Holy Grail of Product Management

Layoffs — The process takes a life of its own

noreply@blogger.com (Irfan(Abhi)) — Sat, 25 Jul 2015 21:49:00 +0000

Layoffs is one of the most painful process any company can go through and it effects everyone from people who are let go (and their lives disrupted as a result of it), to people who stay back (and are demoralized) and the management who has to lead them post layoffs. While this process is as painful as it is, it is sometimes needed and unavoidable.

Strong Leaders

noreply@blogger.com (Irfan(Abhi)) — Wed, 19 Feb 2014 06:11:00 +0000

I usually write on diverse topics such as: Product Management, Data Science, Marketing, Entrepreneurship, and Leadership. This article is part of a series of articles on leadership. Being a strong leader is about many things, but none more important than emotional intelligence. I have written a detailed blog on emotional intelligence, which is yet to be published, but today I am going to focus on the decision-making ability of a leader and how emotions and intuition play a role.

The business world is complex and fast-moving. Deep, rational thinking may sometimes be a luxury that a leader cannot always afford. Strong leaders make quick decisions under extreme pressure and it might seem like a gut-feeling or random decision. It may almost feel like they are being impulsive, but that is not the case. Conditions under which leaders have to make decisions sometimes preclude the use of rational analysis. Their information may be limited or the pressure of time forces them to make quick judgments. There are limits to rationality and many psychologists believe that much of the cognition occurs in a realm of intuition outside the norms of consciousness.

My colleagues always ask me how I make such risky decisions so quickly, and I tell them that it comes with experience. Now that I am in my mid-thirties, I have been in senior leadership positions and led companies and products for quite a long time. Over time I have made many critical decisions and developed an intuitive process which helps me make quicker decisions; they might seem like gut decisions but they in fact are not. You develop an intuitive process for recognizing patterns and seeing through the missing information. Intuition is a composite phenomenon involving interplay between knowing (intuition-as-expertise) and sensing (intuition-as-feeling). As a leader, you are going to make 10 decisions a day and all you can do is hope that you make more right ones than wrong, and that the net result is positive. You cannot let the fear of making wrong decisions slow you.

When it comes down to it, it is the tenacity, grit, optimism, and the ability to fail-up that differentiates a leader from a non-leader. I will now restate the list compiled by Amy Morin, a psychotherapist, but add my thoughts and personal experience on each of the traits strong leaders need to possess/ get rid of to be successful.

Wasting Time Feeling Sorry for Themselves – Strong leaders know that life is not fair and do not dwell upon variables which they have no control on. They do not spent time feeling sorry for themselves because of how they were treated. They accept the results of their actions and are always willing to move on.
Give Away Their Power – Like my grandfather always used to say “Never let anyone or anything have so much power on you that they can hurt you”. Strong leaders take control of a situation and never let their emotions get in the way.
Shying Away from Change – The biggest fear of strong leaders is not change, but being stuck in a monotonous life. Leaders actively seek change, they embrace it. One of my biggest fears is getting stuck in the same job or same company. I encourage everyone I mentor or who works for me to always be learning, always be changing and always be seeking to better themselves. Life begins at the end of the comfort zone.
Waste Energy on Things They Can’t Control - The only thing you have control over is your response to uncontrollable situations. As a leader you have a risk-it-all attitude and you are bound to go through peaks of success, valleys of failure and everything in between. You will find people who will love you and people who will hate you. Strong leaders don’t waste energy worrying about things they can’t control.
Worry About Pleasing Others - One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in my life, which was Dhivya’s (my mentor, friend, mentee, and a business partner) philosophy and was aptly worded by John Gardner is “You come to understand that most people are neither for you nor against you, they are thinking about themselves. You learn that no matter how hard you try to please, some people in this world are not going to love you, a lesson that is at first troubling and then really quite relaxing.” I have an obsessive need to make sure everyone loves me and if someone does not, I end up spending a lot of time trying to please them. I have been working on this for quite sometime and am getting better at it (This is one reason why I never ventured into sales, because you have to take constant rejections)
Are not afraid to feel emotion - There can be no success without passion and there can be no passion without emotions. The ability to connect with fellow humans is one of the most important skills one needs to have to be a successful leader and lead a happy life. I will talk more in detail about this in the emotional intelligence blog I have been working on for 2 months. I will also cover in detail the learning of the course “Inspiring Leadership through Emotional Intelligence” by Richard Boyatzis. For those of you who are interested in learning more about emotional intelligence should read the book “Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ” by Daniel Goleman and the book “Emotional Intelligence 2.0” by Travis Bradberry. These are two very popular books on the subject. Coaching someone on emotional intelligence can be very tricky and I general get about 70 – 80% success rate. I have been successful at mentoring people, almost a 100% on every subject except on emotional intelligence. It is sad how many current and future leaders today do not even have a basic understanding of emotional intelligence. Disclosure: I recently tried teaching the course “Inspiring Leadership through Emotional Intelligence” on a mentee and it didn’t work. I am yet to completely understand why, but I think teaching emotional intelligence is very tricky and it is best to tell the person what you are trying to do upfront and get a buy-in. In my case, I think it was a combination of not telling the person all the techniques of improving emotional intelligence but also I found the second reason in the book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman (Daniel Kahneman is an Israeli-American psychologist and winner of the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences) According to the the New York Times columnist David Brooks recently declared that Kahneman and Tversky’s work “will be remembered hundreds of years from now,” and that it is “a crucial pivot point in the way we see ourselves.” They are, Brooks said, “like the Lewis and Clark of the mind.” Once I started reading this book to understand a few questions I had on emotional intelligence, I found this book providing deeper insights into human irrationality and intuition.
Fear of Taking Calculated Risks - Strong leaders have a high risk tolerance and tend to employ risk it all strategies. They analyze all the variables and take calculated risk as there can be no success without taking risks. They have the conceptual ability to see all the possible outcomes and control the execution in order to result in a favorable outcome. The planning fallacy is “only one of the manifestations of a pervasive optimistic bias,” Kahneman writes, which “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases.” Now, in one sense, a bias toward optimism is obviously bad, since it generates false beliefs — like the belief that we are in control, and not the playthings of luck. But without this “illusion of control,” would we even be able to get out of bed in the morning? Optimists are more psychologically resilient, have stronger immune systems, and live longer on average than their more reality-based counterparts. Moreover, as Kahneman notes, exaggerated optimism serves to protect both individuals and organizations from the paralyzing effects of another bias, “loss aversion”: our tendency to fear losses more than we value gains. It was exaggerated optimism that John Maynard Keynes had in mind when he talked of the “animal spirits” that drive capitalism.
Giving Up After Failure - As long as every failure brings you closer to your ultimate goal, failing is not a bad thing. The important thing is to learn from it and get one step closer to your goals. Failure can teach you a lot more than success and as a leader you are going to fail many times. If you are not failing, then you are not taking enough risks, not pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone and obviously you will not fully realize your potential. I have mentored 28 people so far and currently mentoring 3 more. I failed mentoring one person in 2013 and I can honestly say that I learned more from that one failure then any successes I had mentoring in the past.
Fearing Alone Time - Strong leaders use alone time to plan, reflect, and reenergize for the next race. Whether they were victorious or defeated in the past competition, they know that every individual run is just a sprint and ultimately they need to remain strong for the marathon.
Expecting Immediate Results - Staying power is the most important trait for a strong leader. Good grades and fancy education is not going to guarantee you success. Strong leaders do not expect automatic success. They work hard. They compromise and make sacrifices. They make friends along the way and maybe even a few sharks (someone they have a lot to prove to so that they can say you were wrong about me) in their life. They take their school breaks as an opportunity to engage with the world at large, gathering all kinds of experiences and constantly bettering themselves.

Which of these traits do you need to improve on? It is important to critically evaluate yourself and work on these qualities to become a strong leader who your employees would love to be influenced by.

Serial Entrepreneurs

noreply@blogger.com (Irfan(Abhi)) — Wed, 04 Dec 2013 06:47:00 +0000

It has been exactly 2 years since I decided to close my previous (and first) startup. After pondering over it for a few months now, I have finally officially kick started my new startup. I decided to start it with one of my previous co-founders, but am still on the hunt for a third member. My last startup, which began as a winter break project, became surprisingly successful and led to the creation of Faqden Labs. We shut down the startup due to various reasons, which will be discussed in later blogs.

Until 2011, I launched almost one iOS app per month. The process of going through the opportunity assessment, product discovery, building a MVP product, and finally launching it was very gratifying. The rush of launching a new app and marketing it cannot be matched by anything else. Since December 2011, I have been busy with my job from Yahoo to Personagraph, now combined that with my kid and I’ve had no time to think of a new startup idea or pursue an app, which made me miss that rush in my life. I am currently the co-founder of Personagraph, which was built in an incubator model. Incubators as entities have capital and they attract entrepreneurs looking to build businesses. It is like building a new business unit inside a large company.

I am sure you have heard of the term Serial Entrepreneurs; people who love to start company after company and are unable to do anything else. There is another category of entrepreneurs called Parallel Entrepreneurs who start multiple companies simultaneously. A parallel entrepreneur is someone who can’t do one thing at a time. They need to be working on multiple startups at once to feel accomplished. Serial entrepreneurship put all their eggs in one basket, so to speak. “If VCs spread their risk across numerous companies, why should not we”, says Scott Rafer, 38, the former CEO of the search engine Feedster. You can’t be a parallel CEO, but you can be a parallel entrepreneur. The key is to have a full-time dedicated CEO running the store once the idea has been proven.

