Category: Product Management

Posted on

Marketing Expense Tracker for Startups

I moved into a product role recently but for the majority of my startup life, I was in marketing. One of the things I always had lacking in my toolbox was a simple expense tracker. I looked around a lot but the best option was what I was already using and wanted to move on from — Google Sheets.

What’s wrong with a spreadsheet?

Google Sheets is a great way to record marketing spends compared to complicated expense management modules built inside even more complex solutions. It’s fast, everything is one place, everyone’s familiar with it, and there’s no easier way to collaborate than Google Sheets.

google-sheets-marketing-spend

But every time I shared the sheet with someone else to add spends made by them or their team, I was scared that something will go wrong. They might delete a column, remove a comment, change the amount paid. I normally trust people but this was the only place where I was recording spends. And it’s rather easy to fuck up with a spreadsheet. So, I would make a copy of my marketing spend sheet every couple of weeks or whenever the terror struck me. Over time, I ended up with 40–50 copies of the marketing spend sheet.

Also I often add comments to individual items with details on the campaign, the creative we ran, or simply if the campaign has already been paid for.

google-sheets-marketing-spend-with-comment

While comments in Google Sheets are awesome to collaborate, once you have a couple of comments, they start to get clumsy. And with 15–20 comments every month, it is easy to miss out on one of the important ones. Oftentimes, I also wanted a reminder to check on the RoI of a particular campaign or to make a payment, which was not possible in Google Sheets.

And of course, I wanted to compare and contrast the total spend against the budget, the spend previous month or the same month last year. Or even sum up and compare sub-heads like Tools, PPC or Events over a quarter or year. One of the core uses of spreadsheets is to help you add and compare numbers and I could have just written simple formulae for that (and I had some of them) but for most practical purposes, the analysis I needed to do was different most of the time. And then there were times when I just wanted the bigger picture — show the total divided under sub-heads, no need for individual expenses. Or show all items under PPC ads, we are spending too much there, so I need to figure out how we can cut down there.

All of these can be done with a spreadsheet, but it’s not the most efficient way. And there’s only so many rows and columns you can see at once in a spreadsheet.

I also talked to some other people in marketing and there were only two ways people were doing this in:

  • A Google Sheet like mine or Excel Sheet that they mailed back and forth in the organization to prevent the fuck ups I was so scared of.
  • Do nothing. And dig through your emails and credit card statement when the time came to put together the numbers..

There needs to be a better way for this.

The Solution

The next step before we get to the actual product definition is listing down the main actions a user could take in our marketing expense tracker. We won’t go into tiny details like inviting collaborators or editing the profile, we’ll just keep it to the actions required to solve the main pain points we just talked about.

User Actions

  • Add an expense
  • Add a reminder to an expense
  • See total spend in the month broken down under sub-heads
  • Compare spend against the budget
  • Compare spend in current month against previous month or same month last year
  • Compare spend under sub-heads across different time periods
  • Edit an expense after it has been added

Screens

The next step I use in the process is to think about the most logical way to group these actions into screens. Here are the screens we are going to have for our expense tracker:

  • Add Expense: The most obvious screen. Here’s where you can add an expense, categorize it and add a reminder.
  • See All Expenses: This is where all expenses for the month will be listed in chronological order. You can see all details about a spend, edit them or delete them from here.
  • Dashboard: This is where you can see total spend for the month compared to budget, and compare spends across months. Also all reminders will be shown here.

Add Expense

add-new-expensePretty self-explanatory but here are some pointers that the mockup doesn’t bring out:

  • The name field is a textbox but once you start typing, it will show suggestions that you can pick from as well. This ensures that you don’t end up using Adwords, adwords, Ad-words for the same item, making it easier for grouping and comparison later. Of course, if you want to add a new item, you can disregard the suggestions.
  • Category is to be picked from a drop-down so that you don’t end up creating too many new categories. If you want to create a new category, there will be an option in the menu. Or you can choose none if you want your item to be a sub-head by itself.
  • Amount can be made recurring for things like spend on tools for SEO or email marketing, retainer contracts with agencies or long-term campaigns. It’s a pretty frequent use-case to be out there. You can choose the currency at the time of setup.
  • Already paid? Then you can choose to add payment details like mode of payment and date. If not paid, you can ask to be reminded. You will get a reminder email and it will show up in your dashboard.
  • Additional comments are helpful to add details on the creative you used, campaign results (later on) and so on. It really could be used in so many different ways that I cannot fathom right now, so we will have it.

See All Expenses

see-all-expenses

Additional details:

  • The expenses are listed in chronological order based on the date they were added on.
  • You can click on an expense to see details, edit or delete it.
  • By default, you see all the spends for this month but you can also choose last month, this quarter, this year and other well-defined time periods.
  • Clicking on the categories head will group all expenses under a category (see a use case for it?), the amount head will display spends in descending or ascending order and the like.
  • You can also see all spends on freelancers this year by first selecting this year as the time period and then searching for freelancers in the search box. You can search for individual items as well.

Dashboard

dashboard

The dashboard is rather simple.

  • It shows what % of your budget for the month have you spent already. If you overshoot the budget, the bar will turn red. The budget can be set during onboarding and changed from settings for current month onwards.
  • You get a quick breakdown of the spend by sub-heads right below with the option to show individual expenses under that head. Think we need it here or would people rather go to See All Expenses to see it in complete detail?
  • You can compare your spend against previous month/previous quarter/any chosen time period (you are allowed to select months for this, not individual days) by using the Compare option the date picker provides (very similar to how Google Analytics has it).
  • And finally at the bottom, you get payment reminders for everything that is due. If you have already paid something, you can simply check it and add payment details from the dashboard itself.

That’s it. That’s all I would build in v1 of the product..

Future Additions

Of course, I have ideas for what else can be added to the product. Who doesn’t? But as I said, I will evaluate them once v1 hits the market and I have data points on how people are using it. Here are some of the ideas:

  • Simply send an email to a particular address to add an expense.
  • Build a mobile app. Or probably start off as an app itself.
  • Automatically pull spends on Google Adwords, Facebook Ads and everything else that can be automated.
  • Show RoI for different campaigns. Again the details are a little fuzzy, but if the product could show RoI, it becomes a lot more valuable than a simple expense tracker. And a lot more embedded into the marketing team’s workflow.
  • Show possible savings. If the product is tied to Google Adwords, I could show ideas on which campaigns can be optimized.
  • Suggest additional channels to advertise on. You have budget left over for the month. Why not try out some additional growth areas? It’s a tricky problem to solve but a problem a lot of people have. And going from passive expense tracking to providing active suggestions makes it so much more valuable.
  • Some kind of gamification or feed to show who added what expense. If people see others are adding every expense and detailing them out, they will be pushed to do it too. Adding marketing expenses, after all, is not the most exciting job on the planet.

What do you think?

Is this a pain point you or other people around you face? Does a product like this help you? If you were to build this, would you build it any differently? Or prioritize the functionalities differently? Would love to have your feedback.

Why am I doing this?

Why would I put out a pain point and then discuss how to solve it in so much detail? Why wouldn’t I just go build it?

Because coming up with the initial product idea and actually building, marketing and supporting it are completely different beasts. Moreover, I want to get better as a product person. I want to be able to identify opportunities better, learn how to tackle them better and how to prioritize what to build. As much as I tried to find detailed case studies on how other products opportunities were spotted, how they thought of the solution, the trade-offs they made, I was not able to find good study material.

I have a bunch of product ideas that I have made notes on over the years. If this post turns out well, I will do the same with them. So do add in your feedback, brickbats or bouquets and help me become a better product thinker. Thank you!

Follow me on Twitter: @sanketnadhani

Posted on

Cheap Kills, Value Wins!

Competing on price is never a great strategy! Cheap Kills, Value Wins! As long you as you have a clearly differentiated offering, you should calculate the value your solution provides your users, and base your pricing on that! And stick to it! Competing on price creates a spiral of death for all competitors, no matter what the industry, no matter what the offerings are!

cheap-5

Some eons ago, in one of the services start-ups I was with, prospects always brought up a competitor that offered better prices. Why just one? I usually volunteer to provide them an even larger list of competitors that can give them better raw pricing than me. Then I bring up the value of our higher priced offerings and how, over the course of the project, our total costs will  be lower for them, given the superiority of our hiring, training processes, and the higher productivity of our resources.

