Digite Product Management

experience is the product

2008-11-14T03:29:00.000-08:00

Came across this wonderful presentation on product design by Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path. Please take some time to go through it as it will certainly be useful to you at some point in your career.

Here are my notes from the presentation. These points would be much more clear if you see the presentation where Peter gives some very interesting examples to support it,

Don't focus on technology or features. Focus on the experience that you want to create and then build a system that gets you there
Technology as a product design strategy can be used on ly when the technology is disruptively new! e.g. First generation word processors were very difficult to use. You needed to remember many commands in order to work with it effectively. But because they were technologically far superior than the alternative "type writer" of that era, they became popular.
Once technology becomes standard, we tend to compete on features. And there are numerous examples where competing on features has been taken to the extreme. One such example is Microsoft WORD. A very good example of this phenomenon is VCR. When VCRs first came out, for the first time they allowed people to record live TV. This made them very popular. As years passed by VCR got bloated with features. So much so that people could not even program it anymore. So adding more and more features actually caused the decline in VCR usage. (Then came TiVo that once again revolutionized ease of use when it came to recording TV programs!)

Some take aways from the presentation,

Designing from outside in...Christopher Alexander says, to design pathways first put the lawn in place, then see where people actually walk and then add paving!
Create an "experience vision" statement. e.g. Palm Pilot vision was, a. Fits in shirt pocket, b. Syncs seamlessly with PC, c. Fast & easy to use and d. cost less than $299. Concise and clear vision that made Palm design a compelling one.
Leverage the System! This one is my most favorite! System as a whole does not get simpler however the experience of using the module of the system become much more enjoyable. e.g. iPod only allows you to do basic things like browse, play, rate audio songs. For everything else such as creating actual playlists you have to use iTunes. Thus Apple simply leveraged the system to remove unnecessary complexity from the everyday use of the product, iPod and the rest is history!

Experience Is The Product

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: petermerholz dconstruct2007)

Changing the world, one light bulb at a time!

2008-11-05T04:04:00.000-08:00

Here is an invention that will boggle your mind. These are the new light bulbs that are use virtually no electricity and they last for 50,000 hours. (That is 6 years of continuous operation!)

The fins on the light bulb are actually designed to allow heat to dissipate. These bulbs are designed by the company LightingScience. Each bulb costs over $125 each!!! Before you jump to conclusion that you will never buy such an expensive light bulb, consider the fact that you will save enough electricity in 7-8 months to offset the price. In addition you will NEVER have to replace it! I remember solving industrial engineering stastistical problems that dealt with the cost of changing light bulbs for large companies. Because cost of changing light bulbs is very high, it is actually very routine to change them even when they are not completely worn out. This is a huge wastage! Using one of these bulbs you are virtually eliminating the need to change light bulb ever!

When I look at this new invention from my product management hat, it is such an iconic example of doing new product development. When doing new product development, it is very essential to have a fresh perspective and not hamper your creativity based on what exists today! Only when you avoid the trap of doing something similar to what you know or see around you, then you can create something truly disruptive and revolutionary!

Let me know if you think you would buy this product at this entry price tag. Do you love your planet enough to take the plunge? :)

Facebook kids on to something big for enterprise?

2008-10-06T01:49:00.000-07:00

Facebook co-founder Moskovitz leaves to start group collaboration company

It is a long shot but I would be curious to track what these kids come up with next and how it affects Globally distributed ALM space! These guys could very well come up with the next disruptive phenomenon/paradigm that we so desperately need! And who better to do it than co-founders of Facebook? Click on the link below for the full article or just read the excerpt below

….and the new project requires a company built around it from the ground up, with the goals of efficiency and group collaboration embedded deeply into its DNA from day 1.So we’ve decided to leave Facebook (in about a month) and start a new company, to build an extensible enterprise productivity suite, along with a high-level open-source software development toolkit, built for the Web from the ground up.

http://venturebeat.com/2008/10/05/facebook-co-founder-moskovitz-leaves-to-start-group-collaboration-company/

NASSCOM Product Conclave Conference 2008

2008-08-24T23:15:00.000-07:00

I had the pleasure of attending the second annual product conclave conference organized by NASSCOM. This year I was not only an attendee but a speaker too. The conference was held on August 11th and 12th at the Grand Ashok hotel in Bangaluru. This year there was much more participation than last year which was the inception year for product conclave conference.

This conference focuses on indian software product business and brings together luminaries from all known and unknown Indian product companies.

With slowing services sector and increasing VC funding there is lot of interest in software products business. However building a great software product requires a different set of skills and most importantly a different mindset. My speaking topic was centered around the same theme, "Product Development to Product Management". I had the fortune of sharing the panel with VP of Product Management from Yahoo! India, VP of Product Management from iFlex software and a senior Marketing manager from Rational/IBM India office. I talked about the role of product management and how it gets confused frequently. As software product business takes root here in India, there is great need for educating and dissiminating this information. As such our session was very well attended and got great response. So much so, that I may be helping out NASSCOM further with creating/delivering "product management basics" course in future.