I wanted to use this opportunity to touch a little bit on what you need to ask yourself if you are a first time entrepreneur. Before venturing into any start-up it is critical to ask yourself if you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur? There are many ways to tell if you have that inner spirit, that burning desire to be better than you were the day before, and to really determine if you've got the potential to develop a genuine entrepreneurial mindset. Below are few traits discussed by Matthew Medney (Founder & CEO of DOG Media NYC) in one of his blogs which I am summarizing here:

You need to be a natural born leader and this is something you will know very early on in your life. Have you always been the captain of your football team or any sport team you played? Are you incapable of turning off your brain, always conceptualizing new ideas 24/7 365 days year round? You always dig deeper and try to understand the ideas at a deeper level and emotional level. You are obsessive with a never give up attitude (almost a Richard Branson Syndrome), are motivated by people who perfect their art/skill, and are inspired by greatness and have a collective mind. It’s never been work to you everything you do for your company is fun, engaging, and exciting. You've never felt that you've truly worked at all.

Unlike the school playground, the entrepreneur world is kind to misfits. Those square pegs may not have an easy time in school, they may be mocked by jocks and ignored at parties, but these days no serious successful startup can prosper without them.

The mental qualities that make a good entrepreneur resemble those that might get you diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome: an obsessive interest in narrow subjects, a passion for numbers, patterns and machines, an addiction to repetitive tasks, and a lack of sensitivity to social cues. A lot of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs find the symptoms of Asperger's "uncomfortably familiar.” Some people joke that the internet was invented by and for people who are "on the spectrum", as they put it in the Valley. Online, you can communicate without the ordeal of “meeting people.”

ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder - people who cannot focus on one thing for long) is another entrepreneur affliction. As David Neeleman, the founder of JetBlue says: "My ADD brain naturally searches for better ways of doing things. With the disorganization, procrastination, inability to focus and all the other bad things that come with ADD, there also come creativity and the ability to take risks."

Emotional Courage

noreply@blogger.com (Irfan(Abhi)) — Thu, 28 Nov 2013 20:14:00 +0000

I was thrust into the world of leadership very early on in my professional career due to a pure chance event. When Verizon’s vice chairman Lawrence T. Babbio promised Wall Street that Verizon was adding more than 10 million new lines to the 36 million now equipped with digital subscriber line (DSL) service, a product called Golden Source was funded to meet these objectives. I was one of the developers assigned to this product for DSL loop qualification processing. I reported to a Project Lead who reported to an Engineering Manager. In 2003 while monitoring the data migration scripts at around 3:00 AM, I had a disagreement with my lead on how to handle a technical issue and we ended up arguing over it. During this time, my lead entered into disagreement with his manager for various reasons, and I and his manager became very close. She appreciated my decisiveness and started relying on me for critical tasks.

A few weeks later, she was promoted and was asked to head a new critical initiative for Verizon at a new division. During the same time, my lead had already resigned due to disagreements with his manager. Since the project was almost complete, they decided to put me in charge of Golden Source Product as a project lead, just 2 years into my professional career as a software engineer. Ever since my childhood, I was always consistent in my response to what I wanted to become when I grew up; “I want to do a PhD and become a scientist” I would say. Turns out I ended up not perusing a PhD and becoming a scientist, and here I was being asked to lead a team of 15 developers with many engineers a lot more experienced than me. This was going exactly the opposite of how I thought my career will go.

I was not trained as a manager, did not have any business school training, and no mentor and no HR training. One fine morning during a staff meeting with my Vice President, I came to find out that I was now the Project Lead for one of the most important (even though almost complete) products at Verizon. As my luck would have it, the Golden Source initiative took a surprising turn with new goals and we were funded another few million dollars to embark on new objectives, which ended up resulting in it becoming a more important and more visible project. I had daily calls with the Group Chief Information Officer (CIO) and visibility for this project was unlike any. Since the previous engineering manager was already moved to another division, it was difficult to move her back and hence I was promoted to the Manager role with multiple leads reporting into me within a few months. I had gone from being a developer to becoming a manager in less than 6 months in 2003 and within 2 years of my professional career.

Both my product and I succeeded and went on to win three awards in 2004 at a Verizon event in New York. In this blog I am going to write about emotional courage. In future blogs, I will cover emotional intelligence, courage, passion, manager vs. leader, and many other critical leadership topics.

So what is Emotional Courage? Do you have what it takes to be a leader? Leadership isn’t something you can learn in a book or in an academic setting. It is part nature and part nurture. You can only nurture leadership by practicing it in real life situations. Leadership at its heart is the courage to take action in uncomfortable and difficult situations. This is called Emotional Courage according Peter Bregman (CEO coach and regular contributor to HBR blogs) who defines it as “standing apart from others without separating yourself from them…speaking up when others are silent… [and] remaining steadfast, grounded, and measured in the face of uncertainty.”

You cannot teach someone leadership in a classroom setting. Leadership can only be learned by doing the actual work, giving people the chance to practice and make difficult decisions in extraordinary circumstances. Best way to give them this opportunity is by putting them in real-world scenarios where they get to make real life difficult decisions where they feel a sense of emotional risk. The only way to teach courage is to require it of people.

Speaking up in difficult situations is another crucial skill for emotional courage and leadership. As Rick Phillips, chief communication officer at Nationwide Insurance says in an article in Communication World, “[Communication] is not a spectator sport, and you have to stick your neck out. You can’t always make the safe play.”

Every manager I have worked for in my career has read innumerable books on leadership and attended multiple training programs, but not all of them were great leaders. What separates a leader from a follower? There is a massive difference between what we know about leadership and what actual leaders do. I have never seen a leader fail because he or she didn’t know enough about leadership. It’s not about knowing what to say or do. It’s about whether you’re willing to experience the discomfort, risk, and uncertainty of saying or doing what it takes. These are the things that distinguish powerful leaders from the weak ones.

In the heat of the moment, when the pressure is on, and your emotions are high, how will you react? Will you let the emotions get better of you, or will you show emotional intelligence and emotional courage. The only way to teach courage is to require it of people. To offer them opportunities to draw from the courage they already have within them. To give them opportunities to step into real situations that they find uncomfortable. I recently met someone who I wanted to train to become a leader and the best way I knew how to do that was to recommend that we do a startup together. There is no better experience than co-founding a startup. The stress one goes through as a startup CEO is unlike any other. The emotional roller coaster one goes through within themselves and with their family and life partners due to startup stress would train even the least experienced person on how to be a leader. Whether the person will pursue it or not, whether the person succeeds as a startup founder or not, he/she will truly learn the hard lessons of leadership, such as remaining clam under pressure, handle stressful situations, show emotional courage, and be decisive. It might be helpful to skim over my other blog “Fear of failure - A motivator for success?” as well.

Passionate Leadership

noreply@blogger.com (Irfan(Abhi)) — Wed, 27 Nov 2013 23:04:00 +0000

This is the 3^rd blog in the leadership series I have been writing on for the past few days. My two previous blogs were “EmotionalCourage” and “Emotional Intelligence”. Leaders need to have many qualities to be successful, but none-is more important than passion.

At the risk of sounding too kumbaya, passion isn’t just a wild, loud, take-no-prisoners sort of quality. True passion requires honest commitment to something, which you feel strongly about, and staying committed through difficult times. When a leader is passionate, people feel a deep sense of being led in a worthy direction by someone who is committed to something more important than his or her own individual glory.

In the HBR Blog by Joel Stein called Boringness: The Secret to Great Leadership, Joel talks about how his images of great leaders “were based mainly on movies and sports. I figured great leaders did a lot of alpha-male yelling and inspirational speechmaking.” In doing research for a book, though, he discovered that most really effective leaders aren’t the loud, pizz-azzy kind. He found, instead, depth of commitment and a quiet attention to the details that allow that commitment to bear fruit.

What qualities of leaders result in people to accept another’s leadership? According to Erika Andersen, Forbes contributor and author of “Leading So People Will Follow”, there are six qualities that people most want to see in their leaders.

Farsightedness
Passion
Courage
Wisdom
Generosity
Trustworthiness

Authors Robert Kriegel and Louis Patler cite a study of 1,500 people over 20 years showing the value of finding your passions within your life:

“At the outset of the study, the group was divided into Group A, 83 percent of the sample, who were embarking on a career chosen for the prospect of making money now in order to do what they want later, and Group B, the other 17 percent of the sample, who had chosen their career path for the reverse reason, they were going to pursue (their passions) what they want to do now and worry about money later. The data showed some startling revelations:

At the end of the 20 years, 101 of the 1,500 had become millionaires.

Of the millionaires, all but one-100 out of 101- were from Group B, the group that had chosen to pursue what they loved (their passions)!”

I wanted to underscore using an example based on my personal experience on how following your passion can lead to success. By 2006, I had already spent 5 years at Verizon and worked/led innumerous products like iView, Golden Source, DSL, Design Services (high speed network provisioning system), Home Networking, and was ready to call it a day. I had 3 offers on hand from investment banks in New York and also had a MBA admission at IIMC (Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta), one of the best business schools in India. I was invited to lead BAAIS Video product. BAAIS Video was part of the Verizon’s FiOS initiative (a 32 billion dollar investment) and handled the video aspect of the triple-play (voice, data and video). This product was started in 2005 and two leaders had already failed at delivering the product on time. I wrote a deeper technical blog covering my experience on this project in the blog “Global Software Development using SCRUM”.

