Posted on

Growth = Engagement: A product design principle you can’t ignore

Newly launched startups love to see their traffic and sign-up stats grow. Growth, after all, is opium for a startup fresh out of the door, and frequent refreshes of the sign-up logs are the happiest pastime for entrepreneurs.

Startups often tend to think of growth and engagement as two unrelated divorced concepts. In reality, nothing could be farther from the truth.

Startups that focus on growth, completely divorced of engagement, are often the invite-spam startups. With number of signed up users as the only metric for success, these startups pursue growth single-mindedly, get their k-factor and viral cycle time in order and hit the desired user numbers.

However, they often fail to focus adequately on engagement and in an age where there is no dearth of choice, lose all (or most of) the users that they acquired in the first place.

A PLATFORM THINKING APPROACH TO GROWTH

In the age of social products, every engaged user is a potential distributor of the product.

Growth and engagement feed each other. Startups that focus on engagement, invariably, realize that good engagement leads to good growth.

Every time a user engages with your platform, she is offering to be an evangelist for it. The onus is on the startup to leverage the user’s engagement on the platform for its growth needs.

In this context, I’ve written earlier about how producers/creators drive organic growth for user-contribution platforms. I’ve also written about how users are your new SEO team.

A SIMPLE HACK AS AN EXAMPLE A.K.A. GROWTH = ENGAGEMENT (Tweet This)

Here’s a screenshot of the answer creation box on Quora. Notice anything interesting?

In case you didn’t, the one after it offers another clue, a much easier one this time around.

It’s a screenshot from Quibb, an invite-only social network.

 

Well, here’s the thing, and the Quibb screenshot demonstrates this well. Every time a user clicks on Save, she creates something and that potentially starts off an engagement loop on the product.

But if the user also checks the ‘Tweet’ box, she’s potentially starting a growth loop as well.

If you just post, you’re feeding engagement. If you click that box, you’re entering the growth loop as well.

There, that was simple enough! Growth can, in many ways, be just one click away from engagement.

The power of platform thinking is in the fact that users are now the new product marketers. The more you engage them, the more growth opportunities they present you with.The more you con them into sending out ‘frictionless’ invites, the less likely are they to bring you any sustainable growth.

DESIGN PRINCIPLES FOR GROWTH = ENGAGEMENT

(Tweet This)

Here’s a quick and dirty framework to think through growth in the context of building engagement.

1. FOR EVERY USER ACTION, IS THERE A MOTIVATION TO SPREAD THE WORD ON EXTERNAL NETWORKS?

In the case of Quora and Quibb above, the user is likely to want a broader audience (and especially her immediate network) for the content she created. Motivation is key here. Motivation works especially well for self-promotion platforms like KickStarter and Change.Org. But even platforms that are not solely for self-promotion can play on a user’s interest in getting the word out.

2. HOW CAN WE PROVIDE USERS WITH THE TOOLS TO MAKE THIS A ONE-CLICK EXPERIENCE?

One-click is key here. The engagement to growth transition should be as seamless as possible. The user should be required to invest minimum effort. This is exactly the reason I showcase the examples above. The user doesn’t have to go through a new follow, it is not an afterthought to the content creation, there is no additional pitch to the user to get the word out. It is all incorporated seamlessly in one action. One-click is a very powerful design principle in general.

3. HOW CAN WE ENCOURAGE SUCH BEHAVIOR FOR USERS?

For all the motivation that users may have, they may not start doing this right away. It is unto the platform owner to encourage the user to start doing this. Quibb ‘encourages’ users by often retweeting the tweets that users send from Quibb and giving them a bigger audience. Slideshare actually ties the success of your uploaded presentation to your ability to have it be shared on different networks.

4. IF GROWTH IS A PRIORITY, REMOVE THE CLUTTER!

This is where Quibb, in the screenshot above, does a better job than Quora. The interface on Quora is too cluttered and one is likely to miss the checkboxes in the middle of everything else. On Quibb, it’s fairly simple: You can feed engagement, but we also give you the option of feeding growth! Up and center!

Engagement is the most sustainable growth strategy. Creating real engagement and creating opportunities for engaged users to get the word out is the best way to sustainable growth.

This blog was first published at Plaformed.info

Posted on

May 2013 be the year for Systematic Innovation in India

If 2012 saw a lot of buzz in India about Jugaad thanks to the Radjou/Prabhu/Ahuja bestseller, I am really hoping that 2013 will restore the balance towards systematic innovation. Indian companies need systematic innovation more than they realize because their challenges are different from the ones that multinationals face.

Why are Indian Companies afraid of Systematic Innovation?

Among Indian entrepreneurs, even in large business houses, the fear of systematic innovation is that it will hamper them from being opportunistic, and prevent them from being agile and quick. They point to multinationals who lose out to nimble local competitors, such as a Nokia being eclipsed by a Samsung.

But I wonder whether it’s fair to attribute the travails of large multinationals to their systematic innovation processes. It’s well known that as companies become large, they tend to become more focused on predictability and efficiency than on disruption or innovation. They tend to get more obsessed with “what analysts will say” than what is right for their company. And, they tend to get more bogged down by the “dominant logic” of what made them successful in the past rather than what will help them succeed in the future.

