you solving your users’ problem?

Sean Ellis answers this beautifully, in his blog.

“I’ve tried to make the concept less abstract by offering a specific metric for determining product/market fit. I ask existing users of a product how they would feel if they could no longer use the product. In my experience, achieving product/market fit requires at least 40% of users saying they would be “very disappointed” without your product. Admittedly this threshold is a bit arbitrary, but I defined it after comparing results across nearly 100 startups. Those that struggle for traction are always under 40%, while most that gain strong traction exceed 40%.”

Takeaways

Some quick points to sum up my takeaways from the session:

  • Product market Fit isn’t a destination, it’s a journey.
  • Understand your market.
  • Know your customers.
  • It’s not about the product. It’s about how you position it.
  • Keep your product sticky.
  • Align your products to your users’ metrics.

Avlesh’s sense of humor, Arvind’s sarcasm and Suresh’s guffaws helped maintain a lively atmosphere for the discussion 🙂 It was a great session overall with some brilliant takeaways from all of them.

Guest Post contributed by Anusha Murthy, ChargeBee

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What the Uber-Lyft war teaches us about success and failure in the on-demand economy

This article is based on the book Platform Scale, written by Sangeet Paul Choudary. Platform Scale is available for free download for a limited period between October 5th and October 9th. To access additional bonus content, check the book website here.

The on-demand economy is bringing together technology and freelance workers, to deliver us services in exciting new ways. We are increasingly using our cell phones as a remote control for the real world.

Every week, we see a new platform come up that connects consumers with freelance labor. New companies are forming in almost every service vertical. But not all these companies clearly understand what determines success and failure of on-demand business models.

Success in the On-demand economy

There are two critical factors that will determine the success of a company in the on-demand economy: multihoming costs and interaction failure.

MULTIHOMING COSTS

In computer networking parlance, mutihoming refers to a computer or device connected to more than one computer network. In the world of platforms, this notion is an important one. If your producers and/or consumers can co-exist on multiple platforms, you face a constant competitive threat. Eventually, it may be difficult for clear winners to easily emerge.

Multihoming costs are relatively high for developers to co-develop for both Android and iOS. Multihoming costs are high for consumers also because of the cost of mobile phones. Most consumers will own only one. However, multihoming costs for drivers to co-exist on Uber and Lyft are relatively low. Most drivers participate on both platforms. Given the ease of booking rides, multi-homing costs are very low on the consumer side as well.

In a previous article on TechCrunch, I had elaborated in detail how multi-homing could be prevented by creating long-term stored value within the platform.

For on-demand platforms, this is important because multihoming allows producers (service providers) to co-exist on multiple platforms. With a limited supply of service providers available, this can lead to interaction failure.

INTERACTION FAILURE

Interaction failure happens when the producer or consumer (or both) participate(s) in an interaction, without the interaction reaching its logical, desired conclusion. Imagine a merchant setting up a listing on Ebay that never gets any traction, or a video enthusiast uploading a video on YouTube that fails to get a minimum number of views. Quite often, these outcomes could be the result of poor quality listings or videos, but they could also be owing to the platform’s inability to find the right matches. Producers and consumers who experience interaction failure get discouraged from participating further and abandon the platform.

If reverse network effects set in, this can eventually lead to an implosion of a platform. In the initial days, interaction failure regularly leads to the chicken and egg problem. To understand these phenomena better and how they could impact your platform, I’d recommend this post on reverse network effects and this one on the chicken and egg problem.

Bringing it together – The Uber-Lyft war

Interaction failure is especially important for on-demand platforms. Imagine a consumer requesting for a service and the service never arriving. Imagine, in turn, a producer receiving a request, preparing to fulfill that request, only to find that the request gets cancelled. In both cases, the consumer or the producer may decide to abandon the platform.

This is exactly what Uber had in mind when it waged its war on Lyft. Unethical as that was, I’d like to focus on that to glean lessons for building the next Uber for X.

In some of the largest cities we see drivers drive for both Uber and Lyft, and other competitors. It’s not uncommon for these drivers to switch between the two platforms multiple times a day. With a limited supply of drivers in a city and the cost for a driver to connect to an additional platform so small, we see drivers multihoming on both Uber and Lyft. This has naturally led to intense competition between the two companies and Uber infamously resorted to a playbook to create interaction failure on Lyft using questionable tactics.