In another software product startup, we knew that many of our customers tried developing a solution in-house to solve the same problem and failed. We knew that in-house applications will not scale up as well as a carefully designed software product. Our product had the benefit of addressing  a larger variety of problems with all of our customers. And so every customer gets to benefit from better features, rapid customizability and scalability. We priced our offering at high US product prices; they were based on value provided rather than something that is worked from costs up!  We knew we had defensible intellectual property that cannot be easily replicated by any other competitor!

Perils of Competing on Price

Competing on price does not mean that you don’t provide strategically offered discounts on the total price to close a sale quickly.  It means that the only thing that differentiates you from your closest competitor is price and price alone. This is a terrible situation, not just for you, but all of your competitors also. Here are the perils of competing on price:

  • Inflexibility in the Contract – Competing on price does not allow for acquisition of other technologies, products, or people to make the overall effort more efficient and effective. Especially in product companies, a smaller competitor may have developed a product that fits in well with your offering when integrated properly.
  • Tight Margins – Murphy’s Law happens! Key people may leave, unforeseen things may happen at a company. Competing on price and tight margins can turn a marginally profitable opportunity into a loss-making effort.
  • Compromises future people and product development – The margins you make are not just for profits. A large portion of the margins are the monies you have left to be used for continued development of the people you have, or continued product research and development. Competing on price may force you to cut down on these strategic investments.
  • Sets up the wrong dynamic with the customer – The best time to set up a proper dynamic on Pricing with customers is right at the beginning. If you get the contract because you competed on price you have already set up a terrible dynamic. You may never be able to recover from this later on.

Steps towards Competing on Value

value-1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Competing on Value is a careful, long journey and requires faith, patience and a lot more hard work. But when set up correctly, and if the value is proven with a handful of customers, scaling up to a larger customer base is easier. Here are some absolutely essential steps towards Value-Based Pricing:

  • Calculate and Have Ready, Demonstrable Value – First principle of Value Based pricing is to understand, calculate and have ready at your fingertips, your Value. Return on Investment (ROI) calculations, Pay Back Periods, Projected Total Cost of Ownership of alternative solutions are all necessary for you to demonstrate Value.  You need to have them ready even in your initial presentations. Tell them how you may appear more expensive than their other alternatives, but demonstrate how your solution will save them money, effort and time in the long run.
  • Differentiate your offering and Value – Make sure you have defensible intellectual property either in the form of patentable technology or at least a large body of complex code that will take a competitor a long time to figure out and develop. Companies underestimate the value of time in these comparisons. That’s why large software product companies routinely make the buy decision to acquire a smaller, nimbler competitor that provides a part of their overall solution rather than develop it all from scratch themselves.
  • Highlight your plans to add even more Value –  Share some of your future people or product development directions with your prospects and customers. Demonstrate how your plans will enable their investment in you will benefit them in the longer run even more. This will also have the added benefit of getting you feedback on what’s critical for them and what’s not. You will be able to fine tune your own future directions before you spend money on them, a kind of Lean Fine-Tuning!
  • Demonstrate Thought Leadership, don’t be in reactive mode – Whether you are providing software services or software products, thought leadership is a terrific way to demonstrate and provide added value. If you are doing Big Data Analytics products, share with prospects and customers, the thought leadership kinds of activities you are doing in that area. They need to look up to you as an informed, thought leading business expert; not a service or a product supplier. Those are the tools with which you add value.

Competing on Price is a losing proposition. Nobody wins and all competitors including you will be in a downward spiral with that strategy. On the other hand Value-based Pricing when done correctly can facilitate a longer term, mutually beneficial partnership with your customers. When done correctly, it enables you to defend and build your business with your customers and help grow your company in the process!

Price is what you pay. Value is what you get – Warren Buffett

 

Posted on

Practitioner’s Guide to Product Strategy

Building products that help customers achieve the outcomes that they desire over the long term is hard. Jeff Bezos has a great quote on basing your strategy on things that do not change. This quote captures the essence of strategy and long term planning.

Here are few elements that product teams should consider while building products:

Product_Strategy - Pandith Jantakahalli

What to build? is determined by three critical elements — outcomes that customers want to achieve, other alternatives that help customers achieve the same outcome, and your point of view.

Customer outcomes: It is best to define customer outcomes using a vocabulary that a customer would use. While it is typical to place emphasis on functional outcomes, it is crucial to identify emotional, and social outcomes. Functional outcomes can be defined by understanding the customer’s context, situation and constraints. Emotional and social outcomes can be defined by understanding motivations, where and how much energy the customer is expending to achieve the desired outcomes today, and “skill” level of the customer. Ask what will make the customer successful, before asking what will make your business successful. (Note: It is important to ask the latter question as well)

Alternatives for achieving the same outcome: In order to understand what to focus on while building your product, it helps to understand how the customer is achieving the outcome today. Pay attention to what they are dissatisfied with, and if the dissatisfaction is on an important attribute. You may observe that the customer is using multiple products to achieve the desired outcome, or that the alternative is not in the same “product category”.

Point of view: is crucial to the success of your product as it determines the scope of your product and your approach to helping the customer reach an outcome. For example, you may decide that project management is all about enabling better communication among all stakeholders. Thus focusing your efforts on enabling frequent and timely communication, rather than including support for Gantt charts.

It is useful to define every interaction with your product as “the product”. User guides, support interactions, blog posts, interaction on community forums constitute the product. Prioritizing each of these interactions for focus and attention will immensely impact success of your product.

Building what you decide: is especially hard with a steady stream of distractions that are typical in any business. A really “big” customer will sign-up if we build this feature now, lets build this really small/cool feature — it will take only a few hours. Product principles and sequencing decisions help rein in these distractions.

Product principles: While goals and metrics help communicate what to focus on and measure progress, they are weak in communicating what actions need to be taken at an operational level. This is where product principles are helpful. They help with alignment and cohesion of activities across different stakeholders by providing guidelines for action. Product principles must be anchored around customer outcomes and your point of view. Good principles includes how the user should feel before/while/after using the product. They enable faster decision making while ensuring alignment. Instagram has very clear principles — make every picture beautiful, make it super fast to upload a photo, and make it super easy to share photo across different platforms.

Sequencing: When to build a functionality/feature is as important as what to build, as it critically impacts the pace at which business outcomes are achieved. Good sequencing decisions take into account —limiters/enablers, impact, effort required, and any compounding benefits. Evaluating trade-offs in sequencing decisions is crucial — what is the impact of doing multiple small features vs. one large feature, should we focus on projects that drive more traffic when activation rates are low?

While customer acquisition is usually considered to be part of market strategy, I’m including this to highlight how product strategy informs customer acquisition and how feedback from customer acquisition informs product strategy.

Acquiring customers is greatly dependent on positioning, power of emotion in the customer’s decision making process, and your company’s strategy in tackling objections against using/buying your product.

Positioning: Position based on your point of view, and attributes that are important to customer (but poorly served by alternatives) for maximum impact. Good positioning evokes strong emotions and motivates the customer to take action. Positioning greatly impact pricing of your product. iPad’s positioning and anchoring around netbooks is a great example of effective positioning.

Power of emotion in decision making: A rational approach (based on utility and logic) to selling your product has a limited appeal among prospective customers. People find it extremely difficult to take action in the absence of emotion. Tapping into the motivations and true emotions of the customer are crucial for acquiring new customers.

Tackling objections: Customers do not just buy your product, but they switch to it from an alternative. Hence, it is important to make this switch as easy and painless as possible. For example, if you are building a ticketing system, make it is easy to import tickets from their current system. Leverage existing behaviors instead of asking prospective customers to create new ones. For example, Google Sheets retained formulas on Microsoft Excel and focused on improving the collaboration features. It is also important to focus on eliminating/reducing negative emotions like anxiety. Free 30-day trial, no questions asked returns policy can help reduce such emotions.

Measuring if customer outcomes are being delivered: Feature usage is a key indicator in determining if customer outcomes are being met. Feature usage consists of two important parts — reach (how many users are using a feature) and frequency (how often a feature is being used by a user).