There are several recent examples that corroborate these observations: Nokia had developed touch screen phones well before the Apple iPad made them the “next big thing.” Kodak, which recently filed for bankruptcy, was one of the pioneers of digital photography technology but allowed other companies to take over that space. These examples suggest that risk aversion and “prediction disability” (and not systematic innovation processes!) prevented these otherwise iconic companies from capitalizing on their innovations.

Once you go even slightly higher up the technology ladder, systematic innovation becomes inevitable for success. Consider any of the companies that I wrote about in the last year – 3M, possibly the most innovative company of all times; IBM, still a powerhouse of innovation with more than 6,500 US patents granted in calendar 2012; or Cisco, one of the first multinationals to create a world class product end-to-end from India. Or Indian companies like Titan, whose disciplined efforts to build innovation capabilities ground up from the shopfloor have resulted in huge savings of time and precious metals; and Eureka Forbes, whose efforts to commercialize the best technologies in water purification have resulted in Amrit, a process that tackles even bio-organisms. None of these companies could have achieved even a fraction of these results without following systematic approaches to innovation.

I believe that systematic innovation has got a bad press because it has been confused with the dynamics of decision-making in large organizations. A clearer understanding of what systematic innovation is, and what it’s not, should establish why embracing systematic innovation will help rather than hinder innovation.

What Systematic Innovation Is…

An approach to innovation that enhances the number of ideas being generated and considered so as to improve the odds of innovation success. [Research shows that it often takes more than 300 ideas to result in one successful product.]

Greater, structured connections with users/customers and other stakeholders to help align innovation with market needs. [Remember my article on why the Tata Ace was much more successful than the Tata Nano?]

A focus on experimentation and testing to check out assumptions, refine and reinforce ideas, and make innovations more robust and scalable.[Remember the motto of IDEO, the leading design firm: “Enlightened trial & error succeeds over the planning of the lone genius.” With enhanced user aspirations, the “integrity” of any innovation as reflected in the experience of the user is essential to innovation success. Innovation is much more than ideation, it is about execution to provide sustained benefits to users/customers. When a company like Apple puts an inadequately tested map utility on its latest iPhone, or Tata Motors fails to address safety issues adequately in pre-launch testing as appeared to happen with the Nano, an otherwise high potential innovation loses its sheen. As does an e-commerce site when it doesn’t support all browsers!]

Leveraging the power of many rather than depending on the intelligence of the few. [Open source software development has demonstrated the power of harnessing the wider community in product development. Open source methods are now being extended to challenging domains such as drug development. And companies like P&G and Eureka Forbes have shown that open innovation can be a source of unusual ideas.]

And What its not…

Systematic innovation does not necessarily mean huge investments in R&D. In fact, studies have repeatedly shown that the most effective innovators are not those who spend the most on R&D. As consulting firm Booz showed in their 2006 innovation report, effective innovators excel at processes like ideation, project selection, and commercialization, all part of the systematic innovation process!

Systematic innovation does not mean doing basic research or trying to pioneer new technologies. Firms like Titan Industries have shown that systematic innovation works very effectively even with improvements in traditional jewellery manufacturing processes.

Systematic innovation does not necessarily mean long drawn innovation cycles. Effective innovators find low-cost and quick ways of experimenting that help them test ideas and assumptions rapidly. They try to do what A.G. Lafley calls “Doing the last experiment first” – test the assumptions that will have a critical bearing on innovation success or failure early so as to avoid going down tracks that lead to nowhere.

2013: The Year of Systematic Innovation?

Indian companies need to embrace systematic innovation so as to capitalize on their innate abilities of intuition and market sensing. Vinay Dabholkar and I hope that 2013 will be the year for systematic innovation in India. May systematic innovation go viral! Our own contribution towards this will be released soon – watch this space for more details!

Posted on

I didn’t have a Job, when I graduated. But, I was clear about Entrepreneurship – The iXiGo Story

It was an early December late afternoon that Avinash and I got together to interview Aloke Bajpai, the Co-Founder and CEO of iXiGO – one of India’s most loved travel websites. Whether you are trying to save an extra rupee by comparing air fares across portals or planning your next trip with that saved money, Aloke’s iXiGO will GO with you.

As I sat in the reception area waiting for Aloke and Avinash, a board with many yellow colored A4 size posters caught my eye. It was actually a timeline that told the story of iXiGO. Starting from 2006, the sequence of posters talked about the many successes iXiGo achieved over the years. It looked easy. Or was it? It was time for the real behind-the-posters story.

Listen to Aloke’s story(Podcast) of perseverance as he describes his tumultuous iXiGO journey in this exclusive podcast brought to you by the good people at ProductNation.

Aloke’s fling with entrepreneurship began in a business plan competition while he was still studying electrical engineering at IIT Kanpur. It took the 2000 dotcom bubble burst to get him onto the conventional job path.  Starting a career with Amadeus – a European technology travel company – Aloke realized in a few years that work wasn’t exciting. He says, he was done with code. And as he puts it, he took the “Indian Solution” of doing an MBA.  It was at INSEAD that he decided to take a serious shot at entrepreneurship taking courses pertaining to entrepreneurship and was lucky to find an iXiGO advisor in his Professor – Patrick Turner.

Aloke’s stints at Amadeus and INSEAD seem scripted, for it is here that he met his co-founders Rajneesh (Amadeus and IIT Kanpur) and Yash (INSEAD).