Uber decided to target interaction failure on Lyft, by contracting third party employees to use disposable phones to hail Lyft taxies. Before the Lyft taxi arrived at its pickup location, the Uber contracted employee would cancel the ride. With so many cancelations on the Lyft platform, drivers would become frustrated driving for Lyft and, in some cases, switch over to Uber. Lower drivers would lead to further frustration for consumers as they would have to wait longer for their requests for cabs to be fulfilled, eventually spurring them to abandon the platform. This loop is illustrated below.

When multihoming costs are low, producers and consumers will connect to many platforms. With multiple platforms sharing the same producers and consumers, it is difficult for a business to build defensible networks. Thus, it is difficult for a clear winner to emerge in the market. With many platforms operating and defensibility low, interaction failure becomes a key factor in determining long-term winners.

What does this mean for you?

SangeetpaulblogIf you’re building the Uber for X, you need to ensure that you’re tracking a metric that helps you determine the degree of interaction failure on your platform. Freelancers that don’t get business within X days, requests that don’t get satisfied within Y minutes, may all be indicative of interaction failure. The exact measure of interaction failure will vary by platform and the importance of tracking interaction failure will, in turn, depend on the multihoming costs.

About the author: Sangeet Paul Choudary is the author of the book Platform Scale, available for free download for a limited period between October 5th and October 9th. He also writes the blog Platform Thinking.

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UX and Design in India

I recently heard of the demise of renowned MP Ranjan. Though I’ve never met him, my friends and colleagues who are in design, speak highly of him. It’s amazing how much design as a field of study and profession has progressed. And I’ve been fortunate to have worked with a lot of smart and talented designers over the past few years. This was not the situation when I started in the tech industry.

While at Zoho (then AdventNet, circa 2002), few of us came together and felt it was important to focus on design (it used to be called Usability then). And many teams had designers who used to be called Usability Engineers. We even went on to setup a usability lab where we had the ability to share the big CRT monitor, have a user try out our product (usually someone from SysAdmin, remember: AdventNet was building enterprise network management products then) and be able to see how a user used specific screens in the product. Most of my friends in other tech companies back then hadn’t heard of or were familiar with usability engineers or what they do. The common question used to be

Are these the people who fix the font colour and bold/italic? Isn’t that graphic design?

When I was interviewing with Yahoo in 2004, the recruiter who forwarded my resume to Yahoo, saw “User Experience” mentioned in the resume, and suggested “Why don’t you write some programming languages like Java in the resume so that they’ll consider this? Why do you want to write things like user experience? How does it help?“. As irony would have it, I ended up getting hired by Yahoo, and joined the same day as @rutasraju who led the UX teams at Yahoo for quite a while 🙂.

By this time, few more companies were beginning to talk of User Experience, Design and even hiring for those positions. And when I moved to InMobi (then mKhoj, circa 2008), we hired UX designers quite early on, and the company continues to build the UX/Design team. It was a much more accepted and serious profession to be included, if you were building products for any kind of human!

In more recent times, design is a mainstay in any company building products. This may be achieved by hiring in-house or by outsourcing/contracting, but the fact remains that it plays at a high level of consciousness for any team starting a company or building a product. At Credibase, when we think of what to do for users, the conversations always start with

What is the proposition for the user, and what is the experience the user will undergo?

I think this is due to a nice and virtuous cycle: See classy products -> Want classy products -> Build classy products. And I think this is great for the ecosystem. From being an afterthought (fix the text and colour on the screens) to being a mainstay, design in India has certainly come a long way, all in 1.5 decades!

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Stop Wasting your Hard-Earned Inbound Leads

Inbound Digital Marketing – A must for Generating Leads!

Organizations rely significantly on inbound digital marketing for their business. One of the most popular marketing channel used is Pay-Per-Click Campaigns, wherein inbound leads are captured as soon as a visitor clicks on sponsored landing pages/Google Adwords links and fills the details to access specific resources/offers. Direct inbound traffic leads are generated through Newsletters, Blogs, Contact Us, Demo Pages, Case Studies over website/ social networking sites where the visitor expresses an interest by filling their details over website to access the required information or request for a personal contact. Another way to generate direct inbound leads traffic is through organic content publication, SEO.

Getting an ROI from your Inbound Digital Marketing?

