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What I learnt from organising 100 #PlaybookRT. #iSPIRT

When I was a kid, the only goal that I had in my mind was to become a cricketer and play for India. But never did I get an opportunity to play beyond the gully cricket and few matches as part of the school cricket team and my cricket was just restrained to the park level.

My dreams of scoring a century have now finally been full-filled. Playbook RT, something that started in the early days of iSPIRT, turns 100. This is my first century, the gully cricket ones not withstanding.

Our elevator pitch — took us 15 sessions to get to this.

As crisp as that sounds, it took us around 15 Round Tables to distill this elevator pitch, and truly understand our own product-market fit.

This is the story of how it all began, and of the amazing journey, the lessons, the people who made it all possible. For those of you who love visuals more or are pressed for time, there is a photo-story at the end of this post — please feel free to scroll to the end of this post for that.

Inthe early days of iSPIRT, Sharad(iSPIRT) initiated the process of the mentoring program with Ashish Gupta(HelionVC), Aneesh Reddy(Capillary), Vivek Subramaniam(iCreate/Fintellix) in order to put together a mentorship program for product companies. We iterated over 10–12 calls about the format, audience, focus and how things will be run. Once everything was nailed down, Ashish took the lead of curating the first playbook and the facilitator was Shankar Maruwada(EkStep).

You can see the level of planning which went behind the scenes of the first playbook.

Planning for the First Playbook led by Shankar Maruwada(EkStep)

Pallav Nadhani(FusionCharts) & Ambarish Gupta(Knowlarity) were part of the first playbook and added lot of valuable insights and others benefitted from this learnings.

Ashish was a splendid host for the first playbook. I still remember the yummy samosas and kachoris that we got during the break and I still remember Ashish helping his office boy in serving tea to all the participants. I was blown away by the simplicity and the humbleness of Ashish. Thanks to Nikhil Kulkarni(Flipkart) for capturing all learnings in a subtle way.

The next goal was to conduct Playbooks around Product Management & Sales in different cities. I remember Amit Ranjan(then Slideshare) & Amit Somani(then MakeMyTrip) helping us with the Product Management Roundtable in Delhi and Aneesh Reddy(Capillary) helped in curating the Playbook. Ankur Singla(then Akoksha) then did a wonderful piece on Notes on Product Management — insights from Slideshare / MMT / ex-Google PM.

Amit Somani(then at MakeMytrip) & Amit Ranjan(then at Slideshare) led the playbook

Ashish Gupta also helped in connecting with Samir Palnitkar(ShopSocially)who kicked off the PlaybookRT in Pune. Sandeep Todi(then Emportant)helped with the blog on Challenges in Building a Global Product Software company from India. It was a little challenge initially to get the right audience, but we just got few good people like Mohit Garg(MindTickle) help in inviting few founders for this playbook.

I got to read a wonderful blog post by Sridhar Ranganathan on Products and I did reach out to him to see if he could help us with the Playbooks. He liked the idea and Aneesh did the selling to him. Sridhar travelled to different cities and did the first playbook for us in Chennai & Hyderabad.

The attendance for the Hyderabad playbook was thin, but the session was very interactive and the 7–8 folks who attended, had a lot to take away from the discussion. Here is what was captured by one of the attendees Don’t try to solve every customer problem by a line of code.

I learnt a lot from Sridhar’s playbook on product management. Vijay Sharma(then Exotel) captured the learnings of the playbook here Product RoundTable Bangalore @ Vizury Office

Sridhar Ranganathan(Credibase) leading the Product Management Roundtable at Orangescape

We did a late beginning for Mumbai and thanks to Avlesh(WebEngage) for helping us in starting the movement with Sandeep’s support. Avlesh disappeared in the middle of the playbook and he had lots of documents to sign as it was a saturday… But I remember Sandeep holding the fort till Avlesh came back and shared his learnings of building WebEngage.