In the podcast, Aloke talks in a free spirited way about how one fine day – he just left his job. A quick move to Gurgaon was followed by figuring out what to really do and how iXiGO came about. He shares how his INSEAD batchmates seeded the idea on good faith and how a brave trip to Singapore got them their first serious investor – William Klippgen. This after their idea had been politely refused many times over (read as no response) by a number of angels and VC’s. Hear from Aloke the sense of exultation when they did get their first smart money.

Good times don’t last long so much so for the King of Good Times. The 2008 credit crisis and a renegade potential investor almost brought iXiGO to the brink. iXiGO not only survived but grew stronger since none of the employees left after the consensual 50% pay cuts. iXiGO’s business model was validated during that time as travelers were looking for best deals using price comparison.

These days iXiGO is busy with the Travel Planner. Aloke describes how the idea came about and how they leveraged a set of early adopters to fine tune their market offering?

When it comes to team building, Aloke’s been a success. He stresses the importance of being transparent, involving the team in creating and owing new initiatives and gives some sound reasons why each employee needs to read all customer feedback. This man is sure going places.

Don’t miss the podcast. The secret is right there. If you have a 55 minute car drive, look no further, you have got the perfect companion – Aloke Bajpai of iXiGO on your car music system. Just in case, you don’t, check out the iXiGO trip planner for some 55 minute drive options.

 

Posted on

Now Get Your Daily News through Contify

Contify is India’s leading business news, content and information provider with interests in managing databases; publishing news stories; and syndicating content from reputed publishers to global databases. We recently caught up with Contify’s CEO Mohit Bhakuni to understand more about the product and his journey so far. Here are some excerpts from the interview.

How did it all start?

Founded in April 2009 by two Indian Institute of Technology alumni in a small basement-turned-office and 1 lakh INR, Contify has grown into an 85-people strong multi-city operation in a short span of three years.

What is Contify’s proposition?

Contify positions itself as the easiest source to receive industry specific news underpinned by sound concept based search. It licenses content from publishers and uses advanced technologies to provide functionalities like faceted search and filtering to provide relevant content to the readers.

How are you funded?

Contify’s parent company is Athena Information Solutions Pvt Ltd.  Athena is the largest licensed content syndication company in India. In addition, Athena generates revenues from services business by providing content related services to few international clients. Contify product development is funded by the profits generated from Athena’s business operations.

What is the vision for you company?

To become one of the most respected products for industry information in India.

What are your key offerings?

Contify is a comprehensive news and information database aggregated from over 100 publications, which gives users access to insightful business content with its smart ‘filter-based’ search platform. Contify also has a strong in-house editorial team, which covers information and reports news on a range of industry verticals including banking, finance, energy, retail, automobiles and pharmaceutical, as well as key government policies related to India’s business environment.

How is Contify different from exiting platforms?

According to Mohit, Contify provides a unique value proposition to its clients who are looking for industry news in a cost effective way. It also focuses on small to medium sized businesses that have limited bandwidth or financial resources to source such aggregated industry information.

What is your biggest challenge?

The team is consistently working on coming up with ways to enhance user experience. One such example includes de-duplicating of stories across publications to provide only unique articles that are relevant to the users.

What does the future hold?

Mohit suggested that Contify is also building customised features for its clients to enhance their experience. For instance, it recently introduced widgets directly on the website to allow users to receive customised news.

Our view is that with intense competition in the news aggregator space Contify is likely to face stiff challenges from the incumbents and in order to build a sustainable advantage it will have to continuously innovate through additional product features such as analytics that can demonstrate value for money to the clients. 

Post Contributed by Abhimanyu Godara

 

Posted on

Bizosys Technologies’ Tools for Simplifying Software Development

Bizosys Technologies, launched in January 2009 in Bangalore, India, is an award winning, India-based software engineering company that has developed several tools that are available free to use online or as open-source software with downloadable source code. One of the most significant tools is HSearch, a real-time Big Data search engine for Hadoop. In this interview, Sridhar Dhulipala, co-founder and director – solutions, discusses his company’s tools and also shares lessons learned in the software development journey. This article is brought to SandHill readers in partnership with ProductNation.  

SandHill.com: What was your vision; what inspired you to launch Bizosys? 

Sridhar Dhulipala: Bizosys was born out of a question and not out of a smart business plan. The question we had was: how can one simplify software development? This translated into an engineering quest where Bizosys founders were consumed in research for the first two years, entirely self-funded, thanks to the low capex model afforded by cloud infrastructure.

The three co-founders at Bizosys met during their careers at Infosys in Bangalore and decided to start Bizosys. Bizosys is self-funded and has had no sustained mentor in a formal sense — but a mentor would surely have helped from a go-to-market perspective.

We now provide IT services for enterprise and SMBs, mostly around Big Data, search and analytics, IT performance engineering, new application development targeting existing on-premises deployments or cloud architecture, addressing existing application technology stacks or emerging NoSQL technologies such as Hadoop.

Our tools are now accessed by users from over 100 countries globally. In the longer run, evangelizing our products and having vibrant user communities is a desirable goal.

SandHill.com: Is there a story behind your company name? 

Sridhar Dhulipala: The idea behind Bizosys is “business operating system.” As our quest was about simplifying software development, the application of this was to develop a business operating system that is easy to build, robust, scalable and especially intended for frequently changing, rapid deploy, long tail of applications. 

SandHill.com: Please describe the tools your company has developed. 