I had a choice to make. I said to myself “ONE LAST TIME”

By the time, I was invited to look into the product; the Engineering Manager was already fired, 2/3^rd of the team had quit, and the Senior Engineering Manager and Director of Engineering were desperate to turn around the product and had no clue on how to fix the issues and business (which funded the product) had lost all faith in the engineering team to deliver this product.

Once I made the decision to stay and lead this project, the first thing I did was talk to the remaining team (which was no more than 10 people by that time). I told them that I am honestly committed to turning around this product. I discussed my previous experiences with turning around products at Verizon and tried to show genuine passion. I heard everyone’s point of view and presented my thought process and invited everyone in the dialogue to challenge me. Passion balanced with openness goes a long way. As a leader, I rolled up my sleeves and jumped into the architecture and code. I directed all the communication to business through me, to protect the team from any external fire. It was going to be my failure if we failed and teams success if we succeeded (the buck stops at me).

8 of those 10 people ended up staying and committing to the product. We hired more people and by Sept of 2008, we were a 100+ development team. This team was the most sought after team at Verizon, in that everyone wanted to be part of it. We were the most funded product at Verizon, and the youngest team with many of my leads under 23 years of age, and the most successful product of that year. We were a turn-around success story and won awards.

It was the best team that I had the privilege to work with and I still miss working with such high caliber people. I was happy to have led them to success. I succeeded because this was my passion, which helped me rally my team, and my honest commitment to turning around this ship was contagious enough to help me recruit new blood in the team.

A person’s passions can ignite other people’s passions and bring energy into their lives. Real passion provides inspiration that’s much deeper than cheerleading or a temporary emotional high. When leaders are truly passionate, people feel included in the leader’s commitment to making important things happen. That’s satisfying on a deep level, and it lasts. If you want to raise your influence, then you need to be a passionate leader..

War Commander And Competitive Strategy

noreply@blogger.com (Irfan(Abhi)) — Tue, 12 Nov 2013 18:32:00 +0000

While at business school, Competitive Strategy and Marketing Management were my favorite subjects and I ended up specializing in them. Of the two, Competitive strategy was my favorite simply because it caters to a human’s basic desire to compete and win. As a co-founder and president of my current company Personagraph, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of a larger company, I end up using a lot of teachings from the competitive strategy class by Pai-Ling Yin and the Advanced Competitive Strategy class by Michael Cusumano. As a product manager in my previous jobs, I benefited a lot from what I learned from these classes. The only other class, which taught me more, was the System Architecture class by Prof. Edward Crawley. You can read my detailed blog on the System Architecture class here.

I have been obsessed with the War Commander game by Kixeye for the last couple of weeks now. It is an extremely addictive game and I ended up spending a lot of money buying weapons, for the first time ever. I finally understand why Zynga is not doing so well in comparison to Kixeye. Apart from being targeted for a different demographic, it is an extremely well made game. The hiring video of Kixeye highlights the type of games they make and the company culture.

I have spent many hours on the game seizing a lot of territory by attacking and capturing enemy territories and it reminded me of what I learned in the Competitive Strategy and Game Theory classes. It took me some time before I recollected what I had read in the book Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant by Renee Mauborgne. One of the central themes of the book is that the competitive strategies are modeled after the archaic war strategies (resources are limited and the only way to win is to defeat the enemy and capture their resources). My favorite quote from the book is “To focus on the red ocean is therefore to accept the key constraining factor of war- limited terrain and the need to beat an enemy to succeed and to deny distinctive benefit of the business world: the capacity to create new market space that is uncontested”.

Initially, when I started playing this game, I was continuously attacking enemy installations for resources (oil and metal). But once I recollected many of the Blue Ocean strategies and Coopetition theory, I started searching for new resources (oil fields and metal deposits) and was able to expand resources much more quickly. It is amazing how many of these lessons I applied and practiced in the War Commander game. Business schools should make games like these mandatory part of the course material.

I will write a lot more about Coopetition, Competitive Strategy, Blue Ocean Strategy and Business Strategy in next few weeks. My main goal for this blog was to highlight that business schools that focus a lot on theory, could benefit by incorporating games like War Commander in their curriculum which provides a platform to practice many of the theories taught in class. Those of you who have read Sun Tzu’s (a military strategist from china, on of the greatest military leaders in history) book The Art of War will be able to apply many of those strategies in this game as well. If you have not read Sun Tsu, grab a copy from amazon and read if you plan to make a career in strategy.

A Tribute to Shakuntala Devi

noreply@blogger.com (Irfan(Abhi)) — Sun, 10 Nov 2013 03:10:00 +0000

Google’s tribute doodle to Shakuntala Devi on her 84^th birthday today made me proud to be an Indian. I am sure a lot of young people from India have no idea who she is. Popularly known as the “Human Computer” she was a great inspiration to many Indians of my generation. Her talents earned her a place in the Guinness Book of World records in 1982.

I started disliking Google since they started spamming the world with Google Plus, their so-called Social Network (a.k.a graveyard). However today’s tribute made me find a newfound respect for them. Google seems to want their Doodles to serve as both a celebration and an educational tool, keeping people informed of characters and events of which they might never have been aware. Shakuntala Devi will certainly be remembered more fondly due their efforts.

We grew up reading her books on mathematics and puzzles in numerous novels. She published the first book in India on homosexuality in 1977, which was amazing given the conservative state of India and the world in general on the topic at that time. Arthur Jensen from the University of California, Berkeley, studied her and Jensen’s findings were published in the academic journal of intelligence in 1990. Her mental ability at arithmetic’s was unparalleled and unmatched by any one of her time.

The legend had received no formal education in mathematics. At the age of 10, she was admitted to first grade at St Theresa’s Convent in Chamarajpet. But her parents could not afford the monthly fee of 2 Rs. She was thrown out of the school after three months To cite an example, at the Harvard University she was asked to derive the 23rd root of a 201 digit number which she answered in five seconds whereas a computer took 15 seconds. The people assembled there were drawn to a standing ovation for her skill. Her brainpower made her world famous and she visited countries all over the world and wherever she went she astounded her audience.

While at Ratnam Residential Junior College, a colleague of mine name Sashidhar was our schools version of Shakuntala Devi. He could do arithmetic faster than it would take time for us to input the data into our calculator. When asked how he does it, he said he was trained in the Trachtenberg system of arithmetic, which makes the high-speed arithmetical calculations with a remarkable degree of accuracy possible. Jakow Trachtenberg (1888-1953) developed this system during the seven years he spent in Nazi concentration camps during World War II to keep his sanity.

I tried, all the mental mathematics techniques including the Mental Abacus, Vedic Mathematics, and Chisanbop (finger counting method), all to no avail. It just takes too much time to master them, but I appreciate those who have the patience to master them. Scholars, often on the humanities side, prefer to have as little to do with numbers as possible. But numbers, in my opinion, are a part of life, so we better learn to live with them.

My favorite book by Shakuntala Devi is “Puzzles to Puzzle You” which I used while preparing for my software engineering interviews in India. People like Shakuntala Devi are few and her departure is literally a loss for the world.

Field of Marketing

noreply@blogger.com (Irfan(Abhi)) — Sat, 09 Nov 2013 22:27:00 +0000

I sat down, ready to write down my thoughts on marketing. Thirty minutes later I could not come up with anything original. There is nothing which has not already been said by Mr. Philip Kotler. For those of you who do not know Philip Kotler, he is unofficially known as the “father of Marketing”, the first person to receive the “Leader in Marketing Thought” in 1975, and placed 4^th in the “Most Influential Business Writers/Management Gurus” category. His book Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning, and Control is the most widely adopted book in business schools around the world today.

Marketing is both an art and a science. The science aspect of marketing (also called formulated marketing) is easy to grasp and most engineers who gravitate towards marketing tend to do well in this field. The artistic side of marketing requires a lot more creativity and takes a longer time to master. I have read almost every book written by Kotler accompanied by many other books on Marketing, and after four years in the field, I can say I have yet to feel 100% confident on the subject.

The average lifetime of a CMO or marketing executive is 18 months, which highlights the unpredictability of this job. Marketing is about increasing the perceived value of a product so that the buyer’s utility (perceived value – price a customer is willing to pay) is higher than the competitor’s product. This said, given the same quality, the buyer will purchase the product with the lowest price. It is part science, part art, and part a function of competitive landscape, which is a complex system dynamics model (competitive strategy, time delayed non-linear cause and effect relationship).

Buyer Decision process: The customer will choose product A over product B if (perceived value of product A – Price of A) > (perceived value of product B – price of B)

The job of marketing is to make sales irrelevant. People in Sales try to reduce the price to make the sale while Marketing is about increasing the price, therefore increasing the profitability of the product/company. Sales is transactional whereas Marketing is relational. Sales is about fulfilling need, whereas marketing is about creating need and increasing demand.