One of the early playbooks on positioning that Shankar Maruwada(EkStep) did at Freshdesk just to get Girish hooked on to the format 🙂

Organizing and hosting a playbook is no small feat. It has taken us a lot of time to put together the following checklist. Feel free to use it if you would like to put together something similar for your community. We have built new initiatives like Cohorts, etc using the same principles.

iSPIRT was misspelt most of the times in the early days 🙂

Curator Checklist

  • There cannot be more than 12–14 participants. The sweet spot is 10–12 participants. Minimum number is 5.
  • We must select participants with similar levels of maturity in the context of the topic. (Over time we should develop a predicted coherence score and see if that prediction is valid based on post-RT data collection.)
  • Adequate discussion should take place with the Facilitator on the topic. It should be sufficiently narrow. It should not be about batting as a whole but about how to play leg-spinners. There would be a Plan B by the Facilitator if the topic ends up being too narrow. It is wiser to err on the side of being too narrow, rather than being too broad.
  • It is mandatory to for a first-time Facilitator to attend a PlaybookRT for at least one hour.
  • Curator should discuss Facilitator checklist. This discussion should happen before selection of the topic.
  • Four weeks advance notice should be given for PlaybookRT if it is not tapping into a pre-curated participant list (e.g. BEX or InTech50). This is to ensure cross-city participation.
  • Postmortem call (30 mins) is mandatory. Participant feedback and other learning should be discussed in this call. At the end of the call Curator should assign an overall rating (on a scale of 5) to the PlaybookRT.
  • Participant feedback for NPS Score must be collected.

Facilitator Checklist

  • You must select a topic that you are comfortable with. You must have expert practitioner knowledge about this topic.
  • You should reach out to startups to scope out the specific topic areas you’ll cover.
  • You should be part of the curation (i.e. shortlisting) of the participants… you must try and get participants at the same level.
  • You must do the homework on the final participants. You must learn about the startups by visiting their website. You must also understand the challenges faced and expectations from the PlaybookRT (this information is in the form filled by the participant).
  • Identify 2–3 participants that could be anchor attendees — folks who will trigger conversations and also add value to the conversations.
  • Engage the participants for the first 30–45 mins to break the ice. You should go beyond introductions — Something on the lines of: We are struggling to do xyz. The goal is to create an atmosphere of trust so that they spell out more details.
  • Participants are continuously requested to chime in with their views. You should also make sure that everyone speaks in the room. For instance, Shankar Maruwada asks very specific questions to participants along the way. He is able to do this because he has done homework on each participant beforehand.
  • Seating should be such that people can see each other.
  • Make sure that the focus area of the RoundTable is 6–8 points. It is difficult for participants to retain more than.
  • Encourage the usage of whiteboard with participants. This allows people to change position and brings energy in the room. Peer learning is vitally important. Don’t be a sage on stage.
  • Share list of books/videos/tools that participants should use after the RT.
  • Ensure there is a break taken after 150 minutes.
  • At the end, summarise key learnings by each participant. Everyone speaks for at least 2–3 mins.

My job has been very simple, just keep hunting for the Curators & Facilitators and allow them to make the magic happen 🙂

Access the complete list of PlaybookRoundtables here. Some learnings from the Playbook Roundtables have been captured here by my friend Rajan(then Intuit). 90% of the Playbooks did get a NPS Score of 80+. Special thanks to Rajan who kept pushing for this 🙂

The Design Thinking playbook in Delhi by Deepa Bachu

From the 50th PlaybookRT

Shankar helped in putting together the 50th Playbook and it was good to get some folks who had attended the first playbook joining this one.

Product positioning is all about connecting emotionally to your prospective customers — Insights from the Positioning and Messaging PlaybookRT

Playbook at Kayako which was led by Paras Chopra, Pallav Nadhani & Varun Shoor

Mavens are trusted experts who pass knowledge to other founders in a pay-forward model in small intimate learning sessions.