It is important to establish baseline metrics for reach and frequency (for each feature), and run projects to improve these metrics on a continuous basis. If a feature does meet the expected metric or is not being adopted, the 5-whys technique is helpful for understanding the reasons and taking corrective action.

Reach/Adoption: Feature adoption can be improved by measures like building awareness, educating users on how it can help them, and suggesting the feature at an appropriate time. If feature adoption continues to remain low and is not helping customers achieve the outcomes that they desire, it is best to kill the feature. Killing features, simplifies the product and provides a great deal of flexibility in making decisions in the future.

Frequency: Frequency of feature usage can be increased either by resolving issues that prevent usage or by extending/modifying the scope of the feature. Nir Eyal’s hook canvas is a great framework for improving frequency of feature usage.

Staying relevant: A product can stay relevant by helping users become successful at what they are trying to accomplish and tracking any changes to customer outcomes and important attributes over time.

Badass users: Enable users to become experts at what they are trying to accomplish by growing their skills, and providing the necessary motivation. Design your product so that cognitive resources of the user is expended on what they are trying to accomplish, and not in using your product.

Tracking changes to important attributes and customer outcomes: As time passes it becomes increasingly important to track any changes to customer outcomes, and any changes to attributes that are important to the customer (It is possible that entirely new attributes become important to the customer). As building these enhancements are crucial, it is important to say no to items like “short term wins” (or distractions), establishing parity with a competitor’s feature set.

Summary: Product strategy should be guided by the goal of helping users become successful by achieving the outcomes that they desire, and focusing on important attributes that do not change.

Essay has been posted on www.jpppandith.in

 

Posted on

The Operating Model for Product Companies

The missing bridge between strategy and execution

MANHATTAN (4)Building an IT product business can be quite challenging if you don’t have certain foundational elements well understood and institutionalized. This applies to not just startups but large organizations too. The goals in any sized company are similar. For example, getting a new idea out to market, entering new markets, trying to achieve scale, reducing cycle time between idea to market, reaching the right set of customers etc. Large organizations will need to maintain their leadership positions by continuously innovating, whereas startups agile nevertheless, have a lot less room for errors due to scarce resources. Some of the symptomatic situations of a shaky foundation are; building a new product with several features without involving potential customers; depending heavily on sales to gather customer requirements; misaligning outsourced development outcomes; mixing custom solutions and products while positioning etc.

There is an implicit operating model in product organizations, which has rarely been explored or discussed so far. An operating model describes how organizations execute. Imagine a product team – what conversations do they have to execute their goals and strategy? How are information and decisions flowing between team members and with their external stakeholders? Is it aiding or impeding their speed of execution and thus eventually their business? This is not to be mistaken with functional best practices in creating or marketing a product successfully, rather this is more foundational for any product organization. There are four factors for that make up the operating model for product companies and they are product mindset, organizational design, development model and decision making structure.

Product Mindset

Mindset is the basis of culture. Product mindset can best be described as the set of beliefs and assumptions that power the creation of inspiring products. Our beliefs and assumptions are hidden deep in our psyche and it takes a conscious effort to realize and shift to the mindset needed. The challenges are in unpacking the beliefs and repacking them with new ones that enable creating products. The mindset drives how we perceive success, failure and efforts in every aspect from deliverables to revenues.

For example, if the customer asks you to add a feature for them, do you jump on it and implement or do we understand why do they need it and how does it help them? Do we also pause and collect data points from other customers on similar needs and then begin to work on it? It is easy to mistake a customer’s ask for Promise to Pay. Instead we should explicitly check for Willingness to Pay before launching the product.

There are three assumptions we need to watch out for. First, are we paying too much attention to what the customer is asking us to do instead of understanding what they really need? Second, are we jumping into technical solutions before spending enough time trying to understand the problem and reframe the problem in multiple ways? Third, are we building for each client instead of exploring repeatability for many?

A good product organization considers product failures as valuable learning lessons (as long as you can afford it) and success only when you have happy, paying and returning customers. Shifting to product mindset requires sustained effort. Ideation or brainstorming is one of the ways. Exposure to inspirational stories is another. Several companies encourage new ideas through internal hackathons but fall short of nudging their employees to think bigger and from a customer point of view.

Organizational Design

Organizational design looks at reporting structures and size of teams. Engineering, Sales and Marketing are well defined organizations. Product companies need a Product Management organization that reports to the CEO. This is not to be confused with the Marketing organization, which is essentially Sales in internet consumer companies. It is important to balance the perspectives of engineering and sales with a product management team. Very simply put, product management organization is responsible for representing customer interests during product development. A good Product Manager recognizes and navigates through the dynamics while diligently advocating for the customer regardless of reporting structures. It is not easy to balance with generating revenues or feasibility constraints.

A typical product team consists of a product manager, designer and several engineers. Product ownership is critical and a basic ingredient to making the product a success. Some very successful global product companies have figured out that a good team size is which can be fed with two large pizzas. That’s roughly 8 including engineering, quality assurance, designer and product manager. Being able to do “more with less” is an oft-heard statement. Most founders in startups are the first product managers but quickly exceed their bandwidth. An easy milestone for the founder-CEOs to know when you need a product manager is when you are not able to spend enough time with the customers. Even though customer empathy and advocacy is something that the whole organization should embrace, a product manager can greatly help drive the process.

Development model

Product companies must build in-house engineering talent which they usually do. For startups, it is becoming increasingly expensive as well-funded companies are going all out to attract top talent with much better compensation. Large companies may also want to hire someone outside for temporary work to rapidly build a proof of concept. So, there have been and will be situations that require the team to outsource development. When product companies outsource development, there is a great amount of risk in velocity. The difference between the client and the vendor is in operating rhythm. The outsourced vendor expects a well-defined Statement of Work with fixed scope to ensure quality and timely deliverable. This is the antithesis of product development where scope is inherently flexible and changes during development are almost a given in the first few versions when working closely with customers. One way to getting around this problem is for vendors to innovate their business models and/or engagement models so that the lines are blurred between consultants and core team members. For this to happen, the conversations between the client and vendor needs to change from time and materials based outcomes to value based outcomes.

Decision making structure

There is always an element of continuous discovery and refinement in the product world that demands continuous decisions. We need to embrace this uncertainty at the same time work towards minimizing the risk. Modern methodologies like The Lean Methodology greatly help in minimizing the risk by cutting down the time taken between implementation and feedback. Also, with the advent of experimentation tools in the market, it is easier to compare user behaviours. For e.g. do the users click more when presented with a green button or a red button. Product level decisions should be clearly aligned with business goals set by the executive leadership. It becomes easier to evaluate and track product performance and impact on annual targets which is also very rewarding in high performance teams since they are visible and recognized. Most product organizations have a flat hierarchy that enable easy collaboration and brainstorming.

In summary, it may be useful for product organizations to pay attention to their operating model while working on strategy and execution.

Posted on

3 ways in which Brand Positioning influences us silently

MANHATTAN (3)I’ve usually been averse to buying premium branded apparel. For the simple reason that I could always find equally good clothing which isn’t necessarily a Lacoste or a Tommy, and which is as elegant and durable as that venerable brand.

Garments is a very competitive industry. You are spoilt for choice and there are more brands to choose from for every category than the number of hours in a day. Which is probably the reason you can get a good deal if you shop around enough. In a market where product differentiation is reduced to sticking a label on the shirt, it becomes very easy to ignore the pull of a brand and look for value instead.

#1 Discoverability

My bias towards ignoring a brand took a hit when I went shopping for a set of tyres. Now this is an industry with less than 10 brands. And they are not bought based on the label stuck on them. It was difficult to believe that the Continental, Bridgestone and Yokohoma brands (I left out Michelin on purpose), were slowly but surely getting an edge in the replacement market over time tested Indian brands. The first battle they’ve won over others, is the sheer reach. They are present overwhelmingly in front of you, wherever you go. Most purchase decisions are made by engaging with brands that are easily discoverable. It is only a handful of customers that does serious market research in the quest of finding every product they can lay their hands on before choosing amongst them.

