We are pleased to announce the first Playbook RoundTable for Product Entrepreneurs around Messaging & Positioning. A strong, differentiated & memorable product messaging is essential in creating traction for your product. Effective product messaging speaks directly in the langauage of your target audience. This Playbook Roundtable is brought to you by iSPIRT. One of the initiatives of...
I believe one of the best ways to learn marketing and business in general is to learn from other people’s successes. And in a bid to do that, I am going to bring to you interviews of Indian startups that have taken their products to the world. We will talk about how they got the initial buzz going, where they got their first set of customers from, how did they scale that up, what marketing...
NowFloats – Getting small businesses online in 4 SMSes and 13 minutes! I love clear mission statements, and NowFloats couldn’t be clearer: 9.6 million small and medium businesses need a website. Only 0.6 million have one. That’s 9 million tasks on our desk (and that’s just in India!) I recently got a chance to catch up with Ronak and Jasminder (Jas), 2 of the cofounders of this exciting...
You may find it useful to read the previous post on importance of ambiguity tolerance and questioning for an engineer transitioning to a product guy before reading this post. When I was first tasked with writing new features for an existing product that contained thousands of lines of code I earnestly started reading through the documentation & code to understand how it is structured and to...
Software vendor Stelae Technologies provides a content extraction and automated conversion solution for multiple categories of content. Its product Khemeia™ is a cloud-based technology that combines multiple analytic methodologies into one product. In this interview, CEO and founder Aruna Schwarz discusses the unique nature of the company’s product and shares product development advice for first...
Product companies (especially those focused on the Enterprise) always face pressures, primarily that of cash flow in the earlier years, forcing them to take on more services components. This is especially true in countries like India where angel and venture investments are not as plentiful as in Silicon Valley. This is a trap that product companies will find it difficult to emerge from once they...
The last three business books I read were seemingly all different. “Wired to Care” by Dev Patnaik, “Nanovation” by Kevin and Jackie Freiberg and “Customer Centric Selling” by Michael Bosworth. The first was how humans are genetically designed to care for others, the second was the story behind how the Tata Nano was launched and the third was a book on more effective selling. But there was a...
Everywhere you look, there is an Indian woman in pursuit of an entrepreneurial dream. With a GDP growth rate of 8.2%, women product leaders have a whole reason to be bullish. This International Women’s Day, we choose to celebrate pioneering Woman Product Leaders among us, choose to celebrate the success of these efficacious women. This is not a comprehensive list, and if there are some Women...
As a part of my product management training, I insist on the importance of understanding of behavioral science while managing products. I am both puzzled and irritated when a participant, that is mostly an MBA educated product manager tells me – Viveck, can we skip to the section of how to write a PRD as these principles are only relevant to my boss, VP – Product Management. On the...
No one is sure of their exact number, but a census of micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) done a few years ago estimated that there are 26 million small and medium enterprises in India. It is well known that this market is fragmented and price-sensitive and, hence, large companies have tried to tailor products and services to target this market. But, is that enough? Take a look at the...