Sridhar Dhulipala: Bizosys has developed several tools that are available free to use online or as open-source software with downloadable source code. 10Screens is an online high-fidelity prototyping and requirements collaboration tool for remote teams. It’s free and has close to 4,000 registered users spanning more than 120 countries. HSearch is our open-source Big Data search engine with real-time capabilities on Hadoop and it has had over 2,200 downloads by users in more than 80 countries. It includes a kids-safe search engine for YouTube videos. 1line is a server-side backend.

They are ready to install and use as shrink-wrapped, off-the-shelf software. They are also available as frameworks that are compiled with custom applications. As a third option, we offer our products and frameworks as a service via robust APIs. Our tools are backed by email support today.

Read the complete interview at Sandhill.com

Posted on

How to get to 1000 startups in India ever year

I will be on a panel with several others at the IAMAI conference next week for the India Digital Summit and the discussion is about how to make 1000 digital startups happen annually in India.

I thought I’d put some thoughts together and get some opinions before I present at the panel.

Currently there are less than half that number of product companies being started each year.

There are various issues across the funnel, but I’ll focus on the #1 issue, which I believe is at the top of the funnel.

Great product entrepreneurs starting great companies.

I wanted to pick a specific example from our accelerator: two of the most amazing hackers and geeks I have worked with – Melchi and Aditya co-founded Cloud Infra after 6 years at Google here in India, building high quality products.

I would fund them just given their background and the quality of hackers they are. Regardless of what they are developing.

Anyplace else (Valley) they would have been funded first and then they would have been asked questions. I worked with them for 4 months.They are amazing.

India needs more of them to increase the number of startups from 500 to 1000.

Unfortunately that’s not happening and is not going to happen.

I may get a lot of brickbats for this statement, but:

I believe the best product entrepreneurs should have built & shipped a world-class product before they start a company.

If you have worked in a services company it does not count. Period.

There are very few software product companies in India – in fact fewer than 20 are really good. Of those 20, many, including Google, are cutting back on hiring and investing in India.

That’s just awful.

Yahoo, Zoho & InMobi in particular have contributed a LOT to the product startup ecosystem in India, given how many good developers they have helped groom.

If you worked at any of these product software companies a few years ago, then you are a candidate for a high quality product startup in India.

Granted, a small number of these folks are actually starting companies, but that can be fixed.

The trouble is there are not too many of them in the first place.

And the bigger issue is that the Google’s and Facebook’s of the world are preferring to hire more folks in the valley.

In fact many of the top IIT graduates who get jobs at Google and Facebook are moving to the valley. 2 years ago they’d be working here in India.

To get 1000+ digital startups each year in India, we have to work on making sure world-class digital software companies hire more of our top people here in India.

I dont think tax breaks will provide them any more incentive to hire here.

I also believe there are enough quality folks here in India they can hire.

I’d love some ideas on what will make them hire more people of high caliber in India and keep them here. I’d love to see them not cut back on hiring in India.

What are your ideas on how we can get these companies to hire great engineering talent in India?

Posted on

5 questions for every product marketing team

When Girish Mathrubootham, CEO, Freshdesk) hired yours truly, a complete novice straight out of B-School, I was Freshdesk’s employee no. 8, and we operated out of a nondescript location deep in south Chennai, from two small rooms behind a quaint Catholic church. Painted in our company’s signature teal color and equipped with an internet connection that had a mind of its own, our old office was for me the ultimate symbol of the true entrepreneur – spare, utilitarian and with a contagious energy that infected everyone.It was then that G, as we call the boss, told me to put my Kotler away and learn by doing, rather than falling into the trap MBAs usually fall into, of analyzing everything but failing to execute even a single one.I tried to do that, and learned a lot from a world class team of marketers along the way. Our marketing has received some praise, and though we’re light years away from where we want to be, I’d love to share a few things with the product community.Here are five questions for product marketers like me –

Are you telling a great story?

The answer should be a resounding yes. If not, well, you should be. A technology product’s website is its showroom, and like showroom space is gold for the retailer, so is our website. And this is where we need to get our story across. 
We humans understand and assimilate stories much more easily than we do disparate facts. It’s just how we are. And that is why, to make it easy for the customer to understand our product offering, to digest it, there needs to be a story, told in a simple way, as clearly as possible, with a definite call to action. For tips and techniques you can use, here’s a post from Jonah Sachs, author of ‘The Storytelling Wars’. The book itself is quite good, and I highly recommend it.

 

Is the language perfect, the communication flawless?

You should be saying yes even before you read the question completely. As product marketers, more often than not, our target market is international, and there can be no compromise on grammar and language. The writing needs to be top drawer. Full stop. In fact, this was the reason I got the chance to become a product marketer in the first place. G did not hire me because of my MBA degree, G hired me because he judged me to be a good writer and because I was able to get a point across. 
When we at Freshdesk write copy for our site and content for our blog, there is great emphasis on grammatical accuracy and narrative tone. None of us is Shakespeare of course, but selling to respected companies abroad, we can’t afford to drop the ball on this – the very brand is at stake.

 

Is more time being spent on perfecting things than on getting stuff out?