#2 Value proposition (what can I do for you)

What each brand told me was a story. Continental said its new technology, Bridgestone said wide acceptance / long term player, and Yokohoma claimed high performance. In this milieu, I could barely hear what Apollo / MRF / Ceat were trying to say. I came away with the distinct impression that they have confined themselves to being manufacturers of OEM supplies and Truck tyres! Both of these segments do not require them to position their brand to the consumer.

I made my choice, and it was on the basis of brand positioning. No prizes for guessing which way I leaned.

#3 Believability

It’s easy to promise the moon and every seller would like to believe their brand is God. In the courtroom of the consumer however, decisions are swift and ex-party. Which means, you do not get a second chance to be heard. This is where believability or trustworthiness comes in. In my case, it was the dealer who swore by the product I bought. Do we convey trust either directly or through media or through our sales touchpoints? If not, then you are seriously under exploiting your brand’s potential.

Indian Software

This is precisely the problem that plagues software from India. To this day, we are immersed into selling our products by feature and rarely take an emotional position in the consumer’s mind. A brand connects with the buyer at an emotional level. If we want to be world class, saying how good we are will not help. How we can transform the life of the buyer, is what matters. And that is where branding and positioning comes in.

Emportant HR Software

I then thought about what we stand for as a brand. Emportant has a deeply committed team, founders with deep roots in product software and the HR software industry and yes, we’re also new-age and high-tech. So what do we stand for? Our effort will be do bring forth our Brand value to you in the coming months. Brand should also be a truthful reflection of the company ethos. We’d like to be perceived as trustworthy, caring and progressive. We’d like to be quoted as being versatile and easy to adopt. You can help us in this journey. Just write back and tell us what you think about Emportant and be part of shaping our story (click here to share comments). Because we believe that in our story, the best is yet to be told.

Posted on

Growth Hackers Will Share Their Secrets at SaaSx Chennai

This Thursday evening will witness the largest gathering of SaaS founders in India. In the event conceived by iSPIRT called SaaSx Chennai, more than 100 people, largely SaaS founders, apart from a few handful of product industry influencers, will brainstorm on various aspects of a SaaS business, especially taking the SaaS organization from a $10 million revenue to a $100 million revenue.

Girish Mathrubootham, CEO of Freshdesk, talks of Aaron Ross, the author of Predictable Revenue, as the brain behind Salesforce.com’s recurring $100 million revenue year on year. He initially started a company, raised $5 million, burnt the whole cash, and shut down the company. Then he joined Salesforce.com as a cold caller. Finding cold calling to be a bit arduous in winning customers, he conceived what Girish calls Cold Calling 2.0. His idea was to first interact with the customer on email and then establish a rapport, before calling the customer. The idea behind this exercise to first zeroing in on the most suitable customer for your product. This turns the prospect into a paying customer quickly.

SaaSx_headerAt SaaSx Chennai, Aaron Ross will deliver the keynote as SaaSx via video and will release the Jump Start Guide Desk Marketing and Selling for SaaS, co-authored by Suresh Sambandam, founder of KissFlow, Krish Subramaniam, co-founder of ChargeBee, Niraj Ranjan Rout, founder of GrexIt, and Sahil Parikh, founder of BrightPod.

jumpstart-guid-1Suresh says the event was conceived on the lines of SaaStr Conference, hosted by Jason Lemkin. He attended the event in San Francisco this February. Buoyed by the 300 to 400 founders coming together from all over the world in SaaSter, he wanted to bring together the SaaS founders in India. SaaS companies are witnessing phenomenal growth all over the world, and India is also seeing an uptick in this sector. Chennai is emerging as the SaaS hub of India, thanks to six big companies that are running their operations here. There are startups emerging as well. “Just two days after we announced the event, 65 signups happened and SaaS founders were excited by the idea,” says Suresh.

“In a focused event, founders can discuss real problems,” says Girish. A conference of a general nature does not give a beneficial take-away for an entrepreneur. “The idea is to bring similar people at similar stages of growth and discuss their pain points,” says Krish of Chargebee. He says cross-learning from each other will be useful in solving many problems the SaaS entrepreneurs face. “Even before the event, many one-on-one meetings are happening among SaaS entrepreneurs,” says Krish.

The event will have four parts. A My Story session with three SaaS founders, followed by an open house on Anything and Everything on SaaS moderated by Girish, aided by Suresh and Krish.

Aaron Ross will deliver the keynote then and finally, the Jumpstart Guide will be released

Posted on

My Experience on Building a New Generation CRM Company and Ecosystem with Kreato

We started Navrita with a vision of making customer life-cycle management an easily accessible and adaptable process to every SME (Small & Medium Enterprises). To realize this vision, we started building Kreato CRM – a moderately priced, end-to-end Customer Relationship Management solution characterized by leading-edge technology, comprehensive functionality and a highly flexible architecture.

Building Kreato CRM

When we started with developing Kreato in mid of 2012, we finalized that it has to be built over four main pillars.

First being it has to be a complete and an integrated CRM solution – covering all three main facets of CRM: Marketing, Sales & Customer Support and pre-integrated with required 3rd party applications. We don’t want our customers to juggle through multiple tools to manage their customer relations. Kreato will serve as primary and integrated platform to manage the complete customer life-cycle.

Second it has to be naturally flexible – Hence we first built a CRM framework with qualities to restructure its schema as needed and also ingredients to include new modules and workflows as required. And then housed Kreato on top of that framework, so that our customers can embrace the exact customization that they need.

Third on the pricing point. It has to be very attractive, affordable and modular – To make it possible we framed a moderately priced one single subscription package with all the must-have CRM features loaded and adopted the affordable & incremental pay-per-user subscription model. And then all other add-on features and much needed integrations are provided through the pick-n-pay App subscription model. So that our customers can just pay for only the Apps they want in addition to the must-have CRM features that comes as default with user subscription.

And the final one being the security. We wanted to provide the absolute security – Having hosted our solution at Azure, we know for sure that we don’t have to think even once about the infrastructure security. And we don’t have to worry on the access level security as we have the 256 bit SSL -encrypted application and database access in place. And on the data security, we felt that absolute data segregation only will provide the heightened data security. So instead of following the shared database model where all customers’ data co-exist in a single database, we decided to follow the multi-instance database architecture model, providing every customer a dedicated database.

After nearly two years of time has been devoted to build Kreato Cloud CRM with focused research and engineering on base of the four pillars (explained above) which includes 6 months of stealth mode for Cloud Infrastructure testing, we launched Kreato for general availability on April 2014.

Building the CRM Ecosystem

During the journey of Kreato building process, we decided that in-addition to covering the sales, marketing and customer service facets of CRM, more innovative features and supportive functions have to be introduced in-order to enrich our customer’s usage of Kreato in their customer life-cycle management or on improving their customer experience. And we know that we alone cannot drive such innovations and the best solution is building the CRM ecosystem comprised of best-of-breed technology platforms, supportive service partners and professionals that suits the CRM space.

To provide suitable examples – on the technology platform part, integrating cloud telephony will benefit Kreato customers with ability to track telephony communications from their CRM itself; on the service provider part, with the availability of trusted web designing provider, our customers can instantly create or enrich their web presence to make complete use of Kreato marketing tools; on the professionals part, our customers can instantly hire service of a sales professional well trained on Kreato lead and sales management features on a temporary or permanent basis to support their sales activities.

Including 3rd Party Technology platforms in the Ecosystem: We started addressing the first part of the CRM ecosystem – integrating more and more technology platforms like cloud telephony, text messaging service, web, social and email marketing solutions, web chat software and lead generating platforms with Kreato. Only one thumb rule that we followed on all these integrations is, we did the integration works up front and made all these integrations to be “Plug-n-Play” with Kreato. Our customers can enjoy the benefits of this ecosystem from the day one rather than spending more time, money and efforts to find external consultancy to make the integrations workable. So when an organization chooses Kreato, they are actually choosing an accessible and ready-to-use CRM ecosystem from the day one.

Our Kreato App Store is already live with inclusion of much-needed technology platforms. Mostly all the customers Kreato has got till-date make use of at-least one of these integrations, a welcome note which reinforces our dedication to enrich this ecosystem further.

Also we believed publishing the API platform can further fuel these innovations. Hence we opened up the API platform so that Kreato and any other third party applications used by our customers can talk to each other to build a custom solution that needed.