B2B companies invest between $25 to $500 for generating an inbound lead while B2C companies invest between $5 to $25 for the same. The money spent goes down the drain if inbound leads are not responded in an efficient way. The important questions for you to answer are – How many of your inbound leads are never contacted as they get lost during data transfer to sales team? As per the latest research done by Texo for SAAS companies based in India, close to 70% companies didn’t respond to inbound leads. How many inbound leads are loosely passed on to Sales reps to contact with incomplete or wrong information? How many of them are contacted when the prospect have lost interest in you or chosen a competitor? Based on Texo research, only 3.7% companies had a lead response time within 10 minutes and only 6.5% companies responded within an hour. How many prospects block you after your first sales contact?

The answers to these questions will define the ROI of your inbound marketing efforts. However, the good news is that if you are effective in inbound lead response management you are on the top of your business as chances are pegged on higher side in converting inbound sales leads rather than outbound leads for which investments are even on a much higher side.

Way to Efficiently Manage your Inbound Leads

We’ve all heard this popularly-quoted statistic: 70% of the buyer’s journey is complete before a buyer even reaches out to sales (SiriusDecisions). What are buyers doing during this time?

Prospect gain awareness about their own need, and the vendors available in the market who may cater to the specific need. Buyers are usually looking for educational material, customer reviews, etc., at this stage. Prospect then considers the narrowed down companies and their products and services based on their requirements. They then perform a second level of research on company’s specific offerings to see how the companies can address particular pain points. This involves comparison of shortlisted companies’ products and services. Buyers generally consume MOFU content around features, case studies, and comparison charts. Prospect finally decides to choose a vendor. Prospect looks for more practical and on the ground stuff to substantiate their decision. They look for demonstrations, customer testimonials/ references, reliability of customer support to assess which solution suits their needs and budget. BOFU content drives the prospects to make a final contact for placing the request for buying interest. Marketers job involves understanding what their buyers are doing, and how they can engage with their buyers and help them move from one stage of the cycle to the next.

Inbound Leads are the prospects who have shown any kind of interest in your products/services by making a contact at any of the buyer stage. Marketers and sales reps have to align their engagement strategies with respect to the buyer stage. But what can they do about the 70% of the buyer’s journey that they’re missing out on? They are not able to correctly judge  the prospect’s buying stage when they make a contact and hence not able to employ an effective engagement strategy.

And how can a tool like Sales Engagement Hub integrated with Marketing Automation Tools help marketers and sales reps keep pace with their buyers? The level of interest may vary depending on the buying stage the prospect is in, and hence different prospects need to be addressed differently. Factors to be considered for engaging with inbound leads are Response Time, Mode of Communication, Information to be shared, Frequency of follow-ups and so on. A prospect in the consideration stage would prefer information about products, solutions, services, and case studies, and would need longer follow-ups over email (preferably) or call. However, a prospect in the decision stage would be more interested in having information on solutioning and pricing, and would need consistent follow-ups (shorter) over call (preferably) or email. Sales Engagement Hub integrated with marketing automation tools help the sales reps and marketers in effectively engaging with prospects.

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Mobile Product & Growth Hacking RoundTable #playbookRT by @amitsomani & @VishalAnand

Having a completed a half century of RoundTables, the iSPIRT team was back with the 51st RoundTable on what’s currently the hot topic of discussion and debate in the startup community – mobile! A lot of startups are also trying to figure out their mobile strategy and this was evidenced in the great interest shown by startups in participating in this RoundTable. And why not? It’s not too often that you get a chance to deeply interact and learn from senior industry practitioners like Amit Somani, who was the facilitator and Vishal Anand, co-facilitator for the RoundTable.

The participating startups were from different domains (healthcare, HR, payments, consumer services etc.) and across stages (already have something up and running on mobile, tried something on mobile, but didn’t work, yet to figure out mobile strategy and so on). There was a round of introductions with each startup giving a context about their company and industry, the key challenges and their expected takeaways from the RoundTable. The iSPIRT RoundTables are highly collaborative in nature with a lot of peer learning and feedback as part of the discussions. As the introductions were happening, the facilitators were mapping the areas that startups were looking for help to the mobile journey. With the introductions complete, the group had a fair sense of the key areas that would be taken up for discussion during the RoundTable.