There is constant criticism about marketing and how it creates needs. However the book Principles of Marketing Management addresses this point well. It suggests that needs are inherent to humans and cannot be influenced. Human “wants” are something more closely tied to the product. Humans need food, but want a sandwich. Demand is something, which can be influenced by price and is about a specific product/brand. Customers demand subway sandwiches. This book argues that marketers’ influence wants and demands, but needs pre-exist marketing.

Marketing is one of the most versatile fields and I highly encourage and respect people pursuing it. But many people seem to be gravitating towards it with starry eyes and false hopes that it will be an easy field to conquer. I can promise you that this is not the case, marketing will end up being the toughest field you can choose as you grow into the leadership roles.

The reason Marketing is so complicated is because attributing the uplift in sales to a specific marketing campaign is not easy. At least not in the past, before the data driven marketing field gained traction. Also before the advent of Internet, it was much more difficult to directly correlate the influence of a marketing campaign to a specific sale. I will write a separate blog on attribution marketing later as it is a large field within itself.

Another reason why Marketing is difficult is because a lot depends on the product value proposition and competitive landscape. Your products’ competitive landscape will dictate how easy or hard it is to differentiate the product and the position it will take in peoples mind. If you recall from your undergraduate marketing classes, marketing is about 5Cs (Marketing Strategy) and 4Ps (marketing tactics). It is the STP analysis (Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning) which connects the strategy to the tactics. The process of anticipating needs and defining a product which will address those needs and positioning it in the market at a price point where buyers will see the value of your product over your competitors in this hyper competitive world is a very difficult task. Most of the time, Marketing is brought in very late in the product life cycle, a few months before the product launch rather than from the very beginning of the product development process. By this time the product has already been defined and built and it is too late for marketing to conduct a customer feedback study and influence the product development. We as Marketers are asked to create a marketing campaign for a product, which might not have been completely validated, or value proposition hypothesis tested. Sales is looking to marketing to provide the leads, and senior executives are breathing down your neck for demonstrating the ROI (return on investment) on marketing spend, while also looking at the sales number to see the impact of marketing budget. This field is no child’s play.

There are two types of marketing roles prevalent in the Silicon Valley. Product Marketing and Field Marketing. Product Marketing is about communicating the product to the world (3 of the 4Ps – price, placement and promotion, while product management is about product features, 4^th P). As a Product Marketing Manager you are responsible for product launch including online marketing campaign. Field Marketing is about mostly outbound marketing including attending and publicizing at conferences, trade shows and events. It is about press release and building strategic partnerships. In my opinion Product Marketing is the toughest part of the job, but I am no expert and it depends on how the role is defined in a specific company. Most companies combine Field and Product Marketing into a single role, while others spilt them. The two roles should be divided but more on this later.

Model Thinking

noreply@blogger.com (Irfan(Abhi)) — Mon, 04 Nov 2013 05:02:00 +0000

My previous blog on “Model Thinking – The Fox and the Hedgehog” discussed the differences between the Hedgehog’s and the Fox’s style of cognitive thinking and decision making. In this blog I am going to talk a little more about why we should study models. In upcoming blogs I will talk about sorting vs. peer effect model and also 2x2 model which helps with decision making during issues involving competing choices.

So why study models?

We study models to become more intelligent citizens of the world, understand data and patterns around us, and get our logic straight during a decision process. We watch the world around us and try to make sense of it. As human beings we are wired to rationalize everything and find patterns. I highly recommend reading the book “Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Taleb is a Philosopher who has spent the better part of his post investment banking career and life studying problems of uncertainty, probability, and knowledge. His three books: Antifragile, The Black Swan, and Fooled by Randomness are must reads for leaders and decision makers who have to deal with real life decisions under uncertainty in their day to day lives. The book argues that luck is often mistaken for skill, but I have my own opinion about it, which I will reserve for a future blog.

The human brain abhors randomness. The key point of the book is that the patterns seen on charts or in life is nothing more than figments of our own imagination. It is called Apophenia, which is seeing patterns in random or meaningless data. Humans have the tendency to seek random patterns within information in general, such as with gambling, love, and religion. This argument might seem in contradiction to Machine Learning and the Big Data Analysis theory which is about finding patterns in large data, but it is in fact not. Machine learning algorithms find patterns when they exist, which makes these valid. For example the price of the house is linearly proportional to the square feet of the lot and construction. You can build a mathematical model or equation based model to find the correlation and hence the coefficients of linearity.

Our brains are wired to recognize patterns, whether they exist or not, like watching shapes form in the clouds which is also referred to as Pareidolia. We always feel the need to make sense of our surroundings and events around us. Sometimes, an ability to discern a pattern is very useful, but other times we simply fool ourselves into seeing patterns where there are none. We just can’t deal with arbitrary events. Perhaps, this is one of the reasons why quantum physics – random at its core – is so hard to understand. It is difficult for us to accept that at the core of our reality, there is nothing but uncertainty. I will write about a simple model called “Game of Life”, a one dimensional cellular automata model and also cover the “IT from BIT” theory in future blogs which will try to explain why it is so hard to infer what is going on at the micro level by looking at the macro level, and how complicated micro decisions can get in aggregation.

Even Einstein, one of the founding fathers of quantum physics, could not accept it. He famously said to Neils Bohr, “God does not play dice!” To which Bohr retorted, “Quit telling God what to do!” In this blog I am going to discuss that models help us make sense of the world around us and that we can even build models which can help us understand the patterns.

There is famous quote by George Box where he says, “Essentially all models are wrong, but some are useful”. Models do not give you nicely packaged answers for people who are looking for finality. They are the language of business, economics, academics, philosophy, psychology, and everyday life. Models help you be better at whatever you choose to do. Different models are applicable in different contexts. For example Game Theory is the study of strategic behavior between individuals, companies, and countries.

Models help us become intelligent citizens of the world. To understand segregation between high and low income groups or segregation between different races in parts of cities, it is important to understand models. For you to become involved in a conversation, it is important that you can use and understand models, because models tie us to the mast of logic. Formal models are better at both calibration (how accurate the model is) and discrimination (how fine the predictions are – instead of just saying cold or hot, predict whether it is 80 degrees or 90 degrees).

Models make us think clearly. In any complex event like gambling, stock trading, or horse racing people who use models do better. Models weed out logical inconsistencies and help us think about the consequences of our actions.

Models also help us understand data. There is, what data scientists’ call, a hair ball of data, of which there is no way our mind can make sense of it. There is no way to untangle patterns from this data without models.

Models can help you understand why a certain movie in a theater receives a standing ovation, while others don’t. They help you understand the Arab Spring revolution which overthrew dictators in Egypt and Libya. They help you understand economic growth, and peer effects (why a group of people who hang out together generally look alike, act alike and think alike). They help you understand how people around you affect you (You change your behavior to match others around you), and as in the case of Colonel Blotto’s model it helps us decide how many resources to allocate across different fronts in a war.

Models are built for one purpose and we can apply them to many other purposes to help us become more engaged people out there in the world. When we construct models, we get pretty interesting unexpected results.

There are two types of models.
1. Equation based models or linear models (e.g: y=ax+b). These are easy to model and simple ML algorithms can help find patterns and analyze causality.

2. Agent based model: These models have three parts:
· A bunch of agents – people, firms, countries, organizations which are called objects of the models
· Agents have certain behaviors or they follow certain rules. These rules could be optimal rules (rational choice model - Individuals are doing optimal things in the given context) or irrational rules (where they are not optimizing, but rather following simple rules).
· Then finally, the outcomes. What kind of outcomes can we get? We may expect agents following certain behaviors to have correlated outcomes, but when you work through the logic, the opposite is true sometimes.

A blend of formal models and experience is what gives the best results. Smart people use models, but models don’t tell them what to do. Models make us humble. If you lay out all the logic we realize we had no idea what was going to happen. They help us see the full dimensionality of the problem. People with lots of formal models do better than people with one formal mode. If you want to be out there helping change the world in useful ways, it is really helpful to have some understanding of models. We have a moral obligation to leave a better world for the mankind after us than the one which was handed to us.

Customer Development and Product Development Organization

noreply@blogger.com (Irfan(Abhi)) — Sun, 03 Nov 2013 00:31:00 +0000

My previous blog was about building a successful product which your customers will love. I define a successful product as one which is valuable, usable, and feasible. Valuable, making the customer want to pay for it. Usable implies that in the result of their purchase, the user has a good experience while using the product. Feasible implies that the product can be built within a reasonable time and within budget.

I highly encourage everyone to read Steve Blank’s book “The Four Steps to the Epiphany”. This book along with Eric Ries’s book “The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses” are must reads for any Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Steve Blank is a Silicon Valley serial-entrepreneur and academician who is recognized for coming up with the Customer Development methodology, which launched the Lean Startup movement.

One of the key points Steve Blank’s stresses in his book is that most companies ignore the customer development process until after the product development phase when it might be too late to modify the product to fit the market’s needs. This is a big topic in and of itself and requires a dedicated blog. I am going to mostly focus on the Customer Creation and Company Building phase of the customer development process.

So again, the main tenant is to focus on customer development parallel to product development. During the first two phases of the customer development process you are mostly focusing on problem-solution fit- using what I call the product discovery process, defining an MVP and validating the product in the market by testing product-market fit, and discovering the business model and creating a go-to-market strategy. The combination of my previous blog and the blog “Product Management Approaches - New Product vs. Existing Product” should give you a good idea of these concepts. I do understand that I am skimming over these and will try to address each one of them in individually dedicated blogs in the future. But more than that, I highly recommend grabbing the book “The Four Steps to the Epiphany” and giving it a quick read. It is a long book, but there is 30 pages of abstract that you can read online if you want to get a quick understanding of the concepts.

