Those who know me well have heard a lot of stories about my experience at Zoho when they transitioned from AdventNet to Zoho. I worked there between 2001-2004 when it was quite a new thing in the indian product ecosystem to talk of Product Management etc. During that period, the company went through a very significant phase of transformation which I was fortunate to be part of, see & learn...
Saikrishna Chavali posted the following question on my blog post about Data & UX being two ends of the product spectrum: I’ve got a question: how did you understand the user when you were in the ad business? Did you ever meet real users? In PM theory, one is instructed to empathise with the user by actually “getting out of the office”. Since it’s quite an important question, I thought I will...
I was catching up with Avinash (@avinashraghava) earlier today and we were chatting about product startups in the country. If you’ve been in this ecosystem, and seen the evolution of product companies, some interesting changes happened over the past few years. Back in 2001, at AdventNet, the Product Manager role was created, and so was the Usability Engineer role (which were primarily UX...
A few days back, Sameer, Avinash and I chatted about my learnings from doing the Product Nation Playbook Roundtables as part of iSPIRT. If you’re curious what they are, here’s how iSPIRT describes this program. We convert conversations into playbooks for product entrepreneurs. Product companies need a different mindset than IT services businesses. They need to anticipate customer needs rather...
We are used to talking a lot about Organisation Structure in prevailing literature. I believe Organisation Architecture is more fundamental and instrumental in taking the company to the distances they desire. Organisation Structure, to me, is a subset or a component of the Organisation Architecture. So what do I think of as the Organisation Architecture? The Organisation Architecture is one that...
Every product that you build has to be used by people. This is irrespective of “who may pay for the product“. This is an often brought up topic of “User vs Customer“. And if the product is used only by machines and not by real people, then it’s perhaps best to call it “technology”. As far as technology products are concerned, a significant factor of differentiation they claim and deliver on is by...