One of the first topics that came up for discussion was ‘Activation’ – how do you get the user to make the first action on your app. Many points came up for discussion – coupons, notifications, social/referral and so on. But two stood out, which Amit stressed upon – one was how do you get the users to have their aha moment and secondly, how do you ensure that you’re scaling this in a sustainable way? While the current sentiment seems to be around growth at any cost, Amit mentioned that it’s important to start looking at the unit economics sooner rather than later. Some of the key points mentioned around Activation where:

Mobile Playbook

  • Coupons:
    • This is perhaps the simplest and easiest way, but could you be smarter in doing this? Could you create different segments of users and offer targeted coupons instead of a blanket coupon? E.g. Say, an iPhone user is more valuable than other users. Could you then possibly offer her a higher value coupon?
    • You’d also need to be careful about the positioning and perception of your brand? If the focus is on coupons, will you come to be known as brand offering coupons rather than be known for your service? Also, with coupons, are you sure that you’re attracting the right kind of users or you’ll end up acquiring only ‘deal-hunters’?
    • While coupons are an effective channel, it’ll be helpful to create segments to as minute levels as possible and offer them to users appropriately.
  • Supply Side Users
    • Some of the companies participating in the RoundTable were marketplaces that had users on the ‘supply side’ as well. Key points mentioned were – a) show demand to the supply side user. b) Some kind of revenue calculator/estimator. These would help the supply side user get a sense of the demand and then take the necessary action (create listings, upload products etc.)

There were some companies that were still in the early stages of their mobile play or were evaluating how to go about their mobile strategies. Some of the points discussed were around:

  • Building in-house v/s Outsourcing
    • There is limited availability of high quality mobile developers and designers these days and startups have to compete with some heavily-funded companies for the same talent pool. Given this scenario, does it make sense to outsource mobile development and design? Participating companies had interesting experiences to share. For some of them, outsourcing hadn’t worked well. Some of them were able to find high quality freelancers and engaged them effectively.
    • However, one insight that Amit shared found resonance among the audience – one way to perhaps go about outsourced mobile development could be to breaking down the deliverables into design, frontend, backend etc. Perhaps engage a good designer for design and do the rest in-house? Also, in most cases, the backend is core to the company and that’s perhaps something that needs to be done in-house.
    • Similarly,
  • Does mobile lend itself to a one-time use use case?
    • For example, if there’s an app for employees in a company to check and update their records etc, does it really lend itself to a strong use case for mobile? Can one create enough hooks to engage the user to come back frequently to the app?

The next key discussion was around metrics and tools to use to measure the metrics.

  • Amit gave a simple, yet powerful formula to look at metrics – Record everything, Track 12 and focus on 3. This will help in identifying the really important metrics and drive the company’s energy to focus and improve on those.
  • An ideal comparison for Lifetime Value (LTV) to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is LTV > 3*CAC. In a lighter vein, Amit mentioned that given the amount of marketing spends companies have these days, he’d be very eager to meet and invest in a company that even has LTC = CAC! That said, the importance of thinking through the right economics and working towards it with reasonable visibility is something Amit stressed throughout the session.
  • Rather than averages, Amit mentioned it might be useful to look at percentages, have cohorts to measure movement and perhaps look at percentiles as well depending on the metrics.
  • (Daily Active)/(Monthly Active) >= 15% is a good number for any app. Also, (Monthly Active Users)/(Install Base) >= 25% is good as well.
  • Some of the tools mentioned during the discussion were:
    • Google Analytics for simple and basic analytics
    • Flurry – gives comparative data and is free.
    • AppAnnie – for comparative data
    • Appfigures for Ranking / Review and Ratings – Daily reports
    • App bot (sentimental analysis on Reviews)
    • Crashmetrics –  Crash reports
    • Uninstall.io – for tracking uninstalls
    • Branch.io – post install deeplinking
    • Segment.io – integrates different tools used

MobilePlaybook

The participants left with a lot of food for thought and actionable takeaways that they hope to put into practice at their startups. There were also some very interesting books recommended by Amit to deeply understand user engagement and get some insights:

  • Hooked
  • Made to Stick
  • Influence
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Product Management for Startups and Understanding Growth #Playbookrt52

It was a rainy Monsoon Delhi day with heavy downpour, traffic jams and water logging but these couldn’t keep a bunch of entrepreneurs from making it in time to the Product Nation Roundtable focused on Product Management and Growth Hacking.

Led by Round Table veteran who has done it all and scaled Slideshare to great heights, Amit Ranjan, the excite bunch got together in the lovely office of Posist.

The round table kicked off with discussion around Product Management with Amit discussing his learnings and unfolding carious aspects around it step by step.