Including Service Partners in the Ecosystem: As we have progressed on the integration of technology platforms part and confident that we can add more and more required technology integrations, we started working on the next part of the ecosystem: Service partners. And now we are excited to announce the launch of service partner program, where we wanted to align with like-minded service partners who can help our customers on execution of various support systems of CRM like digital presence, social media management etc. It becomes easier for our customers to choose and use the service of these trusted providers who are already partners of this ecosystem.

Including CRM certified Professionals in the Ecosystem: We felt that adding the human-touch to the ecosystem will make it complete in real sense. We wanted to provide a platform as part of this ecosystem which will create a talented pool of professionals (sales, marketing, administrators and consultants) who are trained and certified in Kreato CRM ecosystem. Our customers can easily hire and use the service of these certified professionals to support their business operations. We will be co-launching this platform along with the service partner program.

We firmly believe that building an innovative cloud based CRM product supported by the ecosystem of compatible technology platforms, service providers and certified CRM professionals will strategically address and help us to realize our greater vision of making customer life-cycle management an easily accessible and adaptable process to every SME.

Even though it’s a beginning, we feel we are moving in the right direction to build the much needed CRM ecosystem that really matters to our customers. We are proud that even we are taking part in building India as a Product Nation.

Guest Post by Lokanathan Kutuva, Founder & CEO, Navrita Software Pvt. Ltd.

Posted on

Announcing Platform Scale, the book: The pre-orders campaign is now live

Are you building a marketplace, social network or a platform?

Do you ever describe what you’re doing as the Uber for X, Airbnb for Y or the Twitter for Z?1

Do you want to understand why certain startups scale and others fail?1

Over the last few years, I’ve been obsessed with platform business models and their ability to scale. Unlike traditional enterprises, platforms do not scale by scaling internal employees and resources. Instagram gets to a billion dollars with 13 employees while Uber doesn’t own any of the taxis it dispatches. They scale through network effects. As more producers use the platform, consumers find greater value, and vice versa.

what-is-platform

Announcing Platform Scale – The Book

I’ve written about this topic extensively on the blog. And now, I’m bringing it all together as a book meant specifically for entrepreneurs and innovators.

order-now

Platform Scale is a maker’s manual, a guide, for entrepreneurs, innovators and makers looking to build platforms and benefit from this new form of scale. The book provides codified, actionable steps to design and implement platform-based businesses. Platform Scale is a book about unlocking the scale advantages that are possible in today’s connected world.

If you’s building a marketplace social network or a platform, you need to understand Platform Scale. Click to tweet

platform-scale

Why did I write this book?

I wrote this book because the rules of achieving scale are fundamentally changing but they aren’t understood very well. Platforms need to focus on interactions between users, not simply growth. They need to invest in building feedback loops that keep re-engaging users. The traditional metrics of user growth and active usage do not apply anymore, tracking actual interactions between users is far more critical to scale. We need a new playbook to achieve scale in a world of platforms.

goal-of-platform

Platform Scale – The Book Trailer

To learn more about the book, watch the trailer below:

If you’d like to pre-order your copy of Platform Scale, just click on the link below to get to the pre-orders campaign:

order-book

Platforms may be more important than you think

Platform Scale lays out the new rules for scale in today’s connected world. Even if you are not building a platform, you can benefit form the same principles that powered the growth of successful platforms like the ones in the image below.

platform-business-model

If you’ve ever wondered how to solve the chicken and egg problem for a platform or wondered which metrics best show success of a platform, you’ve seen the need for a structured approach to building platforms. That’s what Platform Scale aims to provide.

This article was originally published on Sangeet Paul Choudary’s personal blog Platform Thinking – A blog about building early stage ventures from an idea to a business, and mitigating execution risk.

Posted on

Learn Silicon Valley antidotes to product challenges faced by Startups

Successful products are not an accident, even if they may look like it from the outside. Successful products are the end result of a series of challenges tackled well.

While each business is unique, many of these product challenges are not.

As Indian startups are working towards building market-winning products, wouldn’t it be great if we could learn from some of Silicon Valley’s best and avoid costly mistakes?

With this goal, Confianzys is getting Rich Mironov, a product management coach/mentor to Bangalore in February.

As part of the event, Rich will be conducting an interactive seminar for startups on identifying key challenges for product firms, and how these can be tackled.

Rich Mironov coaches product executives, product management teams and agile development organizations. He is a seasoned tech executive and serial entrepreneur: the “product guy” at six Silicon Valley start-ups including as CEO and VP Products/Marketing.

Rich combines “what-we-can-build” with “what-markets-will-pay-for” viewpoints. Since 2001, Rich also has been an interim executive, consultant or adviser to dozens of early-stage companies and larger technology firms including Yahoo, Cisco, Wealthfront, WhiteHat Security, Varian and VeriSign.

Rich has seen the ups and downs of the product industry in Silicon Valley. He has seen the product industry in the US also turn out turkeys by not focusing on basics. If the idea is not validated, development methodology like Agile can only take you twice as fast down the wrong path.

The seminar covers topics like:

  •  What makes good ideas turn to valued products
  •  How to crack your product challenges before the market cracks you
  •  The market only pays for what it really needs. How should you build this right?

As Rich says, “The really successful start-ups are those that believe that they are half right, and half wrong, and quickly figure out which half is wrong– not that the ones that believe they are doing everything right.”

Here’s an opportunity to learn from Rich directly. The seminar Silicon Valley antidotes to product challenges faced by entrepreneurs is scheduled for 25 February 2015 between 3-6PM at My Fortune hotel, Richmond Road, Bangalore.

You can register here for the seminar or read more at The Secret Sauce webpage. iSPIRT members can use the code iSPIRTMEMBERS to get a 25% off on the entry price.

Posted on

Refocus on design for our open source ERP project – ERPNext.

If you have any doubt that design of everyday things is the most important cultural movement of our time, then you need to look up the most valuable company in the world today, which is ofcourse, Apple. We want our tools to work flawlessly and naturally. Open source projects are catching up too.Elementary OS promises to finally make the Linux Desktop accessible for everyone. Many open source web applications like Ghost CMS, Taiga and the upcoming Flarum have designers in their core team. If you want to take a better look, check out BeautifulOpen.

Taste

A couple of months ago, we decided that we need to refocus on design for our open source ERP project, ERPNext. ERPs are known for having the worst user designs and we wanted to change that. Usability in ERPNext was already better compared to many other products, but we knew we were far away from having design as our strength. All of us use Apple products for developing our applications and we use GitHub to manage our team and collaborate with the community, both of which have been very thoughtfully designed. It was only a matter of time before we started comparing our designs and user experience to what we were used to.

Reading about and understanding work of great designers like Dieter Rams also helped us build a strong taste for good software.

The Brief

The next step was to make a brief for the project. Since we already had a fairly mature project, we did not have to start from scratch. Since ERPNext is a data driven application, the two most important screens are the List and the Form. A List is a list of anything, like an Invoice or a To Do, A Form is the actual Invoice that you can create and view. There were a bunch of other screens like the home page, login screen, setup pages, charts but we kept the focus on the two important screens. We took a bunch of screenshots of our current design, highlighting these screens and posted them on a GitHub Issue. We also highlighted the fact that we did not want to go for a radical redesign, keeping our current users in mind. What we really needed was cleanup and polish.

Original Screens

The List and Form Views

The Designer

Now that we had a good idea of what we needed, the next step was to identify a good designer. This seemed to be the most diffficult step. We are not a part of any ecosystem and there is no mentor we could ring up and ask for recommendations. But, we had two leads. Three years ago, we had worked with a wonderful design firm, Studio March which based in Pune (150km from where we are based) for our website. And the other one was ofcourse Dribbble. On Dribbble, we looked up screenshots of designers who had worked on business apps, invoicing apps or project management apps and we had detailed talks over Email and Skype with around three designers. Since we already had a brief, we found that a lot of designers were ready to talk.

Finally we shortlisted two firms, 3Drops from Sweden which we discovered on Dribble and Studio March. Both the companies agreed to work within our budget constraints. Based on the brief and budget, they had estimated around 2 to 3 weeks of work. We selected Studio March since we had already worked with them in the past and we loved their work, we could meet face to face, and also they promised deliver both the screenshots as well as a CSS based style guide, which would be very useful for us to extrapolate the designs to other screens. So we signed a contract went ahead.