Suhas A. Kelkar
Vice President Product Management

Right way to build brand!

2008-04-24T03:31:00.000-07:00

Google named world's number 1 brand!

Google has been named the world's number one and most powerful brand for the second year in a row, with an estimated value at $85,057 million. This, according to BrandZ's top 100 brand ranking for 2008.

If you notice a company such as Nike is coming at #53. This is very surprising to me! I see lot more advertising and marketing done by Nike as compared to Google. These days every sport that you see on TV has Nike sponsorship! This holds true from US athletics to European soccer leagues to the latest Indian Premier League! You do not see any advertisements by Google at sports events, on billboards (except may be in Mountain view CA), or on TV! Despite that it is coming in at #1.

This talks a lot about the popularity of Google and it's products. If you build the right product that solves right problems, people will notice you! Brand equity you build this way is long lasting and it is the right way to build brand awareness!

-Suhas A. Kelkar
VP Product Management, Digite

Process Becomes a Breeze in Tampa at SEPG North America!

2008-04-14T23:33:00.000-07:00

Posting a conference report from Mike Amend who is a Senior Director, Business Development based out of US.

Digite definitely led the wave of Process Improvement on the beautiful shores of Tampa Bay. Although, I can assure you our feet never had the time to touch the beautiful sands of the pristine Florida beaches! Our time was overwhelmed with interested parties from the United States, Europe, South America, Asia and parts unknown (California?). Even though this was SEPG North America, the rest of the world was very well represented!

Digite attended and exhibited at the 20th Annual SEPG North America, March 17 – 20. The reception of our solution to those most interested in Process Leadership was extraordinary! These people knew the importance of process, but also knew that the supporting pieces of our holistic solution solved many of their common issues that doomed the best honed process. Vision from our Project Portfolio and Management piece of our solution, coupled with out completely integrated Collaborative Software Development pieces (Requirements, Change, Document and other IT Management needs) provided the support to both monitor, measure and enforce process throughout the Enterprise. They were AMAZED they could get this all from one, web-based tool! They had all been forced to use lightly interfaced point-solutions that did not work well together – even if all came from the same vendor! Because we were so different, Digite was a BIG hit!

The show was attended by Ram Subramanian, Mahesh Singh, Mike Amend and Rahul Kapoor. As usual, the four of them traveled quite well together and found the food of the Tampa area exceptional! Mike and Mahesh judge the culture of any destination by the quality (and quantity) of the cuisine at the best Thai Restaurant in the area! They were pleased to say that Tampa Thai is some of the best (and most abundant) they have enjoyed outside of Thailand!

Next year, the SEPG conference will be hosted by San Jose and I am sure that Digite will make the grade again as one of the Premier stops within the Exhibit Hall for those interested in Process Improvement and Governance within the Application Lifecycle Management of the Enterprise.

We look forward to seeing you there!
-Mike Amend (You can reach me at mamend at digite dot com)

this is how buzz words are born...say hello to "synchromesh"

2008-03-18T21:22:00.000-07:00

Ever wondered when/where buzz words are born...Recently Ray Ozzie had a keynote speech at the Mix 2008 conference and I was able to spot birth of a new buzzword, "synchromesh"

Ozzie teased the next evolution of his decades-long exploration of synchronization and collaboration, which he referred to as a "seamless mesh"--or what I'll call "syncromesh"--in his Mix '08 keynote in Las Vegas:

Just imagine the possibilities of unified application management across the device mesh, centralized, Web-based deployment of device-based applications. Imagine an app platform that's cognizant of all of your devices. Now, as it so happens, we've had a team at Microsoft working on this specific scenario for some time, starting with the PC and focused on the question of how we might make life so much easier for individuals if we just brought together all your PCs into a seamless mesh, for users, for developers, using the Web as a hub.

Mark my words, if Microsoft is successful in pushing their agenda, then you will be hearing more and more of the word synchromesh until it will be come part of the Oxford dictionary. Just recently I talked at a conference about SaaS and had made a slide that shows the logical progression of technologies. I guess now I must go back to it and add synchromesh :)

Firefox 3 five times faster than IE7...wow!

2008-03-12T09:24:00.001-07:00

Firefox 3 Beta 4 is 5x faster than IE7, 3x faster than FF2 by ZDNet's Ed Burnette -- The almost-but-not-quite-final beta of Firefox 3 (FF3 beta 4) is now available for download. The most noticeable improvement is speed. In some tests, it’s three times faster than Firefox 2 (meaning the test completes in 1/3 the time), and a whopping five times faster than IE 7: (Source: Mozilla Links) Other improvements in beta 4 include: Smarter [...]

