As usual, the 16th iSPIRT RoundTable was a great learning experience. Many thanks to Avinash Raghava & iSPIRT for conceptualizing it, and to Helion Ventures for sponsoring the venue and the snacks. Dhruv Shenoy of Knowience Consulting, a well-known Marketing Guru, was the facilitator, along with Rajan from Intuit. Thanks, Dhruv and Rajan, for an educational and entertaining session. I used to...
PromptCloud is a powerful cloud-computing DaaS (Data as a Service) engine involved in ‘Big’ data acquisition. PromptCloud crawls data that’s spread all across the web and converts it into meaningful insights. It was founded by Prashant Kumar. Before starting PromptCloud in late 2009, Prashant was at Yahoo! with their data team working on Yahoo! Frontpage which was one of its hottest...
The first step: build customer empathy Microsoft built test tools in Visual Studio 2005 to address a virgin test market worth about USD 3 billion at the time. However, the product met with little success and did not create much excitement in the test community. A later in depth observational research of testers to see how they work—what’s their workflow, what tools did they use, what’s their...
Similar to the Chief Executive (CEO) of a company, a Product Manager should also question the process that goes into the creation of a product / service. Treating the organization like a living and breathing creature, a Product Manager should have in-depth understanding of the workings of its vital organs that are responsible for the following: Listening to external and internal business related...
Too many choices make your customers just stop with browsing. They don’t buy and move on! So if you have too many looky-loos and not enough purchasers, you may be giving them Choice Overload! Too many Free Trial users and not enough conversions? Choice Overload may be one of the problems in that case also. Whether you are an e-commerce business or designing a user interface, you may be...
I recently delivered a workshop on building winning products. The audience identified that it was important the customers loved a product in order for it to be a winner. It also came up that consumers increasingly want to buy things that thrill and delight in addition to simply doing what they were designed to do. Today, things around us from Gillette razors to Apple devices exude desirability...
(Post 3 of a series on quick research and usability techniques. Start-up’s can use these techniques fairly easily to connect to and understand their end users better, as well as maintain usability standards on their products.) Previous posts in this series showcased two discount usability engineering methods – ‘Expert Usability Review‘ and ‘Heuristic Evaluation’. Both these methods...
The last date to apply for this bootcamp has been extended to 16th August especially for Product Nation subscribers. TiE-IQ Bootcamp is a no contract and free 60-day bootcamp where the participating startups will have an opportunity to create products, launch companies and walk away with their spoils and a lot of learning. This first edition of the TiE-IQ Bootcamp is restricted to B2B technology...
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...
“Why isn’t there a place where we can store all our medical information?” is the question that bugged Shashank ND, Founder of Practo.com. Jamming together with a classmate from NITK Surathkal, they found a solution and founded Practo.com – a cloud based service that covers over 8,000 doctors and manages the records of nearly 3 million patients. Shashank, I was looking at your website and I was...