The Process

It is always fun to understand the creative process of different people and we really enjoyed our experience with Studio March. First the head of Studio March dropped in had a detailed chat with us. He understood our team, where we came from, where we wanted to go and what our tastes were. Next, they spent a some time playing with the app in its current state to understand all the different ways a user might discover, use and navigate through the app. Then they went on started fleshing out the screens from scratch.

https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/140076/5870740/1d70c0ca-a2f9-11e4-9872-4721bd582e44.jpg

From Wireframes to Detailed Screenshots

In their redesign, they simplified a lot of the visible functionality. They had the courage to throw away things that were not really needed, hide menus that could be hidden, and use the screen space a lot better. Suddenly the app felt a whole lot lighter and natural. With each iteration, they added the remaining functionality and depth into the design. Since this was a never ending process, we realized that time was running out. After two to three interations, we decided to go in and implement some of these designs go get a better understanding of how the designs worked.

In a space of two weeks, we were able to mockup some of the key functionalities in the design. We removed a toolbar, added a sidebar, cleaned out the top menu system and added breadcrumbs. As soon as the design started taking life, we realized the great work done by Studio March team. There was very little we needed to change from their original designs.

They also dropped to our office a couple of times for detailed chats. We had discussions on the layouts and the elements that the design could not cover. Citing engineering effort, we balked on a couple of their suggestions, but they pushed us to work and implement the original designs. Their passion and commitment to the details clearly rubbed off, and the user experience went up a few notches.

Feedback

As soon as we nailed down the important screens, we decided to make a small video to introduce the design. It was initally just a for our monthly Open Day presentation, but we spent a couple of hours polishing it on Keynote and iMovie. For fun, we even added Apple-like adjectives like “beautiful” and “smooth”. We sent out the video to the mailing list and got awesome feedback. It was a great way to notify the community we are working on something new as well as create a buzz. We even got 20+ comments on our blog. Here is the video:

You Tube Link

Conclusion

We learned that executing good design is not impossibly hard or expensive. The entire redesign process was suprisingly smooth. We went from preparing the brief, selecting the designer, working on the designs and releasing them to the community in a span of two months. We were also lucky to work with a great design team.

If you are working on any software project, and don’t have designers in your team, we hope this inspires you to go out and get a makeover.

Here is a working preview of our new design, which is due release mid-Feb.

Posted on

What you need to make a Sholay?

I am a great fan of analogies and for software products that we make, I always try to get an analogy as we grow through the journey. In a recent post I had shared the medical analogy of classifying how software products can be classified as vitamin, pain killer or vaccines.

One of the favorites for we Indians is cinemas, whether hindi or tamil or telugu, and here is another analogy I would like to share connecting the world of software products – with world of cinemas. We all set out to make a hit, a Sholay !

Sholay

Now let’s discuss what we would need to make, a Sholay:

Place – First thing, choosing the place to make it is very important. In movies, the destination is Mumbai and most of the folks who aspire for film career move to Mumbai, and the next best destination is Chennai for south indian movies. Bollywood gains its name from its global cinema hub – Hollywood in California.

mumbai bangaloreSV  For software products, destination is Bangalore, where many across the country migrate for an aspiring career in software, considered as silicon valley of india. Especially with the software product startup momentum, Bangalore is certainly the place for the ecosystem. Other locations such as Hyderabad and Pune are the other smaller hubs catching up in this front. In the global context, its bay area or seatle in US, the land where amazing software products have been made or being made.

So if you are a startup, start to think and put a lot of importance for where you want to operate. These days Govt. policies also is an important factor for you to seek help for building the products

BangaloreTopDestination

But the main consideration for choice of the place is offcourse the talent and the people, and the people who are willing to invest. In a recent article, India and Bangalore took places in top 5 global destinations for VC funding

People

Analogy gets interesting here, as there is always a belief that people with best coding skills can get out successful product. And it’s the same perception with movies where many think a Shah Rukh or Rajinikanth or other actors/actress are all about for the success of movies. But over the years, directors, screenplay writers, music directors, cameraman and many others who are behind the scenes have carved a name and gained significance for success of the movies.

Here is a fun way to connect the who’s who of movies to that of software products, as the goal is here is to establish the fact that “The Team” of people wins it all

Actors – Developers: Whatever is visualized or conceived, comes to life only when actors actually perform the way it should come through. The actual delivery or execution is completely based on what/how these people (actors or developers) really do it. Some actors do it in one shot, some need more shots, understanding the full picture and working with other co-actors. Same is the case with developers who can understand the full picture and do their parts well.actoractress

Cameraman – Designer: Camera men give shape to the movie that gives a visual appeal. This is a key ingredient and skill for success of the movie. Same is the case with Ux designers who really depict how the product should work and interact. Even the best of scripts and stories will not make an impact without a visual impact. cameraman

Producer – Business Sponsor or Venture Capitalist : These are the guys who put the money. They determine how big or small the movie or product can be. They also reap the benefits of the business success of the movie or product. Production houses in cinema are equivalent of companies or venture capital firms. VC-Logos

Editor – Quality Assurance : Movies are made to great lengths, probably for a 2 hours movie, there are many hours made of movie that gets produced. But this gets edited to capture the key parts, making sure the movie comes out in best quality to capture the story and screenplay. In product development context, quality assurance does a similar function of testing and providing suggestions to cut the irrelevant. Especially when different pieces of the product are integrated and tested, it exactly resembles editing. editing

Media & Promotions – Product Marketer : Trailers, promos are very important in exciting movie buffs to get attracted to particular movie. Especially when there are several options and competing movies releasing around the same time, its important to do the right promotion focused on the right audience. Same is the case with products, while you may have the best products, if its not marketed well, you are bound to miss getting the attention. In the current world promotions needs to be across multi-channels. mediapromotions

Screenplay – Architect: Screenplay is exactly what defines the “how” part of the movie and all the details. Few times this is done by the same person who directs the movie, but is different in most cases. Architect defines that in product development. He works on the how part to realize and lays out the path to realizing the same. screenplay

Story & Director – Product Manager : Director in movies is central orchestrator and often the guy who has the real vision of what he or she is making, works to get best out of different available talent and gets involved in every aspect of the movie. Product manager does this role in product development working with different stakeholders – and key person responsible for success or failure of the movie or product. In case of startups, typically founders dawn this role.director

Movie Critics – Analyst: When the movie is out, there are several critics who provide rating, comments and reviews about the movie. They are key influencers that bring audiences to theaters. Now with social media we see every one becoming a critic or reviewer. In case of products, there are several analyst out there who review and provide comments on the product.moviecritic

Movie Audience – Customer/Market: And ultimately the audience to the movie or the customer of the product consumes and provides their feedback, they are the voice to propagate it to wider (references in case of products). There are different types of audience and the tastes differ significantly based on demographic, motivation, interests etc. Also there are categories of markets for movies – A,B, C city audience whose tastes vary. There are movies that are made in keeping what audiences want and some other movies are made which audience may dream. Products also go through the same evolution, some are made based on current customers’ needs and some are made for the future that customers get wowed, some works well in developed markets, some better in emerging. audience

Each of the above persons may go onto do one of the other roles, or remain as experts in their area. The people associated to a movie or products are emotionally attached to it forever. Usually startups have founders and few people doing multiple roles in the beginning.

Product

The movie – The product

Finally the product – the movie is the output. It can be a huge success or failure. It can appeal to some audience and may not appeal to others. There are few that appeal to everyone. Some become classics, some are short term flicks, some stay for eternity as best sellers. Same is for products.

http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-image-indian-cinema-handmade-posters-displayed-as-part-mumbai-facade-indside-kingdom-dreams-its-indias-first-live-image30141091

Sequel –  An interesting point about the market is like in movies where we have seen sequels of successful movies remade with a new flavor, we see the same with software products where hit products get remade with a different theme. And always the original ideas or themes has always a value, but sequels also have good market.