The stage where most startup founders falter is in the Customer Creation and Company Building phase of the customer development process. The skills required to succeed in these phases are different from the earlier phases. When you are still figuring out the product and market fit you are mostly adopting an approach of “start-fire-aim”, but now that you have discovered and validated a customer and discovered a repeatable sales process, you need to start focusing on building the business. This phase of defining business processes and creating a company is what most startup founder’s dread, because it goes against their no process system.. Business processes have gotten a bad reputation due to an over emphasis in large organizations and its tendency to promote bureaucracy.

The lack of having a process works when you are a small startup company still discovering the market, but once you have customers coming in faster than you can handle, you can’t expect to be on top of everything. It worked in the past, because you as a CEO had the time to micro-manage ever aspect of product and customer development process. While I recommend creating a business process to automate the product development and customer delivery/support of your product/business, I also recommend you not do it before this phase. It can limit what your product will become if you start defining processes too early during the product development.

To create a scalable business you need
· Process
· People
· Tools

So you need hire the following people to handle various aspects of the business
· Product Management group – Since you are going to be busy focusing on sales, meeting your key customers to keep them happy (in case of an enterprise product) or evangelizing (in case of consumer facing product), you will not have enough time to be thinking about the product, market, competition, trends and the roadmap

· Marketing group – You need a team or individual who can take care of both product marketing (blogs, social media, communication, product launch plan) and field marketing (events, conferences, out-bound marketing)

· Customer support group – Responsible for that 1-800 number and customer support website. This group is there to address your customer’s issues with usage of the product and also filing bugs into the product backlog to improve the future products

· Business Development group – You need dedicated people focused on lead generation, pre-sales, and closing the contracts

· Account Management/Partner relationship managers – If your product is enterprise focused you need account managers who can keep current customers happy and also expand the business through those customers.

· Architects – You hacked together a product. Good, but now you run into the issue of scalability, performance issues. You need to re-architect the solution until you get it right. Note, re-architecture is never really done. More on this in a future blog.

· Engineering management – Your startup has a lot of engineers. It is not possible for your technical co-founder to manage all of these engineers directly. You need middle ground managers who can manage various modules

· Program Management – You also need dedicated program managers to manage the execution of your product – managing schedules, reporting status, and removing roadblocks in the path to product delivery.

· UX design team – You need interaction designers, visual designers, and interface designers. Design, specifically interaction design, is something I am passionate about and I will write a lot more about it in future.

· Operations group – Someone needs to keep track of all the money that is coming in, that you are burning on salaries, and what needs to be paid out to your channel partners or affiliates. Operations workers keep the lights on.

I propose the following organization structure: Customer Development group run by Chief Operating Officer (COO) and Product Development group run by Chief Product Officer (CPO) both reporting to the CEO. Product Management group sits in the intersection between Customer Development Group and Product Development Group. I believe this would lead to the most organized and effective Customer and Product Development.

Silicon Valley Innovative Spirit

noreply@blogger.com (Irfan(Abhi)) — Sun, 03 Nov 2013 00:04:00 +0000

Yesterday I met a serial entrepreneur in my office who was demonstrating his latest product. He has been around the block for a long time, and has founded many startups in his long career as an entrepreneur. A former Citigroup CTO, he has also held many leadership positions in the past and is currently working on a startup called Avegant. I have never seen a product quite like this. The startup's prototype virtual retinal display (VRD) delivers insanely sharp definition and a realistic image even with low-resolution sources by projecting directly into each eye using an array of two million micromirrors.

This technology is better than the Google glasses as the Google glasses displays images on the glass and the quality is nowhere close to the one you get from the direct projection on the retina. It felt as if I was completely immersed in the experience. The quality and experience was better than watching my 65 inch HDTV. This device hopefully will finally bring to life the promise of Virtual Reality to the consumers. We have been promised a truly immersive virtual reality experience for decades and every device I have tried in the past did not live up to its hype.

You can watch the video demonstration of the device here.

He was a perfect example of Silicon Valley’s innovative spirit. He was sharper than the three of gentleman, myself included, in the room who were running multi-million dollar companies and was able to get to the essence of our product pitches in less than 30 seconds. He then turned around and gave us ideas on how to improve our products, our messaging and communication, marketing, and business strategy. Each of us run different types of companies and his ability to grasp the nuances of each business was something I have never seen before. At almost half his age and this being my second startup, I had to wonder, have I had enough of my startup adventure? Here I was talking to a person who after multiple startups in his 35+ years of career, was more energetic, sharper and had more career ambitions than I did. He was a true inspiration and the epitome of what makes Silicon Valley the mecca of innovation.

I think I finally get why most entrepreneurs end up becoming serial entrepreneurs. Once you have done the whole startup scene, it is difficult to give up the rush. Even if you are burnt out and end up taking a job in one of the larger companies for a while, you will miss the high you get as an entrepreneur and will sooner or later run back to yet another startup. If you are a first time entrepreneur you should read my blog “Building a Valuable, Usable, Feasible Product” which has tips on how to develop a successful product. I am working on a few other blogs related to product management, marketing, and competitive strategy which are relevant to being an entrepreneur.

I have been thinking about Silicon Valley a lot lately, especially its innovative, pay-it-forward, and entrepreneurship culture. I plan on writing a few blogs on it in the coming weeks.

Building a Valuable, Usable and Feasible Product

noreply@blogger.com (Irfan(Abhi)) — Fri, 01 Nov 2013 04:50:00 +0000

Most of what I write in this blog is applicable to software products especially in the consumer space, but it can be generalized to other types of products as well.

What do you need to build a great product? Obviously you need an idea first.

Let’s say you stumbled upon an unmet or unstated need in the market. Or you have an idea, which can meet the needs of customers better than current products in the market. This product could be differentiated by its unparalleled user experience or by its decrease in price. If you remember from my earlier blogs, I said that buyer utility is value perceived by the user minus the price. You can increase the buyer utility by either increasing the value and keeping the price the same or providing the same value at a reduced price. Decreasing the price involves decreasing the cost. You decrease the cost by increasing the operational efficiencies, which requires innovative ideas. For example, Dell reduced the cost of desktops and laptops by using build-to-order approach, which reduced the inventory cost by adopting just-in-time inventory. By delivering computers directly to consumers it was able to save on the channel cost (retailers). Both of these savings were passed on to consumers in the form of reduced price.

Good, so now you have an idea. So how do you go about building a product? The first thing you want to do is validate the idea. Who do you talk to? The obvious choice would be to talk to friends and family. What if they do not like the idea? Do you drop the idea? Even if you friends and family do not think it is a great idea, you should still pursue it further, because they might not be your target customers and hence, might not have the appreciation for the need your product solves. You want to make sure you validate your idea with your target customers. If you are in the Silicon Valley you can find them all over the place in meet-ups or coffee shops. There are literally hundreds of entrepreneurs and innovators/early adaptors all over the place in Palo Alto, Castro and SF. They are more than willing to listen to your pitch, bounce ideas off of and be the guinea pigs for your beta version of the product. You also want to do feasibility study to make sure the product is something which can be built within reasonable time and budget.

Now that you have validated the idea, what’s next? This is the most important step in your journey to building a great product and eventually a great company. You need to select co-founders. It is rare that you will have all the skills to build the product and also manage the business side yourself. And as the saying goes, two heads are better than one. There is no simple answer to this question. The first thing you want to do is conduct a honest assessment of your own skills. What are you good at and what skills do you lack. This will help you decide on the complimentary skills you want to look for in a potential co-founder.

My personal preference is three co-founders with complimentary skills, so that there is a tiebreaker.

1. If you are not a rock star engineer yourself, the first person you want to look for is a technical co-founder who is great at writing code.

2. You also need a world class Sales/Marketing (depending on whether the product is consumer or enterprise) guy who can sell. I have seen many great products fail in the market because of a messed up marketing strategy or an incompetent sales executive.

3. Finally you need a creative designer

You want to make sure that everyone in the company is writing code, designing, or selling/marketing the product. You don’t want employees working as support staff at such an early stage of the company.

You need to especially pay close attention to who you select as your co-founders. You are going to go through everything together. You want to make sure your co-founders have the grit to stand with you. The gender of your co-founder is also something you should look out for. You are pretty much going to go through the same roller coaster of marriage except the sleeping together part. You are going to have good days together along with the bad. Being a founder takes a lot out of you and you need your co-founders to carry you through the highs and the lows as you would for them. If you cannot stand the person outside of the office, he probably should not be your co-founder.

Next you want to hire 2 or 3 developers/designers who will be working closely with your technical co-founder. These are what you call employees zero. You are looking for people who have the mindset of for working in startups. If you are in the bay area, this will be easy to find. People who want to work for startups are generally hoping to one day be entrepreneurs themselves. They understand the uncertainties of the startup world and are glad to work for lower salaries but higher equity for the potential upside in the event of an exit. These are the people who make companies like Google and Facebook possible.

When hiring designers you want to hire someone who is mastered in both visual design and interaction design. Interaction design is about tasks, functions and information flow. It maps the user model to the system model using the interaction model. They create what you call wireframes.