He defined Product Management as the function that manages the product life cycle through activities like planning, forecasting, production, marketing and has flavours of engineering, design, sales, marketing, data etc.

No matter what the stage of the company is, Product management is relevant, it is carried out by Founders is small startups (say less than 10 in strength) and then there are multiple product managers in big companies.

Important takeaway: “A Product Manager should be the CEO of the product” – Amit Ranjan

443b5ffef7b5079d7b20822404fd3124“A great product manager has the brain of an engineer, the heart of a designer, and the speech of a diplomat”

The group further analysed many examples of startups such as Uber, Twitter, Slideshare etc. around a model shared by Amit depicting 3 pillars of Product Management which are:

  • Vision
    • align org goals with market conditions & user needs
    • ‘get’ the pulse of the product (think movie directors)
  • Design
    • give shape to the product: feature mix, user experience
  • Execution
    • work with engineering, quality, marketing to deliver

However, a common issue cited by many founders was the issue of making the right hire for such role. The group identified and discussed the various aspects that must be considered while making a hire for the role :

  • Strong product sense/instinct
  • Carries multiple points of views
  • Communicates clearly
  • Simplifies & prioritizes
  • Measures & iterates
  • Understands good design
  • Writes effective copy

The second half of the Round Table was focused around Virality and the art of Growth Hacking with Amit sharing many interesting anecdotes and case studies.

Amit defined Virality as “Marketing built into the product…if the product is viral, it will market itself.

It is different from Word of Mouth, Marketing, Buzz etc and is simply the ability of the product to spread on its own. The role of a Marketer is to enable the product to do so and leverage different mediums to do so.

In Slideshare’s case, it was widgets that worked out very well for distribution. Amit emphasised to a great extent the importance of cracking and working on distribution right from the get go. The ideal scenario of working deeply on product (engagement) as well as channels (distribution) is hardly realised. It is a call that the entrepreneur has to take and has its own pros and cons. In Slideshare’s case, the heavy focus on distribution instead of deep diving into product development to a greater extent helped them erect barrier against new competitors/clones who tried to differentiate with added media support but could not pick up. As a negative, Slideshare faced issues in motivation as it never made users compulsively log in or create deeper engagement on the platform.

1e742688c80a7e0d19ccbafabe8ee071Amit emphasised the importance of tracking the product’s viral coefficient which is the number of additional members every new member brings. It should be greater than 1 for the product to become viral.

Viral Growth

The participants at the Roundtable were:

  1. Ashish Tulsian @posist.com (Host)
  2. Shashwat Srivastava @iflylabs.com
  3. Saurabh Arora @airwoot.com>
  4. Siddharth Deswal @wingify.com>
  5. Rahul Batra @getwalkon.com>
  6. Sujan Deswal @adpushup.com>
  7. Ankit Singh @aprogift.com>
  8. Amir Moin @contify.com>
  9. Sudhanshu Aggarwal @fizzysoftware.com>
  10. Amit Ghasghase <[email protected]>
  11. Mrigank Tripathi @qustn.com
  12. Udit Sajjanhar @splashmath.com

Founders share their own growth hack stories and channels’ learnings. For majority, in the B2B scenario, content marketing has worked well to boost the acquisition and few discussed the idea of generating leads from fake Linkedin profiles!

Amit cautioned that one should always be looking out for new channels as a channel that’s working for you today will saturate soon.

The group got some great insights and takeaways to implement from product management and growth’s perspective. Ashish’s hospitality at Posist with amazing Cholley Bhature was cherry on top of the cake

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Are You Ready to Take up the Entrepreneurial Challenge in Technology?

There has been a rise in technology entrepreneurship as a movement since last 10 years in India before which new technology businesses were essentially due to business expansion by corporate and business communities in India. Now, we are witnessing the rise entrepreneurial community at grass root level comprising of technocrats driven by innovation and passion to make a strong impact on socio-economic development of India. A number of constraints which previously acted as a road block to India’s Entrepreneurship Story have been overcome by paradigm shift in technological, business and political environment. India is producing more number of quality engineering and technology professionals than ever before who are empowered with technology and information to solve problems at the regional, national and global level. Capital which is one of the key factors for starting and running business is not a barrier now because of better availability of funding than ever before.