This question is specifically for content marketers like me. The desirable answer is of course no, but if your answer is yes, then rejoice. You now have a chance to simplify your content delivery stream and it’s going to give you great results. 
What you need to do is this – don’t keep reviewing and perfecting the content you write or the infographics you make or the SEO pages you craft. Just get them out. Nothing is going to be absolutely perfect. Even Beethoven thought his symphonies were flawed. After a point, the difference between good enough and perfect is so negligible you’ll need a microscope to find out. Something ‘good enough’ that’s out there and garnering eyeballs always, always, trumps that ‘perfect’ thing which will take another week. 
Don’t ‘review’ over and over again. Just get it out.

 

Are there clear strategies for social, content & customer service?

Yes, you need them. Just so every employee knows what’s going on and what the organization’s outlook is. At Freshdesk, being a customer support company ourselves, our service is our brand. Every single customer of ours is treated with respect and the questions our support and sales teams ask them, boil down to roughly this – what problem of yours can we solve today? 
This is ingrained in the way we do things and it’s now in our very DNA. Our customer service strategy is clear – whatever we can do for him/her, we will. This clarity is very important. Because when different teams talk to customers and prospects, this consistency will become your brand, and then reinforce itself. This is exactly how a brand is built. Same with your content and social strategy. The key word is consistency. Just remember that with every piece of content and tweet and Facebook post you put out there, your brand is being constructed, bit by bit.

 

Are new things being tried out, and are the results being recorded?

Yes, yes and yes. If A/B testing is not (at least) a weekly activity, you are doing something wrong. You should be constantly trying out new avenues for growth and new platforms for attracting customers. A few will work, many will not. Don’t worry. This isn’t sunk cost, not at all. Write down the results and move on. This way after a point of time, you know which channels to invest in and which channels to avoid. The data you collect during all this will give you the answers you need to the channel-ROI question.
And in the age of newer platforms and channels almost every month, if you continuously try new things – you might actually be the first movers into Klondike! Give yourself that chance.

Posted on

Wingify – optimizing your website, simply!

Wingify’s vision is to develop world’s best tools for optimizing a website. Wingify launched ‘Visual Website Optimiser’ – an A/B testing software. Their products help in increasing website sales, conversions, signups and, at the same time, decreasing advertising budget. All this done by products which are really simple to use. Having hit 1900 customers in about 3 years, they sure have made internet a better place to be in, in their own way.

Aakriti Bhargava from Boring Brands, spoke with Paras Chopra, Founder & CEO Wingify on his interesting journey so far.

What was the vision, which led you to start Wingify?

Wingify started in May 2010, to make products in the marketing optimizing domain. That was the time when Google offered a very expensive and technical tool for A/B testing – we spotted the opportunity to create a powerful product at a reasonable price. Our ambition from day 1 was to simplify the testing of website for anyone and build in time – efficiency to ensure someone with no knowledge of coding could do it with ease. Having catered to over 1900 customers around the world, we hope, we are in line in fulfilling the intent of starting up.

What has worked out really well for Wingify in such a short time?

Having focussed in the simplicity of the offering seems to have helped us a lot in scaling our operations so far. Relying on self-service model, we have insisted on simple processes to create website versions in a visual designer and specify what goals are desired to optimize the website for. That’s all! No need to do complex JavaScript page tagging. No need to repeatedly fiddle with HTML code. We believe in our product so much that we also encourage our potential customers for a free 30 day trial to play around with the tool. This helps us in getting valuable feedback from the customers and further improvement.

Did you reach out for funding at any stage of your start-up?

We have not had a need so far and have been cash positive right from day 1 of our existence. We are primarily a B2B company, and have scaled in a humble and sustainable manner and will continue to do so.

What has been the biggest challenge so far?

Assembling the right team and hiring the best talent has been the biggest challenge so far.

Today, what are your priorities at Wingify?

I strive everyday to improve the product and build a happy team!

Who have been your customers?

Our customers include Microsoft, Groupon, FourSquare, MakeMyTrip, Rackspace, etc.

What is your Success Mantra?

We strive to provide the best customer support possible. We believe that even if competition is able to copy the product they may not be able to copy the passion that you have towards the product.


Posted on

Mindmaps for Product Startups!

In a product startup you may need to deal with lots of information about your own product features, your market, your competition, your competition’s product features, results of internal brainstorming sessions you may conduct or information about who you can partner with for various aspects of your business.

Mind-maps provide a great way of organizing all the information you gather or generate internally, and create documents or pictures that capture the relationships between them precisely. Most importantly, it can help convey the same concepts to your investors, co-founders, colleagues, employees and partners. It can help you organize mentally for your own use or convey a large amount of information to others in a short amount of time.

Wikipedia’s definition:

A mind map is a diagram used to visually outline information. A mind map is often created around a single word or text, placed in the center, to which associated ideas, words and concepts are added. Major categories radiate from a central node, and lesser categories are sub-branches of larger branches. Categories can represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items related to a central key word or idea.

Typical ways you can use MindMaps in Product Startups:

  • Analysis of the Market: How does the market you are looking at addressing organized? Mobile devices could be tablets, smartphones and feature phones. Tablets could be smaller or larger. Within each you could have iOS and Android Devices. Within Android devices you could have different versions supported by different devices, and so on. All of these branches could be captured effectively in a mind map.
  • Product Ideas Generation – What are all the different product ideas you could consider initially and in an on-going basis. How are they organized with respect to the various products and versions that you are already producing or planning to produce?
  • Generation and Organization of Product Feature Groups and Ideas – Very useful for product managers modeling existing feature groups and features, new features generated and where they might fit in.
  •  Analysis of the Competition: Competition in the market is not always straightforward. Competitors may offer products and services that may be in a related market, overlapping markets or completely unrelated markets. Competitors may be offering a service that may compete with your product. All these nuances can be captured effectively in branches off branches.
  • Analysis of Pricing Models:  If you considering different pricing models – One-time licensing vs Subscriptions, Annual or Monthly, etc., you could capture all the different variations in mind maps.

