For the last fifteen years and more, there has rarely been a meeting of visionaries and practitioners in the IT industry where somebody does not offer the view that the days of IT services are nearing an end and the product movement will create new heroes for the industry and country. In each of those fifteen years, the gap between the revenues of the services firms and product pioneers has only...
Some Takeaways from the #PlaybookRT on Effective Product Mgmt: Applications and Benefits for Technology Startups and SMB
The fifteenth #PlaybookRT with focus on Product Management was held at PubMatic office in Pune. It was led by Shrirang Bapat (VP Engg at PubMatic). Shrirang set the stage for RT by sharing the importance of ‘What NOT to do’ which comes from years of experience. To accentuate his point, he shared a story of introducing handhelds in the market beginning of 1997. Through this story he explained the...
The push for products
By investing in the product marketplace, India will do the same leapfrog as it did with the mobile revolution. Recently I had the opportunity to witness the silent revolution that is taking off in India – a revolution that has been overshadowed (and somewhat suppressed) by the media-popular IT giants! For a long time I have wondered why the IT giants with so much intellectual capital and...
120+ companies in 120 days – Come join the movement to revolutionize India's Software Product Landscape
iSPIRT’s roundtables create a buzz in the Indian software product community. Shehjar Tikoo doesn’t like conferences and seminars. The entrepreneur of e-commerce enabler Unbxd finds them boring and one sided. But all that changed when he attended the iSPIRT roundtable on Product Management in Bangalore. Says Shehjar, “I liked the fact that the audience was very carefully chosen as were the...
India as a Product Nation is in good hands – Insights from the Lean Sales Roundtable
The fate of the future of India as a product nation is in the hands of 20 somethings and 30 somethings. Whether it is sheer luck or sheer brilliance or sheet hard work, or all three I don’t know, but what I do know is that the future of India as a product nation is in good hands. I attended a Lean Sales Playbook for about 3 and a half hours. I had no idea how the time flew as Pallav...
iSPIRT Sales RoundTable – Startup Sales, Lead Generation, Channel Partners
First of all, huge thanks to Vizury for sponsoring great food and the premises to hold the round table. Many thanks to Aneesh, NRK Raman and Srirang for leading the session and providing valuable inputs. And of course, to all the participants for the energetic discussions and knowledge sharing. Here are the key takeaways from my notes. Please note that there are several nuggets of practical...
Fellow Entrepreneur, Ask not what the Buyer can do for your company!
For about 2 hours in the RoundTable session, the intense discussion was centered around how to be ready for M&A. Buyers, who have an interest in your company will ask about your product, your markets, your customers, your revenues. As an Entrepreneur, what is your first ask in return? Usually they are any of the following. What will the buyer pay us? Is this the right time, should we wait for...
iSPIRT Playbook Roundtable: Positioning and Messaging – Lot of it is common sense!
If your grandmother does not understand your message, then you might as well not communicate is the crux of what was discussed during this Roundtable facilitated by Shankar Maruwada and Nandita Sinha. This roundtable discussed the ‘What’ of the positioning and messaging and not the ‘how’ of the positioning. There was very little theory except perhaps setting the context and the entire session was...
Don’t try to solve every customer problem by a line of code.
My First playbook roundtable. iSPIRT’s first initiative at Hyderabad, was a 4 hour insightful RoundTable that was organised by the ProductNation free of cost for the attendees, which most Hyderabadi entrepreneurs gave a miss and are sure to be regretting the missed opportunity and the learning possibility that it offered. Sridhar Ranganathan, ex-VP of InMobi, a Product Guru and Aneesh Reddy, the...
Product RoundTable Bangalore @ Vizury Office
We had some very good hosts @ Vizury office and also joined by their product folks Shiju and Subra for the Product Round table that was organized last Friday. The other awesome people who were part of the event were Siddharth Ramesh (Exotel), Jose (Weavedin), Vinay Simha (Dfy Graviti), Sridhar (ex-Inmobi), Avinash Raghava (Product Nation), Nari Kannan (The man with experience of over 7 startups...