Category Archives: Being a Product Manager

I learned Ideo’s secret to innovate & design for human emotions đź”®

Part of the reason I love being in product is how success is directly tied to identifying and solving the right problems. Of course this requires sifting through data, but numbers are useless if you can’t contextualize them. And that requires empathy — for customers, for people that work with you, and our eco-system. My colleague John is great at this, and my first port of call to confirm if this course was a meaningful investment to get better at my craft. Thanks for your nod, John.

The Insights for Innovation course from Ideo is spaced over 5 weeks. Primarily online learning, it has continuous collaboration with other learners, and weekly mentor calls. Don’t expect tons of theory as its designed to be application-first. Isn’t learning by doing is the best? Here’s what I learned:

#1 Don’t let your design marginalise minorities.

An idealistic statement that’s weightier now then ever. As builders, we fail to realise that equity can be built into good design. If we did, it wouldn’t take a revolution for product packaging to drop racial references. Pause for a bit and imagine thinking about eating habits when designing a product for a healthy lifestyle. Who did you think of?

Did you those consider humans that work in hazardous work environments like mining, or those that don’t have enough access to daily nutrition? To contextualise the latter, the addressable market for that problem is close to a billion people.

#2 Study extremes even if you only build for core users.

PMs shouldn’t come across like this when advocating for their extremes users.

Customer advocacy is expected of product people. But too often personas limit our thinking with an averaged description of our majority users. Extremes are humans whose needs and environment varies drastically from the typical user or use case. Addressing edge case scenarios expands the range of your solution – not the job to be done. Extremes amplify every other user’s needs, stretching our thinking to come up with breakthrough ideas that expand the range your product serves.

In hindsight, this is how we innovated procure-to-pay at Zycus in 2010. We bet that insights from early (SMB) adopters would help us build for the majority and cross the chasm where most products fall through. PS: If you haven’t read Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore, please do. One exercise in the course prompted thinking about extreme experiences one could have in a vehicle. What comes to mind? Some extreme ideas at the end ⬇️.

Continue reading I learned Ideo’s secret to innovate & design for human emotions đź”®

Will your career growth survive COVID-19? 5 prompts to set personal goals today!

I hope you are safe and doing well through the ongoing health and humanitarian crises. The Coronavirus pandemic caught us by surprise, and has left us between repealed norms and an uncertain future. The end isn’t imminent but we’re optimistic.

If you work on the front lines or in an essential category serving this pandemic, my sincere appreciation. Thanks & God bless you. 🙏🏻

If not, you probably have a story for your career-from-home in 2020. And that’s going to be my favorite conversation starter for learning, coaching, networking, interviewing and small-talk in 2021. How did you prevent your personal development from stalling? If you don’t an answer ready, this post might give you some ideas.

In May, Janus offered me to host a session at his Product Management peer group. I took the opportunity to dive into this question with fellow Product leaders and get inspired by their stories from these troubled times. I want to share the leading questions I used (#5 added later) to help frame that story.

Prompts to set personal development goals 🤔

  1. What is the 1 thing you had/knew pre-COVID, but didn’t use it much, and are now using/applying it more than before.
  2. What Skill(s) or Technique(s) you learned pre-COVID are you applying right now?
  3. What book kept you inspired during COVID?
  4. What’s a Skill or Technique you want to sharpen in 2020?
  5. How did you give back to the community during these times?
Continue reading Will your career growth survive COVID-19? 5 prompts to set personal goals today!

Our Android app for LandmarkShops India

I’m so excited to talk about the brand new native experience we delivered to our LandmarkShops customers in India. And even so because it sports Google’s latest visual language — Material Design!  Read on at our official Medium blog.

LAUNCH: Our latest Android app for LandmarkShops India – Web Team @ Landmark Group

We’re thrilled to tell you that we’ve just launched a shiny new app for LandmarkShops India, using Google’s latest visual language - Material Design and I’d love to tell you more about it! Game of phones Earlier this month, IDC confirmed that Android’s dominance of the global smartphone market is expected to grow further, from 81% to 84% in 2016.

As part of the Landmark Group’s Web Team and my Product Management portfolio includes leading digital engagement channels for Shukran – web, mobile, in-store engagement – and mobile apps for LandmarkShops in UAE & India. More on LinkedIn

What does my LinkedIn cover image convey?

I am not a huge fan of LinkedIn’s cover image. Its an odd-sized banner that gets overridden by ads and the profile header itself. The flip-side of not having one is that it makes your profile look very lame. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words.

A couple of iterations later, I put up a metaphor of my professional side as the cover image. What do you make out of it? I’d love to hear in the comments section.

My LinkedIn Cover Image (Mar 2015) - Click to enlarge
My LinkedIn Cover Image (Mar 2015) – Click to enlarge

The Top 5 Deterents to Agile

The beauty of Agile is the fact that its just about a few principles. – which we also summarized in a few words. Everything else is under your control. And on your way from classic waterfall practices to adopting those principles, you are likely to encounter some serious blockers. I’m attempting to list out the top 5 along with the Agile principles that they block.