Some of our Mavens are

Aneesh Reddy, Pallav Nadhani, Amit Somani, Amit Ranjan, Avlesh Singh, Deepa Bachu, Deepak Prakash, Girish Mathrubootham, Niraj Ranjan, Jay Pullur, Paras Chopra, Pravin Jadhav, Rushabh Mehta, Samir Palnitkar, Sanjay Shah, Shankar Maruwada, Suresh Sambandam.

Some of them who are not mavens but have helped us with few roundtables are:
Vivek Subramanyam, Sudheer Koneru, Ambarish Gupta, Phanindra Sama, Abhishek Sinha, Ashwin Ramesh, Shashank ND, Shivakumar Ganesan(Shivku), Krish Subramaniam, Ankit Oberoi, Arpit Rai, Varun Shoor, Dhruv Shenoy, Manav Garg, Naveen Gupta, Rajiv Srivatsa, Sampad Swain, Kailash Katkar.

A big shout-out to Suresh Sambandam for doing the maximum number of playbooks 🙂

Image Design by Rakesh Mondal

Special thanks to Niraj Ranjan Rout(Hiver) & Rushabh Mehta(ERPnext) for introducing the new format i.e the Tear Down sessions and helping early stage(pre-product market fit) companies on helping them find their product market fit.

All the Maven’s have signed the below code of ethics:

Our team of Dedicated & Committed Volunteers who made this happen in each city

Thanks to you who make time in your incredibly busy lives to make these sessions happen.

Companies who hosted the Playbook Roundtables and also hosted some awesome snacks/lunch/dinner 🙂

Many volunteers who have helped in writing blogs for and about the sessions and also help in editing some of my blogs… especially Sairam Krishnan & Kingston David.

I am terribly sorry if I have missed out someone here! I know you will be modest but please do let me know so that I can add your name here. In highlighting your efforts, we motivate others in our quest to make India, a ProductNation…

ProductNation Founders Tribe

There are around 1000+ Founders who have leveraged the playbooks and the list can be accessed here.

Founders right after the Playbook that Paras had hosted at his office 🙂
A recent playbook that we did at WebEngage…you can see the Happy Faces…that is the metric that i measure the playbooks : )

Iam really glad that I will participating at the 100th Playbook Roundtable in Chennai on “Inbound Marketing — Workshop for DIY Global SaaS Startups”. This would be led by Krish of ChargeBee & Suresh of KiSSFlow.

This marks an incredible milestone since our journey began in 2013, and demonstrates the increasing demand for our playbooks every year.

Circling back to my cricket story at the start of this write-up, we all start with an outrageous dream. It is definitely good to dream big but when there is a bigger calling, we should yield to it!

I am so very proud that we’ve reached this milestone. Thank you for your support, and I look forward to celebrating more milestones together in the future.

Thanks to Kingston David for editing this & Titash Neogi for making this look good 🙂

All these guys are waiting for the Next Set of Playbook/SaaS roundtables 🙂 If you carefully see in the big screen…the Big A of the SaaS industry is also asking the same question…Kab hain Next Playbook 🙂

There are hundreds of big and small moments that have made up this journey so far — it is impossible to capture them all here, but I am sharing some of these moments via this photo story — I hope to give you a flavour of the energy and spirit of what made us reach 100!

The first PlayBook Roundtable
A PlayBook RoundTable without Post-its is unthinkable!
In the early days, iSPIRT was often misspelled. 🙂
Typical hustle during a networking break at PlayBook RoundTables 🙂

See more photographs on the FlickR album and few photos here

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On Independence Day, India’s budding product entrepreneurs get the freedom to choose: Introducing the Product Nation Founders Hub(PNFh)

On Independence Day, we at Product Nation have an important announcement to make. This one was a long time coming, as we tried to classify, clear up, and target our efforts for the product ecosystem better. This update is mainly focused on the Playbook pillar, one of iSPIRT’s key initiatives, and will have effects on other fronts as well.