There might be plenty more uses for mindmaps once you get comfortable with what it does and how it can be used. Some of the Mind Mapping tools come up with ways of annotating each node with additional notes that can pop up once you hover over a node in the mind map with the mouse or a pointer. This can come in handy in naming each node with a short name and including more descriptions in the additional notes.

Mind mapping can come in very handy at the start-up stage even before you have a plan for your business. When you are doing your preliminary research or putting together your business plan later on. Or when you are already operating and your product management takes on a formal function!

There is a huge selection of Open Source and Commercial Mind Mapping Software that you can use – more details here in Wikipedia.

I have had very good luck with the Open Source version of FreeMind. It allows me to create mindmaps in their proprietary format and send them to others who have the same software (.mm format). For others who may not have FreeMind, I export the mind maps to PDF formats and send them along.  You can check out downloading FreeMind available for various Operating Systems and playing with it here.

Here are a few examples of Mind Maps I created using Free Mind. These are PDF versions of two mind maps I created when I read two interesting books sometime ago:

Jennifer Aaker’s Book The DragonFly Effect

Designing Brand Identity – Alina Wheeler

 A Picture is worth a Thousand Words! – Anonymous

 

Posted on

Top 10 mistakes Product Entrepreneurs Make

Inspired from Pallav Nadhani’s interview – this infographic is meant for all those entrepreneurs who dream of building a global product.  From delegating to hiring a sales team and to putting an end to customizing products – these tips are invaluable. Pallav, you rock! and thanks for sharing these precious jewels of entrepreneurship! 

Posted on

Huntshire – Hiring Talent via Virtual Hunts!

HuntShire’s mission is to match the right candidate with the right employer through online talent hunts that are designed to assess specific skills against job requirements. It conducts role specific talent hunts on behalf of a range of recruiters and registered candidates can simply choose to participate to show they have the right skills for the job.

 

 

In conversation with Aakriti Bhargava from Boring Brands the young co-founders talk about their startup moments and life in Huntshire

How did you get the idea for your startup?
The idea of having hunts is inspired from Google’s treasure hunts. While Vishnu, CEO, was doing his under-graduation in NIT Raipur, he organized his college’s online treasure hunt event. A Treasure hunt consists of a series of puzzles, which the user needs to solve, sitting at his home. He was surprised to see that the winners were from different parts of the country and when the test methodology can deliver legitimate candidates for online fun event why cannot it have for a recruitment drive.

What makes Huntshire unique from others in the recruitment  industry?
We are creating a platform that enables companies to have virtual walkins. A company will come to our platform and create a hunt. Candidates from anywhere can participate in the hunt with the Hunt URL. This process takes less just about a week and helps companies access to skill profiled resumes.

Who made the initial investments and how did you get it together?
Our initial investments are from our savings. Vishnu and Gaurav were office mates while in cognizant. Vishnu and I are high school mates.

What are you actually doing what others are not?
Recruitment space has multiple players. But the practices today are still outdated. For a company, to recruit candidates, they need to go to a job board and access resumes. They need to call up candidates and see the interest level of them in the jobs. They need to use another filtering tool to screen candidates based on skills. This process itself takes more than 40 days. Post this; companies have to interview shortlisted candidates.

We combine the process of sourcing and filtering into one and help companies recruit faster. With the 20+ clients that we have worked with, we have seen than saving more than 70% time and 60 % cost.

What is the biggest asset for your startup?
Our team. We are individuals from different educational and cultural backgrounds and united for the common passion of solving the problem that all three of us faced. Also the passion, that it takes, to be part of a startup.

What is the founder’s biggest fear?
Our biggest fear is slowing down. Success doesn’t mean that we are doing our best. We still need to work harder.

As an endeavour to give a platform to product startups in India, ProductNation will continue to bring to you a short tête-à-tête with some really cool and young startups.

 

Posted on

Design-Led Software Engineering Improves User Experience

Editor’s note: Focus on user experience now shows up in numerous surveys as a major determinant of success in software product sales. We interviewed the co-founders of software development provider Clarice Technologies: Sandeep Chawda, who is also CEO, and Shashank Deshpande, who is also president. Between them they have more than two decades of experience in user-centric design (especially at Symantec/VERITAS) and now lead Clarice Technologies in design-led innovation for Clarice’s software customers. 

SandHill.com: Please explain what you mean by design-led innovation in software development. 

Shashank Deshpande: Design-led innovation is to understand users and their needs to come up with a design that is usable and consumable and then to apply technology innovation to translate it to a user-centric product. It is about providing an optimal balance of design and technology in the process of product development to ensure intuitive and high-performance products. More often than not we see that products are over-designed or over-engineered, and neither is good for consumers and end users. A product that really delights the customer has a good balance between design and technology.

SandHill.com: What causes developers to over-design or over-engineer? 