Now as one can expect conducive conditions in India to start and run his business, the question arises; Is today’s technology professional ready to take up the entrepreneurial challenge in such a highly competitive business environment? This question intrigues us to ponder upon the key skills professionals should particularly develop to face the common business challenges and emerge as a successful entrepreneur.

Developing a solution that solves problems

The best entrepreneurs don’t come up with great ideas, they solve market needs. Unless a technological innovation doesn’t satisfy a substantial need, it doesn’t make any business sense to start business on that idea. Engineering and technology professionals are trained to solve problems. New businesses are born when technology solves the problem being faced by the public and corporate. Hence, the success of every business is management’s ability in taking the solution to the market and selling the same which is bound to happen if solution fills a void. Professionals should develop marketing skills to assess the market needs and commercial viability of the solutions in the real time market.

Know when to detach from engineering function

A not so perfect technology solution is not among the common reasons for business failures. Technologists as entrepreneurs need to know when to detach themselves from engineering function and focus on business aspects. You need to focus on customers first before maximizing the functionality. Technocrats engrossed with the engineering tend to lose business focus. I could observe business failure from my personal experience with a solar power consulting start up* in India where due to excess focus of the top management on engineering function as they themselves used to spend considerable time in engineering job that they lost time for focusing on customers and developing new business. Technical person can’t expect to do an engineering job themselves all the time. However, you need to focus on business and mentor the technical professionals you employ to increase functionality gradually. You should understand and learn to prioritize and manage diverse business functions like business development, project management, human resources management etc.

The hardest part is the ability of taking the solution to market and sell

There is a famous old adage by engineers, “If we build it, they will come”, doesn’t hold true today. However, today’s reality is that unless the value is proposed appropriately to the targeted customers, customers will not get connected to the offerings and even if got connected but the offerings are not communicated aggressively through multiple channels available customers will be swayed by  competitors’ offerings due to effective marketing and customer engagement. With excessively available information these days, selling is always required. You need to understand the marketing channels (print, digital, radio, tv) to select apt channels and use them effectively. Secondly, you should learn selling aspects related their industry, effective selling process, negotiation skills and related analytical and sales support tools like CRM, BI, web analytics, social media analytics for prospecting, making sales closures and serving customers.

Relationships matter

A common personality attribute particularly observed among engineering and technology professionals is introversion which can be quite detrimental to the business success as no business survives without relationships since it’s of utmost important to get out there, build relationships with suppliers to supply goods and services to serve your customers, financiers to fund you, employees to help you attain business goals, customers to trust you for buying your goods and services, mentors to give you strategic direction and corporate & government agencies to support your business and partner with you. The good new news is that introvert professional can turn into extrovert one by taking proper training and practicing. You need to understand the value of relationships in business and develop related skills to develop a mutually beneficial relationship with the stakeholders.

Keeping your control to keep your idea alive

As an entrepreneur, you would never like to be in the situation as faced by Steve Jobs where he was asked to leave the company he founded by the board of directors. Outside funding causes loss of control and excessive pressure to deliver. Funding is quite indispensable for a start-up during the growth stage to scale up the business. Investors’ interest lies in earning returns from the money invested in the growth of company by scaling a proven business model of entrepreneurs, and they tend to avoid funding for R&D. You need to learn business, financial and legal implications of funding to able to bring in the right amount of funding from the right kind of investors to achieve common business interests to keep the idea alive for which the venture was started.

Today stars are in your favor to be entrepreneurs. In this well connected world by technology where everybody has easy access to information, the skills can be developed and insights can be gathered quickly by already trained professionals like engineers and technologists to face the toughest challenges thrown by highly competitive business environment at national, regional and global level. With the economy on the growth stage in India, we need more and more technology entrepreneurs to satisfy our rising demands and solve the basic as well as intricate problems using technological solutions. It is time for you to make a real contribution to India’s socio-economic development.

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Should experts be limited to an organization?

Expert01

 I am a great fan of analogy, and one of the things I have been pondering for past year or so is comparing our software industry with that of medical and film industry.

In this post, I plan to share some thoughts on how our software industry can consider the evolution of medical and film industry, and probably evolve in that direction.

Expert0 Expert2

In Medical industry, the ecosystem contains Doctors, Surgeons, Physicians, Specialists, Hospitals, Clinics, Life Science companies, research labs and further other associated entities to serve the patients.

In film industry, the ecosystem is made up of producers, directors, actors, cameraman, music director, editor, choreographer, stunt master,other specialized technicians.