Even if you don’t have all the skills, its necessary you have to get the necessary skills beyond just development to make a successful one

Are your ready in the right Place, with right people and to make that thumping hit product for right market ?

Thing Big, Think of Making a Sholay !!!

Posted on

3 questions to expect at your Product Marketing interview

Perhaps you are an Engineer considering a lateral move into Product Marketing and watching out for opportunities within your company. Perhaps you’ve gone through an MBA and are anxiously awaiting interviews on campus.

Whatever the situation, your first interview for a Product Marketing role can be an intense experience, especially if your past interviews have been all about technology.

While each interview can spring some surprises, here are some often asked questions at Product Marketing interviews that you should prepare for.

What product in the recent past do you think was marketed well/poorly?

This question is not meant to check your knowledge of revenues or market share in a particular industry. Interviewers ask this question to see if you have a good grasp of product marketing strategies and how they work in practice. There is no one right or wrong answer here, but you need to be able to discuss a specific strategy that a product adopted, and explain why you believe it worked/did not work.

If your product faced Problem X, what would you do?

Case-style questions like these are popular at Product Marketing interviews because it gives interviewers an opportunity to test two things; one, it tells them how you approach a problem – whether you are good at asking the right questions and understand the root cause of the problem. Two, you can also show them how you would work towards a solution without complete data – and in real life, most problems need to be solved using an incomplete amount of information.

Some examples of case-style questions are:

  • “Product sales are low in the last 6 months. What problems should Marketing seek to fix?”
  • “If your product could use any of these 5 potential channels, which ones would you use?”
  • “Lead quality from our current website is poor. What would you change?”

Mike Volpe, the CEO of Hubspot mentions in a blog post that he uses these extensively, and gives some more examples.

Case-style questions involve using marketing principles but thinking on your feet. It is a good idea to get some practice doing this!

Give us an example of how you would think of a new product idea.

Relax – the interviewer is not expecting you to come up with the next billion dollar idea right away! Since being the voice of the customer lies at the heart of the Product Manager/Marketing role, this question is meant to help the interviewer gauge your customer awareness.

Are you excited about learning from the market and customers? Can you draw the linkages between what customers need and what a new product should deliver? Do you have an understanding of how to learn what customers need?

This question is really meant for the interviewer to find out of you are a Marketer at heart – whether you are passionate about creating products that will delight customers and make them reach for their wallets.

At the same time, it also gives you a chance to showcase your communication skills, since the interviewer sets you free to talk about an idea of your choice. With communication skills being an essential asset for a Product Marketer, that’s something interviewers watch out for as well.

What were some of the questions you faced in your first Product Marketing interview? Do share in the comments below.

This article first appeared on www.confianzys.com/blog. Confianzys is India’s leading product business consulting firm.

Posted on

Do You Need An MBA To Be A Product Manager?

An extremely polarizing topic, the question, ‘Do You Need An MBA To Be A Product Manager?’ is an often asked one on popular forums; the answers range from “No, an MBA won’t help you in any way, and you are better off not spending the money” to “Yes, it’s a must if you want to get hired by large corporations.”

Like most big decisions that individuals need to take as part of their career growth journeys, the answer is really:

It Depends.

Now that may seem like taking the easy way out, but there really is no one single decision that would make sense for every aspiring Product Manager. So, instead of asking if an MBA is essential to become a Product Manager, a better question would be:

What do I lack in my quest to become a Product Manager, and how do I acquire the skills I lack?

When you frame the question this way, you can make a decision that fits your career goals and skill levels, rather than following a generic guideline that may be right for someone else.

A few years ago, getting an MBA was the best way to gain exposure to various business functions and learn skills needed to be an effective product manager. However, there are multiple alternatives available today – working in a startup where every member gets exposed to different aspects, taking online courses, taking specific training programs to build key skills or learn methods, and more.

So, with that in mind, let’s look at some of the skills and qualities you would need as a Product Manager and how you can gain them with/out an MBA.

Joining the dots between Market-Customer-Product-Technology

A good PM needs to map market opportunities, understand customer behavior in the context of that market, visualize the opportunity in the form of the right product – and finally, ensure that the available technology can deliver the product in the form visualized.

An MBA doesn’t teach you to do all of this. However, it can help you learn the tools you need for the first half of the equation, i.e. understanding markets and customers.

Of course, successful managers who do this without an MBA exist, but an MBA can reduce your learning time at work.

The rest of it is a skill acquired over time, learning on the job and supplemented by Product Management training that you can practice at your role.

Communication & other soft skills

PMs necessarily have to work with Sales, Marketing, and Engineering; to do this successfully, PMs need communication skillsbeyond talking – they need to listen, negotiate, harness the power of teams and often, influence using their credibility rather than authority.

Do you need an MBA to acquire these skills? If your communication skills are poor, an MBA can help you polish certain aspects such as presenting ideas well; on the other hand, if you have excellent communication skills, an MBA may not help you much in this area. (And don’t take your own word for it – get an objective person you know to rate your skills).

Product Marketing

Depending on how your company structures its teams, PMs may or may not be hands-on when it comes to Product Marketing. In the Indian context however, most PMs will be deeply involved in some or all aspects of Product Marketing.

This is one area where an MBA can add to your learning, with courses on consumer behaviour, brand management, and marketing communications. Many engineers lack exposure to these aspects of the job, and having some training in them is an asset.

Today, you could also gain some exposure to these using online courses from Coursera or others.

Networking

Till a few years ago, colleges were the best areas to form strong networks. Most of the leading B-schools have strong alumni networks that allow exchange of information about new jobs, and often give visibility into what friends in other industries are up to.

However, today there are a multitude of forums to network within the technology industry like startup events, LinkedIn forums, expert networks and more. While these do not replace the traditional B-school networks, they definitely give a leg up to candidates looking to build their own identity and explore work in other domains.

Graduating from any of the top B-schools could give an edge in getting selected for roles, but a lot then depends on the candidate, his/her domain and functional expertise to clinch the job.

With many startups trying to make their mark in the product space, demonstrating expertise in your known area of work through blogs/forums or by interacting with others in events often throws up job opportunities that you may not be aware of.

The key skills of being a good product manager – intense curiosity to understand how things work, an ability to appreciate context and its effect, the ability to observe keenly, spot opportunities and work to tap them – are not skills that a B-school can teach you.

While a B-school might hone some of your skills, you should take a cost-benefit approach to this and rightly ask – is an MBA worth the money?

Without a huge education loan to pay off, you may decide to take the risk of picking a relatively lower paying job as a product manager for the experience, or maybe start your own firm based on an idea you have.

That would be the first step along thinking like a product manager.

Posted on

Location is a context, not THE context

Being context aware is about knowing location, identity, activity and time.

Many context-aware technologies give a huge importance to location, but location is just one aspect of context, not the context. Location awareness can improve user experience, but knowing a user’s preferences and specific environment makes it all the more personal and all the more powerful. Mobile apps and devices can tap into this information, as can ad platforms, to create relevant experiences for consumers. Location is certainly important, but it’s just one piece of the puzzle.

There are plenty of applications that use location-awareness successfully from tracking deliveries to managing inventory or simply helping a user find their lost smartphone, or even a pet. But what if those same applications could know, not just where you are, but what you’re doing? Or better yet, what you’ll be doing or needing in the future. In that case, you’ll get a lot more targeted and helpful information rather than educated guesses.

The experts say…

According to Gartner Inc., “context-aware technologies will affect $96 billion of annual consumer spending worldwide by 2015.” In addition, the company’s research shows that by next year, 40 percent of smartphone users will opt-in to context service providers that track their activities. This would equal about 720 million people, by their count. The research company believes that transportation, utilities, energy and healthcare firms, in particular, stand to gain from these trends.

“Context-aware computing is the method by which new experiences are constructed that blend information from mobile, social, digital and physical world sources,” said William Clark, research vice president at Gartner. “The disruptions caused by context-aware computing will include major user, technology and business shifts, including the use of model-driven security in fraud detection and prevention, convergence in television, game, Web and mobile advertising, and new styles of application programming.”

He added that “organizations that do not prepare for thoughtful information sharing — balancing usage, privacy and business models of consumers, context providers, and the enterprises themselves, will be at a severe disadvantage.”