We are reviving some of the initiatives; to others we have added more rigour and form.

Depending on what stage(Discovery, Happy Confused) you are in as a founder you can leverage the iSPIRT programs accordingly. We now have a mailing list we call the PNFT (Product Nation Founders Tribe), where we will update subscribers on the Playbook and other iSPIRT initiatives. If you are not part of iSPIRT, but still want to receive our updates, please fill up the form.

This won’t make you a part of iSPIRT, though, and we reserve the right to extend invitations for smaller, more pointed events only to our members. Our programs like the RoundTables, PNcamp, and PNgrowth, are oversubscribed to, and therefore we extend invites only to curated startups.

Why on Independence Day, though? One, for purely sentimental reasons: our mission, after all is to make India a Product Nation. And two, we’d like to say that will better clarity, entrepreneurs now will have the freedom to choose which iSPIRT programs they want to be part of.

iSPIRT-Playbook LandscapeSharing some of the initiatives classified based on stages:

Pre Entrepreneurship – iKen
This is a boot camp aimed at folks planning a startup or who are in the early stages of their startup. It is based on a ‘by entrepreneur-for entrepreneur’ model and on the effectuation model put forth by Professor Saras Saraswathi. This is a 10-week exercise/task oriented course designed at gaining clarity and action. The participants do most of the work during the week and review happens at a 2-hour meet every weekend. Once they graduate, the community continues to meet to help each other through the journeys.
More details can be seen at ikenstartup.org
City: Bangalore

Discovery – PNcamp(8th October 2016)
This is a boot camp for product people, by product people. It is a day-long coming together of doers: ones who have been there, done that; and ones in the journey of getting there. Orchestrated by hand-picked facilitators, it promises focused, interactive, deep conversations within small, curated groups. PNcamp is a surefire avenue to find inspiration, insights and tips, and connections for life to tangibly get ahead in your product journey.  The 2nd edition of PNcamp is in Pune on 8th October. More details can be seen here.
City: Pune

Happy Confused – Playbook Roundtables
Playbook-RoundTable is one of iSPIRT’s most sought after community events. It’s a gathering of 12 like-minded product startups who are beyond the early stage. RoundTables are facilitated by an iSPIRT maven who is an accomplished practitioner of that particular theme. All RoundTables are conducted on a pay-it-forward basis. The only payment you have to make is to provide your undivided attention and active involvement in the process. Playbook-RoundTables are a dialogue and there’s no monologue. None.
Cities: Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad & Bangalore

Happy Confused – PNgrowth(25-27th November 2016)
#PNgrowth camp is a long term mentorship/peer learning program that is focussed and has only one one aim – category leadership. The second edition is being planned for 25-27th November and only 50 founders will get to be part of it. The theme for this year’s PNgrowth is “Achieving Good Scale”. We will be curating around 50 startups for PNgrowth this year. We have around 14 mentors who will be working with 50 curated startups for the next 12 months.
City: Bangalore

Product Tear Down sessions (Happy Confused & Discovery stage)
Product Tear Down session where SaaS founders offered their product to be teared down by expert SaaS founders and audience. The experienced SaaS founders publish guideline templates based on which they will provide feedback to brave startups. We hope to start this series on a monthly basis. Check details here
City: Bangalore, Chennai & Pune

Growth Stage – F6
A group of six founders whose startups are already making over $25 million in annual revenues, and are hungry to learn from peers about challenges unique to their life stage: namely, hiring sales professionals for tapping global markets and avoiding the mistakes that others have made. This group meets once in a quarter and is a closed group.

SaaS Community – SaaSx
SaaSx brings together best-in-breed SaaS entrepreneurs across India to celebrate, inspire & spark up the spirit of start-up ecosystem. It’s an exclusive invite-only bootcamp, created by SaaS entrepreneurs for SaaS entrepreneurs, as an opportunity to network, learn, and engage with the most passionate individuals in India’s startup ecosystem. We have done three editions and the next one is scheduled in the month of October.
City: Chennai

ProductNation Blog
We have an active blog where there is lot of information for Founders. Lots of learnings from PlaybookRTs have been captured here.