Once the interaction design is complete and has gone through a few rounds of usability testing, you are ready to start engineering. Visual design and engineering (development) in parallel.

Visual designers add color and emotion to the wireframes. They add the look and feel. Visual design is a creative process and hence more for the kind of people you will work with will be different from the engineers. Most of these Visual Designers do not even have a college degree, or even if they have one, it is not that critical.

The product you build needs to valuable, usable, and feasible.

While you are building a product, you want to start working parallel to the go-to-market strategy. If your product caters to enterprises, you want to start the customer development process in parallel. For a consumer product you want to conduct usability studies along with product development. It is important to constantly recheck the interaction design with the target customers so that you are constantly building a usable product.

If you are building an enterprise product, you want to create a consumer advisory group from your target prospect companies. This group can help you not only provide valuable feedback during your product development phase but they can also be the pilot customers and can act as an initial reference. Your sales representative should be driving these efforts and his primary responsibility should be to find pilot customers who are wiling to try your product before launch once the beta version is ready. These volunteers are aware that your product is not yet mature and might have bugs that still need to be worked out.

If your product is a consumer focused product like a mobile, then you want your marketing person to start developing a go-to-market strategy and also start working on the product marketing. They need to start blogging to evangelize the product while it is being built and the problem it solves. They need to differentiate current solutions in the market and figure out why they are sub-par. They need to start building relationship with the bloggers who can cover the product during launch. They need to create social media handles and start creating buzz to increase the products WOM (word of mouth).

While a product manager is essential to defining the product, it is generally the combination of three co-founders who fill the role of a product manager in the early stages of a startup. Eventually as the startup pickups, the CEO or interaction designer fills the role of a product manager. Once the company starts moving from the introduction phase to the scale phase, the CEO needs to focus a lot more on sales, operations, and making sure customers are happy. This is when you generally hire a dedicated product manager.

Always be learning - A life lesson by Bruce Lee

noreply@blogger.com (Irfan(Abhi)) — Sat, 26 Oct 2013 18:28:00 +0000

Like every Indian growing up a small town in southern India, I grew up watching Bruce Lee movies. Bruce Lee was the greatest and most influential martial artist in modern times and his life story has been an inspiration for generations. As an Asian, you can’t not know who Bruce Lee is. All his life has been about capturing his internal demons and conquering one goal after another. Coming from modest means, he achieved world fame both as a martial artist and as a movie star. The level to which he developed both his body and his mind in the pursuit of martial arts was simply incredible.

Bruce Lee started out with huge goals in life and achieved so much in his short life that he definitely has some motivational life lessons we can learn from.

“Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it.” – Bruce Lee

As a kid growing up in a small town, he was a great inspiration of what you can achieve if you put your mind to it and are willing to learn. You are either living or dying and if you choose to be living, you need to be constantly learning. I took up Martial Arts at a very young age of 9 and pursued it for 6 years. Those 6 years were the toughest form of training to develop one’s body and mind and they helped me learn dedication, commitment, pursuing goal relentlessly, constantly learning new techniques, and not to be a superior fighter but to be a disciplined disciple.

My advice would be to always be open to the lessons around you no matter where they come from. Everything in life can teach you something if you are open to receiving the lesson. An 18 year old taught me more about myself in the last 3 months than I could learn in the the best of schools.

Every person has good and bad in them, but they can definitely teach you something. You cannot just restrict yourself by saying you areonly going to learn from a person who you view as only good. Even great scientist and philosophers have some bad in them if you look close enough, which does not mean you should not learn from them. You take the good with the bad and learn what you can from the person.

Product Management Approaches - New Product vs. Existing Product

noreply@blogger.com (Irfan(Abhi)) — Sat, 26 Oct 2013 17:59:00 +0000

I wanted to compare and contrast the product management approach for a new product vs. an existing product. As a Product Manager, you need to be conscious of which phase your product is at in the product life cycle.

If you are taking up a new job, then it is critical that you keep track of the stages of your product as not all product management approaches will fit to all types of products. Also, different Product Managers are good at different product management approaches.

For a new product the following steps generally take this logical order:

Opportunity Discovery ==> Opportunity Assessment ==> Opportunity Validation ==> Product Discovery ==> Product Validation ==> Finalize Metrics (KPI) ==> Execution ==> Go-to-market strategy ==> Launch ==> Post-Launch Assessment

Opportunity discovery occurs mainly through ideation, where you explore various ideas, but often the founder in a startup or other senior executives in a large company tell you what you need to explore. You are mainly trying to find a customer’s needs, which are either stated and unmet or unstated needs, which your company can solve by bringing a new product to market.

In the Opportunity Assessment phase, you evaluate the product idea to decide whether it has any legs. You want to achieve something quick, instead of writing a long MRD document. For more coverage on the topic you can read renowned Silicon Valley Product Management thought leader Marty Cagan’s blog here. The goal of the opportunity assessment is to evaluate if the company should pursue the idea and if the answer is yes, then assess what it will take to succeed.

During the Opportunity Validation step you are validating your hypothesis with the target customer. If the target customer is not excited about the opportunity, then the necessity of the product is not genuine enough that the customer will eventually pay for a solution.

In the Product Discovery phase you are quickly iterating through various solutions to meet the customer’s need. In this phase you develop a rapid prototype, which you can present to customers for confirmation. In the Product Validation phase, you present the prototype and gain valuable feedback for further refinement.

If the target customer does not resonate with the product, then either one of the following is true:
· You are talking to the wrong user
· Your solution/product does not meet the user’s need
· The necessity is not valuable enough for the user

The first two reasons are fixable, but if you have stumbled upon a need, which is not critical enough for the customer to either use/pursue a solution or pay for it, then you are better off abandoning the idea.
After the product validation phase, you need to define product by using business metrics, with which you can measure the success of the product in the market. Defining success metrics is a separate blog topic in and of itself so I will skip past it for now.

Finally, you need to develop the product. You must create the go-to-market strategy and launch the product. After launching the product you need to measure the product performance against the metrics you have created earlier. It is important to continuously compare against those metrics and iterate on the product features until you are moving the needle on your metrics.

Each of these phases are important individually and are based on where the product is in its life-cycle (development, introduction, growth, maturity, decline), you might be involved in one or more of these activities.

Compare this to the product management approach you will adopt for existing products where you analyze the usage, develop metrics, and build features to meet business goals. Most of these metrics (business or product) will revolve around acquisition, conversion, and retention. Engagement features are part of the retention metrics.

For an existing product the following steps make logical sense:

Usage Analysis ==> Create Metrics (KPI) ==> Execution ==> Launch ==> Post-Launch Assessment

While taking up a new job, it is critical for you to know which product you are going to lead (new vs. existing) and what stage of its life cycle it is at. These two dimensions will help you choose the best product management approach for the given situation. In this blog we covered the differences in Product Management approaches between new and existing product. I will address the differences in product management approach for a product at various stages of product life-cycle in future blogs.

Model Thinking – The Fox and the Hedgehog

noreply@blogger.com (Irfan(Abhi)) — Sat, 26 Oct 2013 00:47:00 +0000

Someone I love once told me that I overthink everything. Ironically, I started overthinking about why I overthink. After a lot of thought I realized that I try to fit every problem into a model for analysis. Models help me structure my thought process, and help me question my assumptions and communicate my analysis. Most of my thought process is spent in trying to fit the prevailing problem to an existing model, whether it is the Game Theory model, Wisdom of Crowds model or Markov Processes.

“Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful” - George E.P. Box

Models do not give you nicely packaged answers. Nor are all the models always right. They help you structure your thought process and help you find a solution. I started studying more about formal models in a course I took from University of Michigan on Coursera by Scott E Page. Scott is the Director of Center for Study of Complex Systems. I read a few of his books, one of them being Complex Adaptive Systems. In this book, I found the concept of Hedgehogs vs. Foxes to be intriguing. This concept seems to coincide with the manager vs. leader arguments I find in literature that I studied in the leadership class during my short stint at National University of Singapore.. In Complex Adaptive Systems, the concept I speak about talks about how the Fox knows many things but the hedgehog only knows one major thing. I focused on analyzing my thinking process and where I fall on the scale of fox/hedgehog. It is interesting to analyze who you are, so that you can stop trying to be who you are not.

If you analyze the three circles of the Hedgehog concept, it basically talks about analyzing your passions, your skills and what can give you economic satisfaction and then choosing something, which is the intersection of the three. I wrote another blog on “Anything Worth Doing is Worth Over Doing “which talks a little more about passion and how there is a feedback loop between passion and skills.

Philip Tetlock’s book "Expert Political Judgment", talks about idiosyncrasy and how erroneous 'expert' judgments about future events can be. Hedgehogs use only one model, while foxes use many informal models, as shown in the picture below. Isaiah Berlin (social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas, "thought by many to be the dominant scholar of his generation") said, that Hedgehogs have just one, powerful response to a threat: they roll themselves into a ball, and present spikes to possible predators. Foxes, by contrast, draw on many different patterns of general understanding, making mistakes along the way without ever committing to a grand strategy; they have no single response to challenges. These differences between the expert and the generalist are what Tetlock used to name the two ends of the dimension of distinctive 'thinking styles' for future oriented complex problems. His book shows that one of these cognitive styles is superior to the other in predicting events and adapting to new information.