Currently, context-awareness is being leveraged by mobile applications and wearable technology such as fitness trackers from companies like Fitbit, Garmin and Nike as well as numerous smart watches like the upcoming Apple Watch, and finally, Google Glass. In the app realm, one example is Easilydo, a virtual assistant that manages your contacts, calendar and more, in much the same way that Google Now does, by learning from your actions and stored data.

These smart apps and devices are still limited in their intelligence; they only know what a user shares whether it be actively or passively. For example, location-awareness becomes a challenge when one is indoors and out of range of Wi-Fi. Beacons, standalone devices that beam Bluetooth signals, are one solution that can be seen in the retail sector, where stores can communicate with shoppers, for example. Apple has joined the game with iBeacon, which is built into its devices and OS and can communicate with compatible beacons at retailers. Additionally, apps like Placed can be used to launch apps based on which room of your house you’re in, which makes the beacon experience more personal. But there is so much more potential to be tapped in this arena.

How business benefits

On the business side, mobile ad platforms can use your location to serve ads, but they can become more targeted through user profiling. Here too, location is just one tool at their disposal. InMobi, a mobile ad network, uses context-aware technology to create “SmartAds” which exploit a user’s immediate environment to trigger relevant ads. For instance, a user checking the weather on a hot summer day might see an ad for a cold drink or an air conditioner; conversely, on a snowy day, that same user might see an for a hot drink or winter boots. Looking into the future, a platform that knows not only that a user is at a ski resort, but is actually skiing, could serve ads for nearby après ski locations, or other relevant businesses and services.

These apps and devices are only scratching the surface. Currently, all of them require at least some user intervention or prompting. Eventually, we’ll see smarter applications that can infer more about a user, digging deeper into their interests and preferences and learning from mistakes. For instance, apps could know without explicitly asking, where a user works and lives and what their regular schedule entails, and when they might need a break–almost reading one’s mind.

The possibilities are endless

Guest Post by Prima Dona, Keypoint Technologies

Posted on

Processes in Start-ups! Can’t live with them! Can’t live without them! Seven ways to address this!

Processes in start-ups are like the proverbial Men or Women – “You can’t Live with them! You can’t live without them!”.

Striking the right balance between having processes and not having them is an Art, not a Science. Getting them right in a start-up means all the difference between a surviving and thriving one, and one that chokes on itself either through chaos or rigidity!

When it is just the founding team and a small, tightly knit team working closely together, you don’t need a whole lot of processes. Everything just gets done informally by someone picking up the slack and doing it. It is when you reach a critical mass of 20 or more employees, fast growth or rising revenues that you suddenly need processes for everything. Not having them brings chaos, confusion, loss of goodwill with critical early employees, clients or customers!

At the same time, I have seen start-ups emulate large corporations too soon, and load up on process in the beginning, become rigid, and drive away good employees, valuable clients and customers. Right in the beginning when things looked so promising, and that’s not good either!

Whether it is Software Development Methodologies, Sales or Marketing, Customer Support or Human Resource management, processes become necessary with size. Keeping processes in control and making them work for you, rather than you working for them is the key!

,chickenprocess

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Forms are the first signs of processes that show up and they are the bane of most start-ups! Like a form designed for an impromptu conversation proposal above!

Pixton_Comic_6_Reasons_Processes_Fail_by_OperationsBlog2Processes fail for various reasons. Start-ups cannot afford to have processes fail! In large corporations, there is enough margins and cash flow, ( Of course, when they are doing well) that they can afford to absorb all kinds of process experiments, and failures before something works correctly! Start-ups need to get them right the first time! The margin for process failures is very thin! You cannot afford to waste any money, especially when you are on your way to revenues, and you are burning angel investments or hard-to-come-by venture money!

Luckily technology provides software product start-ups with various tools that can be leveraged. They can have the cake and eat it too! Here are seven such technologies that every start-up needs to look at seriously in rolling out processes smoothly and inexpensively, for the most part!

  1. The Internet: Web portals have enabled organizations business processes from order entry to logistics to customer service to be performed from anywhere, anytime by their employees. In some cases, these organizations are making these portals available even for their end-customers on an around-the-clock basis, making it very convenient. A good question to ask in any start-up while rolling out any process “Is there a way, the Internet can increase the process cycle efficiency for this business process?”. There are no excuses for not leveraging all kinds of Software As A Service (SaaS) sites from Software Development management to Customer Support and Service! Zoho, ChargeBee, Explara, FreshDesk, BaseCamp, etc., are all companies that any software start-up should explore and integrate in their processes!
  2. Wireless Connectivity: Can we wireless enable the people that form part any process?  Can that delivery guy record that delivery using an application and data connectivity through his smartphone?
  3. Automated Workflow Systems: Automated workflow systems cut down the time, work items wait in a queue for processing. Many business processes suffer from wasteful physical movement of paper from desk to desk. When a piece of paper reaches the next destination, it waits behind other work items that arrived before it. Automated workflow systems can keep the work items moving, raising alerts if work items have been waiting for too long a time, re-routing themselves to others if someone is busy, etc. They also provide visibility into exactly where the bottlenecks may be in a business process, enabling sane Lean process improvement efforts to smooth these out. At a time when cloud-enabled workflow systems like Orangescape are available locally in India, there is simply no excuse!
  4. Scanning and Digitization: Computing and computer storage have become so inexpensive that many organizations scan and digitize most official documents that come in as paper. These may be legal documents or invoices from vendors of services, supplies, or raw material. Thereafter, it enables the circulation of these digital versions of these documents rather than wasteful movement of physical paper across the company. Digitization also enables processes to move geographically long distances effortlessly, enabling employees from geographically dispersed office locations to participate in the same workflow, for example.
  5. Service-Oriented Architectures: If an organization is using the most up-to-date transportation companies to handle its shipping needs, it can initiate a delivery from it own corporate applications seamlessly. These shipping companies have made their backend software systems accessible to any organizations’ software systems using service-oriented architectures (SOA). The SOA technology enables software systems in the same or disparate organizations talk to each other and exchange information automatically, without any human intervention. Many large corporations have realized enormous gains in process cycle efficiency in their supply chain business processes by allowing suppliers’ and customers’ software talk to their backend software systems using SOA. By enabling automatic exchange of data between organizations’ computers in an electronic form, SOA eliminates wasteful and time-consuming exchange of paper and redundant entry of data in to multiple computer applications.Checking out your local logistics vendor and seeing if you could integrate your order management system with their logistics systems over the Internet is something to be explored early on!
  6. Document Management Systems: Document management systems allow an organization to execute business processes that require collaboration across geographies, and even continents. They allow two people in different cities or countries to work collaboratively on a business process by making sure the changes they make are done in an orderly fashion and nothing is lost during the collaboration. Document management systems allow the check-out of documents for editing and require checking them back in once they are done. Thus changes made by different people on the same document are not lost. In many business processes, this has the potential of eliminating waste due to motion and most importantly the quality of the collaboration involved. In the absence of such systems, more time may be expended in sending documents back and forth by e-mail and coordinating changes made to the same documents by different people.
  7. Online CRM Systems/Self-Service FAQ Systems: Many organizations have placed customer relationship management (CRM) systems online as part of their web site. A customer can login and create a trouble ticket online for a support or service request instead of talking to a customer support representative on the telephone. Many organizations are using self-service frequently asked questions (FAQ) sections on their web sites where customers can see if their problem has been faced by other customers, and what the solution was, in those cases. These systems enable the speed up of customer service and support processes. FAQ sections on company web sites may even eliminate service or support calls if they answered their questions or solved their service or support problem. They are convenient for end customers since they are available on the Internet, around the clock, providing even better service than when done manually by telephone. Make the client/customer do the work! Many times they may not mind since they can do it 24/7 in their pajamas and don’t need to reach a human being to serve themselves!

sugai_slide2

 

Processes in start-ups can only be rolled out after a great deal of thought, especially, “is it absolutely necessary?”. But once it is deemed necessary, these days technologies and especially inexpensive, SaaS based offerings make it easy for them to implement them and make them work very effectively!

You can live with them, after all, if you know what you are doing and find the easiest, most effective way of doing them!

Excellence is a continuous process and not an accident – A.P.J.Abdul Kalam.