The key mavens who drive some of the Playbook Initiatives at iSPIRT are.

  • Aneesh Reddy, Capillary Technologies (Anchor for Sales Playbooks)
  • Girish Mathrubootham, Freshdesk (Co-Anchor for SaaSx/SaaS playbooks)
  • Manav Garg, Eka Software (Anchor for F6)
  • Pallav Nadhani, FusionCharts (Co-Anchor for PNgrowth)
  • Samir Palnitkar, ShopSocially (Anchor for PNcamp)
  • Shankar Maruwada, EkStep, (Anchor for PNgrowth)
  • Shekhar Kirani, Accel Partners (Anchor for Product Tear own session)
  • Suresh Sambandam, Orangescape Technologies (Co-Anchor for SaaSx/SaaS playbooks)
  • See a complete list of Mavens here

If you would like to apply for any of the initiatives at iSPIRT, please apply at http://pn.ispirt.in/apply

Amal Tiwari helped in designing the infographic & Sairam Krishnan assisted in editing this blog post. 

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Indian Entrepreneurs & The Happy Confused Stage

Last week, I met Sharad Sharma, an angel investor & the prime mover behind the iSPIRT, a think tank for software product startups. For those who have been into software products, he is a familiar face. We’ve met many times before but this time around, we talked about the dangers of mass entrepreneurship, which I’ll keep for a later post. That’s because I stumbled upon a more pressing issue, particularly painful to the Indian entrepreneur: The Happy Confused Phase. I’ll try and paraphrase some parts of the discussion here with a few additions of my own.

What is the happy confused phase?

The happy confused phase comes after the entrepreneur has discovered his customer and found a product market fit. Ideally, a startup would now be ready for the growth execution phase. But in India, the happy confused phase takes over. In mature markets, after finding the product market fit, an entrepreneur hires a team to execute. In India, you can hardly find the right talent (for various reasons). So then, it is up to the entrepreneur to train the existing team and the transition takes longer than you would imagine. This in-between phase, is called the happy confused phase.

Implications of this stage

“The execution team is hard to find in most cases and you end up retraining existing staff to do execution,” Sharad says. This is time consuming. Unless you cross this happy confused phase, most Indian VCs won’t fund you despite having found the product-market fit. Indian VC’s won’t come into a deal too early because they have their exits which is time bound in nature, to take care of. Running out of money is one of the many things that can go wrong in a startup.

Who can help?

Accelerators can help. But there is another problem here. Accelerators in India are time based. Which means, when they run out of time, they have to send the startup away. This is one reason why you would have started hearing of “accelerator horror stories.” After time runs out, many will promise you support but it is flaky at best.

A four month acceleration period is hardly enough in Indian conditions. There are exceptions to this. However, the general idea is that accelerators, especially the ones that take equity in the company, must be stage based.

Mentors can help. Mentors in the same industry as yours, who can help you with deals, are very valuable. They can also help you find talent and customers. However, as veteran Silicon Valley investor Vinod Khosla pointed out at his talk in Bangalore, “It can’t be people who are sideline cheerleaders who have never taken risks.”

Focused events like Uncafe or Playbook Round Tables by iSPIRT can also help. These events help speed up learning. Peers and people who have been in your shoes can help you learn faster. The important phrase here is “ experiential learning,” and not “startup event.”

Conclusion

The existence of the happy confused phase is not the only issue that Indian product entrepreneur has to deal with. With Indian startups, the discovery phase is longer than usual as well. An informed product entrepreneur who is aware of these issues can hack his way through these stages better than his uninformed peers.

If you’ve been in a similar situation and have found a clever way out, leave a comment or write a guest post for us.

Reblogged from NextBigWhat – Post Contributed by Jayadevan