People with Hedgehog cognitive style are what I call “single minded people”. They like simple models, which are decisive and result in binary verdicts and are easily replicable. They don’t like multiple scenario models each with a different probability. They need established, uncontroversial models, which have examples of having succeeded in the past. They need approval of their peers and resist any argument contradicting the model. They basically need a sense of closure and finality in order to feel happy.
Foxes on the other hand do not commit to any one model and prefer to calibrate their insights based on many different perspectives. They adapt quickly to unexpected events and are tolerant to the idea of being challenged on what they believe to be true. They thrive in the face of uncertainty, and continuously adjust their responses, rather than sticking to a simple preset plan. Hedgehogs flourish in an environment with minimal uncertainties, while Foxes thrive in chaos.

Now, compare this to the theory of Managers vs. Leaders in the corporate world and you will see a lot of overlap. The concept of “targets and accountability” was made by and for Managers, who embody the characteristics of Hedgehogs. Leaders on the other hand, thrive in an uncertain environment much like the fox. Situations like a new product/business or there is a crisis, which needs to be handled by thinking outside the box. Managers are good at following the process that has already been laid out by leaders or improve the process for achieving efficiencies once the business has reached a certain level of predictability or a crisis has been resolved. Managers are good at “keeping the lights on” and will succumb if put in a novel situation or crisis for which they do not have direct experience dealing with.

In Silicon Valley you find three types of people:
1. People who work for large companies
2. Entrepreneurs who begin startups
3. People who work for startups

The first type is what I call Hedgehogs, for they need the predictability and stability of large companies to go about their life securely. They cannot handle waking up in the morning with the uncertainties that come with the world of startup companies. They serve a purpose as these large companies are doing what you call incremental innovation rather than cutting edge invention or innovation. Intrapreneurs are an exception to this, but that is a topic for another blog. Entrepreneurs are Foxes who thrive on the uncertainties of the startup world. They cannot stand the routines of working in a large company, and trust me they will go crazy. People who work for startups are somewhere in middle in that they are closer to Foxes but for various reasons, including lack of opportunity or a great idea of their own, they choose to work for a startup. Most of these guys do eventually end up creating their own start-up.

While Foxes are actively looking for opportunities to address complex problems and are always ready to jump onto the next big thing, Hedgehogs will not be able to recognize an opportunity even when it is presented to them Sometimes, even when explained about the opportunity and rewards, they will analyze the risks associated with it and choose to continue on the conservative path.

Unfortunately the world has become too complex for the Hedgehog’s style and we need Fox-like outlooks to deal with today’s problems. The problem with the Fox’s style is that it does not come with a neat, closed model, defined goals, and easy metrics like the Hedgehog does. It requires gradual iterations to move forward. The fox’s approach responds to new information, continuously re-calibrating and adjusting to the changing circumstances and eventually leading to a superior outcome. Today’s knowledge economy requires Fox-like approach and they intern will create the conditions for the future Hedgehogs to thrive. So, where do you fall on the Fox-Hedgehog scale? How do you deal with complex and uncertain situations? Do you use one style over the other or you use the combination of them based on the situation?

VP of Product Management or VP of Engineering? Reporting structure

noreply@blogger.com (Irfan(Abhi)) — Wed, 23 Oct 2013 10:50:00 +0000

I always get asked whether the Director of Engineering should report to the Vice President of Product Management or if the Director of Product Management should report to the Vice President of Engineering. There is a third option which is more prevalent in the Silicon Valley: Product Management and Engineering has its own parallel organization. I have personally struggled with this question a lot as I have navigated through my career.

Product Management is all about the WHAT of the product whereas Engineering is about the HOW. Product management is responsible for defining the product both in terms of its form and its function. Form is fundamentally user interaction design and visual design whereas function is a prioritized feature list which delivers the necessary value to end user. Another way to put it is that Product Management is central for defining a valuable, usable and feasible product. Engineering, on the other hand, is responsible for creating architecture and building/developing the product. It requires an ability to figure out the implementation of the architecture on the product and have the operational excellence to deliver a quality product on time with the given resources. You could say that Product Management is more strategic while Engineering is more operational, however both involve creativity.

A VP of Engineering will not have appreciation for the product management functions and will reduce them to requirement managers, if product managers report to them. Similarly, a VP of Product Management might over-emphasize the product definition aspects, focusing mainly on customer features while ignoring the engineering, technical debt/architecture challenges. Also a VP of Product Management will rarely command the respect of engineers - especially in Silicon Valley.

I think there is no one right answer, but I strongly believe that there is a need for an alternative option: a new position called VP of Product or VP of Product Development. I would advocate for both the Director of Engineering and the Director of Product Management to report to the VP of Products. The requirements of an applicant to fill this position could come from an engineering or product management background, but I highly suspect that someone who has never delved in engineering could ever be successful in this role. The ideal applicant for this role would be someone who has experience in the engineering field and then later migrated to product management. I think that at least 5 years in engineering and an equal number of years in product management would allow a person in this position to have the technical depth to lead an engineering team while also have the necessary training to think strategically about market positioning. The VP of Products would allow for a middle ground that could command the respect of both the functions and would result in delivering a better product.

I have started seeing this role being defined as above in various technology/internet companies in the last year. I am hoping this trend will catch on and will lead to better products. I will write more about this in future blog posts.

S-curve and personal life

noreply@blogger.com (Irfan(Abhi)) — Tue, 08 Oct 2013 02:49:00 +0000

S-curve is a sigmoid curve in mathematical terms, but we are not here to talk about mathematics. I have come across the s-curve while studying various domains including marketing, strategy, mathematics, and philosophy. This is a concept I have been intrigued by for a very long time.

If life and business could fit on a linear model, it would be an easy task to predict anything; everything would be so simple. Unfortunately this is not how it works. Cause and effect is not as simple as a light switch where the system reacts immediately.

Let’s first introduce the concept and then we can get into how it is applicable to personal life. Here is the generic form of the curve:

In the fermentation stage there is very little output for a large input. i.e: huge effort may yield only a little in the near future. This is the investment phase of the curve. In the Take-off phase, there is a large amount of output for very little incremental input. This is also known as the pay-off period. In the Stagnation phase, you have reached saturation and incremental output is relatively low compared to the of input.

This concept can be applied in many different fields. In the marketing domain, it explains the lifecycle of adoption of new technology or diffusion of disruptive innovations as shown below:

Diffusion or adoption is relatively slow at the outset but then enters the stage of hyper growth, which typically reaches saturation above 90 of addressable market.

In the innovation strategy domain it explains the performance improvement over time of given technology improvement initiative. It highlights that as you invest on improving the performance of a system, the initial gains are very low compared to the overall investment in R&D. However as time passes, it starts to payoff and the results are steep returns. This image below clearly highlights the time delay aspect of returns in a complex system:

An individual acquiring a new skill can be plotted on the s-curve as well. As show in the diagram below by Juan Mendez, moving up the personal learning curve can be slow at first as you attempt to gain expertise in your new domain. But with time it accelerates to a sudden mastery, this eventually slows down as you stop learning new things and stop enjoying the domain or as Juan Mendez puts it, when the thrill ride is over.

Similarly the s-curve can be plotted for individuals pursuing new goals. Eventually the thrill ride will be over. As you hit the saturation in your pursuits of new goals, you should jump on to a new s-curve. If you do not you still might be okay financially, but you might be less happy and your confidence along with your general well-being will take a hit. In my opinion this is what leads to mediocre existence. It is sad to see so many talented engineers in Silicon Valley fall quarry to this and end up working smaller jobs at large companies with only incremental growth in their careers.

As Saul Kaplan shares: “My life has been about searching for the steep learning curve because that’s where I do my best work. When I do my best work, money and stature have always followed.”

In summary, it is easy to plan life when things are linear which they could be if you want to lead an ordinary career. However the path to an extraordinary career and therefore, existence, is not-linear and our brain eventually requires the dopamine of the unpredictability. This picture makes a compelling case for how to navigate your career and personal growth. In closing, as Juan puts it: “Don’t be afraid. It takes courage to jump from one curve to the next. Staying in the comfort zone is easy, but greatness happens when you escape from it”.

Fear of failure - A motivator for success?

noreply@blogger.com (Irfan(Abhi)) — Sun, 06 Oct 2013 04:12:00 +0000

I have preached in the past that fear can be the greatest limiting factor in a person's success. You might have heard that entrepreneurs, extreme sports enthusiast, and CEOs alike do not feel fear; this has to do with how they are wired. I personally live by the principle that if you feel fear, then you are going to be averse to taking any risks thereby limiting your success. It reminds me of a joke from the TV series Seinfeld - in which the airhostess, while closing the curtain to the business class section, gives an expression that fundamentally says, "If only you had worked a little harder."

I believe that the true road to success is not just the desire to succeed, but also the fear of failure.

As I have entered this next phase in my life, I have become much more reflective of my personal philosophies and what made me succeed in some endeavors yet fail at others. I have been thinking a lot more about what motivates me to succeed. What makes me wake up every morning and keep pushing myself to go further? Part of what motivates me is the fear of failure. This makes me wonder, without the fear of failure would I have done everything I could to succeed? If you let fear stop you from pursuing a goal, then it is definitely a inhibitor. However, if it helps you plan and execute better, and motivates you to give 100% in order to succeed then fear can be a powerful thing.