Sandeep Chawda: It’s caused by the lack of sensitivity of one aspect or the other. We seldom see companies with an ecosystem that has the right mix of designers and technology engineers. If the product is designed without considering various technology aspects, that will cause the product to be over-designed. There are several design studios where designers take a flight of fancy in the product design without really considering whether or not that can be meaningfully engineered.

And the same applies for the engineering side. Many technology companies try to build the product without having a meaningful information architecture in how product functionality is presented. This results in a product that won’t be exposed to the users properly and they won’t be aware of its key functionality, or they may be aware of it but will tend not to use it.

SandHill.com: What do you do differently in design-led engineering to avoid these problems? 

Shashank Deshpande: We do up-front design of the complete product without writing a single line of code. We come up with “product storyboard,” which is a pixel-level detailed mockup of the key screens of the product, and we tie them together so as to mimic the complete product. All this is done without writing a single line of code because changing pixels is an order of magnitude easier than changing code.

These mockups are then used by multiple stakeholders of the product in a very effective manner. Product Management can use it for validating the product functionality. Sales can use it for talking to customers about the product roadmap and what is going to come. And the storyboard acts as refined requirement specifications for the engineering group to go ahead and build the product.

We use this process iteratively when developing software products for our customers to ensure there is a heavy emphasis and high priority on the user-experience angle.

Read the complete post at Sandhill.com

Posted on

iCalibrator – Bridging the Knowledge Gap

The product – iCalib aims to automate the process of practical learning during the training programmes. Trainees are given exercises to practice the skills they are expected to learn. In a typical classroom model, the trainer is not able to evaluate all trainees individually (sometimes the trainers are not capable of it also). The system would provide individual feedback, and also enable the trainees to re-attempt the exercises till they are able to achieve the desired objectives.

Pramod Saini started iCalibrator after gathering valuable experience from the industry. Having done his BTech & MS from IIT Madras and spent 10 years at Wipro in Global R&D role. In 1997, he left Wipro and Co Founded Momentum Technologies, which later on got acquired by Sopra, a French group.

Problem Identification : The Ideation
Every organisation begins with an idea. An idea is basically a solution to a specific problem which the founders are trying to address. In this case, in the year 2000, what was observed was the poor quality of software professionals in employment. The number of “professionals” flooding the market but with no control on quality whatsoever. Especially on the quality of input. The Students coming out of Engineering colleges, fell short on quality. This problem was identified years back and would find resonance much later as various studies were to indicate. In other parts of the world, especially in countries like US & Canada, a fresher would be able to write good software, within 2– 3 months of their first programming job. In India, this period would stretch to almost a year, and even more at times. The problem was much deep-rooted. Poor students were a direct result of poor
teachers, who were themselves all at sea, technically.

The Delivery Mechanism:
The approach was to impart training, through mentoring. To create an environment which wouldenable students through self-learning modules based on Practical exercises and projects. Mentors from the industry would assist trainees in writing good software, something on the lines of what was prevalent in Europe – Teacher & Assistant. Progressively, it was getting difficult for organisations to make freshers project-ready. It put additional pressure on resources and even then, the outcome was not always desirable.

Mentors, of course came with a cost. The effectiveness of this model would ultimately depend on the quality of mentors, which in many ways was a costly proposition and hence a challenge on scalability. This challenge would be addressed by reducing the dependence on mentors and leveraging technology to take up the same role. In due course, the product became very good and
the effectiveness was unparalleled. There was another challenge – to position the company in tech space, rather than as a training institute. The automation of solution would help position them as enablers to e-learning companies.

Challenges in selling this product

  1. Selling a complex idea is always tough and so is the positioning. The processes were pretty complex so not so easily reproducible by rival organisations.
  2. Selling to the target market in India. Decision-making is a slow process and there is some inertia which takes ages to overcome.
  3. Indian Product mindset, in the end-consumer’s mind. If it’s Indian, it isn’t good. Very difficult to break this mindset.
  4. Companies started putting their potent recruits though these tests and the results were disastrous. Not that the tests were exceptionally difficult but the aspirants were below par : The whole problem that was being addressed.

Expectations from the eco-system.
I guess, by eco-system, you refer to the whole learning industry. I hope that the Indian Software service providers actually put in effort to increase the quality of their software personnel. The problem of low quality is very well understood, but I believe that the organisations do not put in additional effort to improve quality because: (1) A large number of jobs are actually software maintenance jobs, and organisations believe that very high quality is not required. (2) Some senior management members believe that they do not want to invest in training personnel who might leave them and change a job immediately after. However, I think that this is a short-sighted approach that is detrimental to the overall industry and the value that we bring to the end customer.

Next 12 months for iCalibrator
In the next 12 months, we expect to raise some funds, and utilise them to enhance our product as well as focus on sales/marketing activities so that we can put our message across to the potential clients. We may be required to do some pilots, where the additional funds will help. We also plan to enhance our product so that it could be easily integrated into the training processes of any eLearning provider. Therefore, we see ourselves becoming a totally technical company, providing various automated aides to enhance the effectiveness of eLearning models.

Posted on

Aadhaar and the 7 principles of Product Management

Sanjay Jain, Entrepreneur in Residence, Khosla Labs spoke at the IPMA 2nd annual event. The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) is an agency responsible for implementing the AADHAAR scheme, a unique identification project. It was established in February 2009, with an aim to provide a unique identification number to all Indians, by eliminating duplicate and fake identities. Biometrics features are selected to be the primary mechanism for ensuring uniqueness.