Similarly in our software industry, the ecosystem is made up of VCs, founders, techies, designers, product managers, and sales/marketing folks.

Specialization

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One of the striking aspects of the whole evolution is the Specialization part, where medical industry has evolved and recognized the need for deep specialization, and doctors and the ecosystem surrounding have focused on specialization. While you still see some general physicians, we all know who are in more demand – the specialist.

In the film industry, specialization has become very key. Whether you are a screen play writer of dramas, you are specializing in romantic comedies, you are an action director etc. Offcourse there are few folks who are versatile especially in acting, but every film needs a bunch of specialist.

Similarly in our industry, specialization has taken off and it’s a great sign of the industry maturing. We see specialists in design, Ux vs backend techies, architects, B2B vs B2C product managers, industry experts such banking, government, healthcare who bridge industry knowledge with technology, we see further more big data, cloud, database, IoT, mobile etc experts.

 

Should Specialist be limited to an organization or department?

With the above background, the key thought I had for writing this post is how our industry can evolve to leverage the specialist expertise, to go beyond just one organization.

Take the case of medical industry, an important attribute is that the specialist are usually not associated to one hospital but consult in multiple different places. There also exists several communities where specialist come together to discuss the challenges, problems, solutions and experiences in their area of specialization. We have seen several doctors consult with others to get second opinions. The ecosystem is well setup in such a way that its not just honorary service, but it’s a win win for everyone, and takes care of “what’s in it for me ?” very well

In case of film industry, most of the people work independently and come together for a specific film. Over the period of time, many work together in multiple such film projects over several years. There are specialist and actors (not the main heros) who work on multiple projects. Its left to the potential, interest and capability of individual on how much he or she can leverage their time, how they want to pace their career, and how they really are on the toes to differentiate or find their winning formula, as individual or as a team. One of the nice talk you should watch to understand it is when our versatile actor Kamal Hassan spoke at NASSCHOM event, sharing some of the interesting aspects of film industry.

The above 2 industry are a great example for us to consider as we evolve our industry. We have several experts and specialist out there in our industry, but their talents are often not leveraged to full potential for lack of the right setup – they are bound by their employment contracts, or merely don’t have avenues to share, engage, contribute and gain. Most of the folks in our industry land up into mundane jobs, standard career path, leading to becoming some people managers or stop reinventing ourselves.

The boundary laid out for experts is not just being able to do with multiple projects outside, but even within the company many of the experts do not have an opportunity to showcase their potential as they are bound by their departments and hierarchies.

Here are my thoughts on how our industry can evolve around better leveraging specialist:

  • Expert clubs that can bring together specialist by different areas of specialization e.g. by specific functional areas, deployment expertise, industry expertise, cultural expertise, skills – product management /design/architecture, GTM expertise etc.
  • Answering the ‘whats in it for me ?’ question – not to expect specialist to come and engage always for free
  • Employment contracts have clauses that allows experts to do other pursuits beyond their employment e.g. like a doctor who can consult beyond the hospital he is assigned to, experts should be able to consult for other products /projects
  • Creating an environment where its safe for experts to be sharing and working independently to take risks
  • Entrepreneurs to recognize the need for experts /specialization for rolling out products that excel, instead of relying on do it all jack of all – this will drive towards the products that excel
  • An environment or community that facilitates experts to be easily accessible and able to work on a product/project for a given time, including possibility for them to engage in multiple projects based on their appetite …think of the movie analogy here
  • Crowd sourcing for expert skills would be a great way to enable experts to be fully engaged, leverage potential and create more products
  • Mentor programs are a stepping stone in this direction for many experts, we see lot of mentor programs already run…but this needs to get to the next level where these experts contribute more rigorously

 

List of Experts that we would like to see in our product industry being part of expert club, not exhaustive:

  • Ux Designers – Interation /visual design
  • Mobile designers
  • Internet Security experts
  • Product Managers for B2C
  • Product Managers for B2B
  • Product marketers
  • Industry Specialist
  • SaaS Pricing experts
  • Growth Hacking experts
  • Technical writers /Product Documentation writers
  • Intellectual Property Experts
  • Social Media Marketers
  • Solution Architects
  • Performance Optimization Experts
  • Scalability Experts

What are your views on this… can our software industry switch gears to enable experts to contribute more…and get awesome products that excel  …working beyond organization boundaries like a doctor or cinema artiste ?