1. Large teams

Blocks: Velocity, Working together

Scales of Agile (Courtesy: ebizq.net)
Scales of Agile (Courtesy: ebizq.net)

It is uncommon to have a cross-functional team of teams with 30-50 folks working on the same product. While the Agile deliverable is a few days of work, large teams working on a single release will generate a huge deliverable that is more coupled, has wider impact and demands extensive testing.

2. Fixed-scope planning

Blocks: Working software, Simplicity, Accepting change

Courtesy: 352inc.com

Teams that have a fixed-scope mental block start off by committing a scope for the next release, and then estimate a future release date. Since estimates are often incorrect, the release is delayed to deliver the committed scope – which is just not Agile. Forget about changing requirements, folks won’t even drop a few stories or acceptance criteria at the very end, to meet the committed date (time-box) – at the cost of Continue reading The Top 5 Deterents to Agile

Our interpretation of the Agile manifesto

As part of a recent Agile training, we were asked to summarize the basic tenets of Agile in 3-4 words. Our group,  with Mahesh, Yuti, Apeksha, Shahdab, Dhwani, Jay, came up with the following:

1. Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

Deliver value to satisfy

2. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.

Accept changes willingly

3. Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.

Prioritize, Breakdown, Deliver frequently

4. Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.

Close collaboration, daily

5. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.

Continue reading Our interpretation of the Agile manifesto

Don’t be desperate to crash time

Everyone in the software industry, has at some point of the other, been part of a delayed project. The result is often a war room where all the big shots put their heads together to save face. Imagine one such meeting where everyone is focussed on crashing time. Management is willing to compromise margins and the project manager has been given the authority to do anything it takes to deliver the project sooner.

All eyes are on the development team to see what they can do to expedite. Desperate, the project manager thinks he has an offer the Dev manager can’t refuse. He takes pride in offering to add more resources to the project. The Dev manager, however sane otherwise, goes ballistic on hearing this and yells out: ‘9 Women Can’t Make a Baby in a Month’. There is a moment of silence. Then, the noobs giggle, the big shots calm down and the PM walks out of the room.

9 mothers can't make a baby in a month
Courtesy: piedtype.files.wordpress.com

This is Brooks’s law, and every software engineer gets exposed to this mantra/joke – whichever way you take it – in the very first years on the job. If Pressman was as bold as Fred Brooks, he would’ve added it to his Software engineering bible. This is 100% true Continue reading Don’t be desperate to crash time

What went into our lovely wedsite

Aditi had done her bit of making our wedding cool by getting me to do a pre-wed photo shoot – that turned out awesome thanks to Frames of Mind. It was my turn and I had to prove to the lady (who had agreed to risk her life with me) that as a Product Manager I was creative enough, and thought of surprising her with our own “wedsite”. When the question of build-or-buy came up, I couldn’t find anything that matched my needs and the flexibility I needed to fiddle with it. So without much thought, I created a sub-domain, grabbed a copy of Bootstrap and got glued to NetBeans. I released the first cut online in less than 8 hours of work, and improved it over the next couple of weeks part-time (24 hours in all I guess). And yes, it really cost me $0, because I had already purchased hosting space and the prasadgupte.com domain.

It was AditiWeds.PrasadGupte.com for the guests…

With domain & hosting available, this was just 24 hours of work @ $0
With domain & hosting available, this was just 24 hours of work @ $0

The pre-wed shoot had given us quite a few fun pictures, and together with the nimbu-mirchi trick Continue reading What went into our lovely wedsite

Top 3 configurability needs in B2B apps

What is configurability?

Configurability is the ability to change application behavior (functionaility) and the interface by changing application parameters, without the need to rewrite code. This can either be done in the front-end by users, or through back-end configuration. On the other hand, customization requires making change to the application code to modify existing or support additional requirements. Sophisticated application design (e.g. web hooks) can permit customization by externalizing the new functionality. But modifying existing functionality in a multi-tenant application is really not advised.

Top 3 / All-time favorite requirements

  1. Web forms / Custom fields: Customers may require the flexibility to add additional fields to a particular document/record (object). Moreover, there would be a need to validate the input to the field based on data-type, or a script. For example, tenant A may require tax-ID as an additional integer field on the customer information object, and also make it a mandatory input. This has grown to be complex enough to support attachment fields, link to master data, controlling access to specific roles/user, etc.
  2. UI customization: Customizing the user interface involves matching the look-and-feel with the customer’s branding: corporate color scheme and adding their logo. Allowing users to customize their own data views (record lists, reports) is just assumed to be there. Sometimes controlling data elements could also be a requirement. (E.g. End-users wont know certain information, so a section needs to be hidden for them. But the next user in the workflow Continue reading Top 3 configurability needs in B2B apps