Product pricing is a touchy feely subject, hence the following disclaimers for I get into it… There is NO one-size-fit-all solution to your pricing problem. Don’t look for a one time silver bullet for product pricing. Pricing varies drastically between verticals, products, company stage, etc. This article is meant to give thought frame work around pricing and not a meant to be a perfect...
If you are a product manager like me, working at a startup, you are already wearing lot of hats and always finding scrappy ways to get things done. On a typical day you help define the roadmap, spec features, triage bugs, analyze experiments and shephered launches. Now, How in the world do you maintain your sanity while being on top of all these things? For me the answer has partially been found...
I met Srinivas Yermal from Indygo. In the conversation he chronicled his journey as an entrepreneur in India. Opportunity knocks from up-close He happened to chance on an opportunity that started from his close network. His chartered accountant once asked if he could help build a practice management solution that would help maintain his growing business. Out came Papilio. Breaking the product As...
The future of mobile apps is linked to how humans have evolved and communicated with tools. Consider an inverted pyramid as shown in the image above, with two dimensions growing simultaneously. The first being awareness and the second inter-connectivity. Awareness can also be perceived as manual vs automatic interactions with little input from user. Inter-connectivity is communication between...
In 1986, when I graduated from IIT Kharagpur as a Computer Science major, I had picked up an obsession with building products. Soon after college, I had joined DCM Data Products. DCM like other players in the Indian market, were very focussed on product development, as the product culture for designing computers, or writing compilers, etc was prevalent in that era. We as any other product company...
I recently visited the office of PeopleWorks to meet Hemant Tathod who Heads the Product Management function. Spin-off from the parent Hemant chronicled the initial journey of the formation of PeopleWorks. It began as a need identified by Mr Ram, President & Executive Director of Crossdomain Solutions who was looking for a solution to cater to existing policies of Crossdomain without...
The 26th playbook roundtable was held last week (8th March 2014) at Delhi NCR and brought together over 15 startup and product practitioners to discuss and gain insights on some of the challenging aspects of growth and monetization in product companies. This roundtable was hosted at Eko India Financial Services office in Gurgaon, and was led by Amit Ranjan, Cofounder of Slideshare, and Amit...
Premise: Wealth creation by humans happens in 2 forms, by making “something desirable” or by helping the maker sell it. Everything else is a support function that brings efficiency to these 2 activities. The Web being a communication medium can only help sell something, which happens through some form of lead generation. One might argue that SaaS tools are “desirable” products on the web but the...
This is a true story – one that taught me a very useful lesson. I hope you will find it useful on your journey as well. In 2000, Adobe launched InDesign 1.0 to critical acclaim. With its modern code-base, fresh UI, transparency and powerful text engine, finally here was a challenger to the dominant Quark Xpress. Though it was late by over a year (which v1.0 product is not lateJ) and it was not...
What does the traditional world of manufacturing have in common with the way networked platforms work? How can a basic understanding of factory design help us change the way we think about designing internet platforms, marketplaces and social networks? I’ve written previously about the distinction between pipes and platforms. If you haven’t already read it, you must definitely check it out. It...