The primary reason for the UID project was to establish the bona fide identity of a person. Lack of an identity proof often excludes people from many facilities and formal systems in society such as opening a bank account or access to public distribution system (PDS).  In most cases the rural poor find it difficult to even produce birth records to prove their identity even to claim their (legitimate) privileges.

Sanjay Jain who spoke at the IPMA second annual event which was held on the 8th of December, was the chief product manager for this project.  He spoke about 7 principles of Product Management and mapped it to Aadhaar, the ambitious Government Project.

Below is an excerpt from the presentation where Sanjay Jain took the 7 Principles of Product Management elucidated by Deep Nishar (at the NASSCOM Product Conclave earlier this year) and looked at Aadhaar through that lens:

The 7 Principles of Product bliss:

  1. Know thy User
  2. Simplicity is a feature
  3. Embrace Constraints
  4. Data is your guide
  5. Innovation is not instant
  6. Adapt
  7. Manifest Destiny

Know thy user: Aadhaar has a process called ‘Know Your Resident’ which is about proving the identity of a resident of India. So it has information like their name, finger print, gender, date of birth, where they live, who is their parents etc. which helps knowing the resident intimately through the data collected.

Simplicity is a Feature:  What could be simpler than one person – one Aadhaar Id. The principle that Biometrics doesn’t change even with time and they are unique to a person is the basis for issuing Aadhaar.
The biometric of a person – impression of all the 10 fingers and the iris scan are the authentication or the proof of identity. There is no need for an

Aadhaar card, the 12 digit identification number and the biometric of the person are the authentication.
Embrace Constraints: There were many constraints; public funds were used so the accountability was to public as the policies and principles were sacrosanct. So a bunch of architectural principles were defined to guide the project and they were not to be violated. Some of them are:

  • To use open source technologies where ever prudent
  • The decision not to lock-in any vendor
  • Performance matrices are made public
  • Strong end-to-end security was ensured

A committee was put in place to take decisions. First data definition standards and biometric data standards were created and a broad concurrence from across the government was obtained to implement the same.

Data is your Guide: A public portal was created which gives complete visibility and transparency to anybody at any time, satisfying RTI norms.  A person who has applied for Aadhaar can check status on the UIDAI website by entering his/her 14 digit enrollment id.

The UIDAI being a part of the Central government agency works with the partners whom the state government outsources the work to; they are 3 levels away from central body, so everybody in the chain gets complete visibility to all information. So the processes are standard and details of contracts are available on the partner portal. The operators had to go through rigorous training and certification before they were activated.
Innovation is not instant: Innovation takes time. Central identity repository (CIDR) is the repository where all the identity data pertaining to Biometric subsystem, Demographic data, Business analytics, Infrastructure management, Application servers etc. resides.

The attempt is to build the world’s largest biometric database, India’s current population is 1.21 billion and the UID scheme aims to cover all the residents. No country has attempted an identification and verification system on this massive scale.

The method adopted is ‘the best fingerprint technology’, the resident provides all 10 fingerprints, 2 best finger prints are taken and the success rate is 95%.

Adapt: Competition brought in a drop in prices; for example when the project started the price of the fingerprint scanners, like the ones used in the US immigration, was 5000 USD; it came down to INR 25,000.

Manifest Destiny: To take up a project of this magnitude needed conviction – One needs to believe one can do it, believe in success and work backwards.

Contributed by Mangal D Karnad, Tally Solutions

Posted on

Why a degree of chaos is better than order

I can bet you are familiar with this one, but not its consequences, in product development: you’ve seen project managers in product development teams express frustration at not being able to keep the development on track, on time and on budget. I had earlier written about the kind of expectations people have of product development and its perils – but this problem of project management is worse. In response to delays, project managers begin to get even more hyper. They start asking for more detailed plans, better definitions of deliverables, tighter schedules, better time and resource utilization and more frequent reviews (ouch!). That’s natural. That’s what project managers are born to do. Except, in the product development context, this approach is just not applicable. It’s a great approach in manufacturing and service environments where assets are under performing and people need to tighten their process management. But in product development, this can all but kill the development.

Product development and shop floors are very different – to start with code being developed can be in several places at the same time, in the hands of different people, undergoing several changes (and becoming altogether new products!). This just can’t happen in a manufacturing scenario. A copper pipe being manufactured can only be at one place on the shop floor. A car being manufactured can only be at one point on the assembly belt.

The difference is crucial. And well worth appreciating. Product development managers can’t afford to have their teams ticking at 100% utilization. Not even at 90%. It can cause untold harm. In development, busy does not necessarily translate into productive. Reason? Nothing is predictable in product development (again, I hark back to my older post on the topic at https://pn.ispirt.in/the-weight-of-expectation/). Development thrives in chaos. No one is certain how long a task in development will require – or should take. Unlike in manufacturing and services, where there are well-set benchmarks for most processes, in development there are practically none. Teams should be given leeway to make unpredictable changes, and start from scratch. And starting from scratch does mean low people and process utilization.

Bringing order to development is futile. Okay, I’ll take that back and rephrase it a bit: Bringing order to development is not recommended. This is because the process of development has large variances and reducing those variances can take up considerable resources, adding to project costs. In a world of shrinking resources, that’s a trade-off few will opt for. Or am I in a minority in thinking this?