Let’s say your fear for failure doesn’t motivate you enough to get you over the top, and you end up failing. Now what? It is your response to failure, which will eventually define you. As a leader you are bound to fail eventually no matter how smart you are. If you have not failed then you have not pushed yourself outside your comfort zone. That said you then need to fight back. If one approach does not work, try another. Rather than letting failure stop you, let it prepare you better for the next battle. This will invariably lead you to greater success.

In my experience failure also helps you find out who your real friends are. I tend to test people in small ways. I ask them for help during a small crunch or rough spot even if I can handle it, just to see their response. You can judge a person's character and their dependability in this way. If a person is not available to provide a shoulder when you are down, will they really be there when you are going through a major crisis? The true strength of a relationship only gets tested in the face of strong adversity. Failure also teaches you empathy. It teaches you to be modest. It makes you realize that the most beautiful thing in life is when someone cares about you unconditionally.

Node.js video tutorials

noreply@blogger.com (Irfan(Abhi)) — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 09:46:00 +0000

I wanted to create a repository of node.js related videos and tag them for easy learning. I will continue updating them as I find more material.

THE CALLBACK PATTERN by Pedro Teixeira

THE EVENT EMITTER PATTERN by Pedro Teixeira

Product vs. Engineering Roles

noreply@blogger.com (Irfan(Abhi)) — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 08:24:00 +0000

I have spent over 10 years in engineering roles (software engineer, engineering manager and architect) and the last 3 years in product roles (product manager, product marketing manager, general manager). As a product manager (at any level) you are defining the WHAT of the product. As an engineer you figure out the HOW of the product. I will dig deeper into each of these roles below and will also try answering questions like “is a product manager role needed in startups?”, “should engineering report to product or product report to engineering?”

As a product manager, depending on whether it is a startup or a large company and depending on the stage of the product life cycle, you will be working on one of the following phases of the product.:

Opportunity Discovery --> Opportunity Assessment –> Opportunity Validation –> Product Discovery –> Solution Validation –> Metrics (KPI) definition –> Execution –> Go-to-market strategy –> Launch –> Post-launch Assessment.

As a product manager you are responsible for product definition which fundamentally means defining the form and function of the product. You are defining what is going to be built, but not how.

In the execution phase, while engineering is developing features for the current iteration, you will focus on defining features for the next, apart from helping clarify the feature description for the current iteration.

Product definition:

Function

Defining a product involves describing which features need to be built during the next development cycle in detail. If you are using SCRUM methodology for product development, you end up writing epics and user stories describing the product features in detail, maintaining a prioritized backlog of product features, so that engineers can pull from the top of the stack until there is no more bandwidth in the current engineering cycle. There are multiple meetings that a product manager can setup as part of the scrum process to communicate the features. During the product planning meeting, the product manager describes the product features in detail and collaborates on prioritizing them in the product backlog. During sprint backlog, the team decides what they can commitment for the next development cycle and the product manager answers any questions related to user stories. Dependencies between user stories are resolved at this stage as well.

Form

As a product manager, you are also responsible for defining the wireframes and visual design of the feature (not applicable if the feature does not have any end user facing component). Obviously you are not going to design them yourself. You will work with an interaction designer in the product discovery phase to finalize the wireframes required for the feature before scheduling it in the engineering development cycle. You will also work with the visual designer to add the look and feel (emotions) to the wireframe, but this can technically be done in parallel with the engineering effort. More on this in later blogs.

As an engineer (or engineering manager or architect) you are mostly involved in figuring out how. You are also responsible for (unless you have a dedicated program manager) to commit to the feature as part of the sprint planning meeting, come up with an estimation and deliver the feature on time with an acceptable quality. You are also responsible to work with product manager to get a sign off and deploy the feature to the production (unless you have a dedicated service engineer).

Now lets get back to the original topic of this article. Do I want to be in an engineering group or a product group? I think this a very personal decision and different people have different opinions. Product definition is inherently a creative job which appeals to many. Engineering gives you the satisfaction of actually being able to implement your ideas and vision. I have struggled with this question for a long time. When I was running engineering groups, I longed for product roles. As a product manager, I feel helpless when I cannot just roll up my sleeves, sit with engineers and develop it the way I think it should be developed. Maybe most of these frustrations are due to dealing with few inefficient engineering managers, but never the less you run into them frequently.

I will side track for a moment to discuss what I mean by product development. A product development group has the following key roles.

1. Product manager to define the product being built.

2. Engineering (including engineering management) to build the product.

3. Architect to define the technical architecture.

4. Designers (both interaction and visual designers) to create wireframes and visual assets.

Each of these roles is self-explanatory and they are all critical for building a successful product.

Back to the original discussion now; after a long and considerable thought, I would rather run the product development group or have the title of Director of Product development than have the role of Director of engineering. That way I can be responsible for both product definition and product execution. Anyone who has engineering background and has successfully transitioned into a product management role, will be a perfect match for this position. This will eliminate the debate whether product should report to engineering or engineering to product. It will bring both the groups into a single umbrella and get the work done faster. The team can focus on delivering a successful product, which is valuable, feasible and usable.

I will talk more about this in the next article. The article is long enough already.

Product Management Approach to New Product development vs. Existing Product

noreply@blogger.com (Irfan(Abhi)) — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 09:07:00 +0000

I wanted to compare and contrast the product management approach to developing a new product vs. adding features to an existing product. I have been thinking about it for a long time and after skimming through numerous product management books and discussing with fellow product managers, I believe the below approach makes a lot of sense.

New Product:

Opportunity discovery = ideation, but often the opportunity is presented to you either by either the founder in a startup environment or by a senior executives in a large company. It is difficult to cover each of these definitions in this article, but they are self explanatory. I will try to add more details in future.

Each of these phases are important and based on where you are in the product life-cycle (introduction, growth, maturity, decline), you might encounter one or more of them.

Existing Product

Compare this to the approach which generally works for adding features to an existing product where you analyze the usage metrics, come up with feature definition which could move the needle in the right direction, develop, deploy and measure. This cycle of build, measure, learn is very well documented by Eric Ries in The Lean Startup book.

I will try not to get into too much details, but it is suffice to say that the approach to product management for a new product is very different. While working on an existing product, the customers are known, their needs have been established, the solution has been validated and we now have a known product/known customer scenario. In the new product scenario, both the market and the product is unknown. You are not sure, if there is an opportunity. Even if there is one, is the need strong enough that they are willing to pay for a solution. You have no idea about the solution and if it has significant value proposition. You probably do not know who your customers are in the first place. Eric covers it very well:

Market	Product	Methodology
Known	Known	Waterfall
Known	Unknown	Agile
Unknown	Unknown	Lean

In the lean start up approach you have to focus on the customer development in parallel to product development. Read Steven Blank’s The Four Steps to the Epiphany for more details

Windows Live Writer

noreply@blogger.com (Irfan(Abhi)) — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 08:03:00 +0000

I have been looking for a good desktop client to manage blogs for sometime now. Based on some research, I found Live Writer from Microsoft. So far it is working out pretty well. http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/confirmation.aspx?id=8621

Entrepreneur as a job title

noreply@blogger.com (Irfan(Abhi)) — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 06:59:00 +0000

While listening to Eric Ries talk about entrepreneur as a job title within large organizations, I could not help but reminisce about my days at Verizon. Verizon group CIO Shaygan was way ahead of his time as he implemented most of the principles suggested by Eric in his book - The lean startup. He incentivised the culture of entrepreneurship by making each Director of Engineering responsible for P&L (even if it was just paper money and no real transfer of money took place).

Each Director was allowed to grow his organization as big as he wants to, as long as he can pay for it. If the P&L group could not raise enough money to pay for all the employees it was forced to let go off the resources. Obviously this encouraged group leaders to hire consultants so that scaling up and down can happen without impacting full-time employees.

Overtime this culture of innovation and competitive spirit gave its way to politics.

Audible.com

noreply@blogger.com (Irfan(Abhi)) — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 18:10:00 +0000

I signed up for audible.com yesterday just to try it out. I also wanted to review the

The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses book as I had no patience to read it the second time. I was pleasantly surprised by how effective audible.com is. Maybe my experience was so positive as I had already read the book.

The only biggest issue with the audible books is you cannot purchase them within the iPhone apps. I am sure this has to do with Apple insisting that publishers pay 30% cut. I had to buy the book using a website and then download it to iPhone, which takes an effort. Remember my earlier post about reducing friction in user experience.

After wasting time politicking in my new role as a GM at a different kind of company, I am back to writing my book. I am hoping to start publishing some material from the book as blog articles. This will help me get some valuable feedback as well as generate buzz for the book.

Friction

noreply@blogger.com (Irfan(Abhi)) — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 02:17:00 +0000

Today I was talking to my friend about a product idea that requires users to take a very simple action to derive value from it. She thought that the product might have an issue with stickiness if it requires users to take an explicit action on regular basis. The reason that Mint works so well is because user is not required to take any action or change his normal routine in any manner. It pulls the necessary data from the bank servers.

The discussion reminded me of something I read in an innovation strategy book about continuous vs. discontinuous innovation. Even a small friction in value delivery can reduce the adoption and stickiness of the product. Users are less likely to adopt to discontinuous innovation, unless the value they derive from the effort to learn or perform an extra action is higher than the effort.