Project Portfolio Management yields results

2008-03-11T22:23:00.000-07:00

I have been involved with PPM domain for quite a few years now. I have seen the very beginnings of the project portfolio management when we had to not only write software that would enable PPM but had to go out and educate customers on the importance of PPM tool. That was the time around 2001-2002 when companies were strapped for cash. Also around the same time, Sarbanes Oaxley was just getting defined and corporate IT folks did not know what changes it really meant for them.

There were just a few players in the PPM domain and many of them simply grew out of their project management, rather than have a vision for top down portfolio management and setting up a PMO practice/processes.

Fast forward to 2008, and finally I am seeing studies that validate the usefulness of a PPM tool. See an in depth article, "ROI study: Product portfolio management yields results" posted to ZDNet.

The entire post on ZDNet is worth reading. But here is the most important section of it,

Key findings from the study include “savings of 6.5% of the average annual IT budget by end of year one and 14% (NPV) over a three year deployment period.” In addition, the PPM software examined:

Improves the annual average for project timeliness dramatically by 45.2%.
Reduces IT management time spent on project status reporting by 43.2%, reclaiming 3.8 hours of each manager’s workweek.
Reduces IT management time spent on IT labor capitalization report by 54.7%, recouping 3.6 hours per report.
Decreases the time to achieve financial sign-off for new IT projects by 20.4%, or 8.4 days.

Notice that not only it says that PPM tool will give you savings in terms of dollars but it also improves projects delivery by 45%. Sometimes people focus too much on the direct dollar benefits from a PPM tool and they miss out on the benefits such as increasing project timeliness etc.

I am very glad to see such reports coming out which validates my belief in the rigor of having PPM processes and tools in an IT organization.

NASSCOM Product Conclave Conference 2007

2007-11-25T21:09:00.000-08:00

NASSCOM Product Conclave

This week I was able to attend the first ever NASSCOM conference targeted towards product companies based out of India. Having realized the trend in Indian IT companies to shift up in the value chain from services to products it is quite appropriate for NASSCOM to start this initiative.

The conference was attended by who’s who of the Indian IT companies. CxOs and VPs from reputed product companies such as Subex Azure, Yahoo, Philips R&D and of course digité ;) were present for the conference.

The keynote speech by Sabeer Bhatia was the highlight of the conference. He made some very insightful remarks and said that for product companies to be successful they need to,

Challenge the status quo: Here he gave an example of iPod. When iPod came out there already were 30-40 MP3 players in the market. But Apple was able to challenge the status quo in that market and invent new market for themselves via innovative design.
Think out of the box. Sabeer criticized and cautioned that Indian educational system is such that we are not trained to ask questions. You cannot build new and successful products by just doing more of what is already known. You need to think out of the box. Product development needs to be disruptive and not incremental.
Take more risks. Sabeer quoted that silicon valley is built on failures not on successes. Nine out of ten companies fail before one succeeds. Hence it is essential to take more risks.
Think global. Build products that solve global problems not just india’s problems.
It takes time to build a successful product company. 4-5 years are needed to successfully build and launch a product. He mentioned how lucky he was to conceive, develop and launch hotmail in just 18 months which was a lucky anomaly.
Products are built not by large teams but small teams of highly motivated individuals. Founders of the product companies need to have product DNA!

Throughout the first day it was clear that no one was sure about the exact definition of the term “product”. It was finally Samir Palnitkar of Airtight Networks who put it in simple terms. He proposed a definition for the term product as, “Anything that scales disproportionately and does not require additional human resources for scaling up”.

Services companies have the distinct disadvantage that they have to increase their head count in order to scale in terms of revenues. On the other hand product companies, with an initial investment for building a product can then scale and sell it to as many people as they can, without too much additional cost. Incidentally, this is why the valuation for a services company is 1-1.5x (of revenue), whereas for a product company it is around 3-4x. An interesting comment from Dr. Lin L. Chase (Sr. Vice President, Technology R&D-India, Accenture) was that she has seen recently that product companies with SaaS offerings are demanding 6-7x valuation!

There were few other very insightful remarks by many other individuals. I won’t be able to attribute them correctly but will still list a few of them. Someone gave excellent advice to new upcoming product companies in India, “to spec the product globally but sell it locally”. Idea is to make the product successful in the local market before undertaking the global market challenges. The talk by Ashish Gupta of Helion Venture capital was very impressive.

One other remark was also very good. It was that don’t position your Indian product company on the basis of cost advantage (due to low labor costs). Instead of using the “low cost advantage", position it as “innovation leverage”. E.g. instead of saying that you can build the product for 1/3^rd of the cost, you can say that you can innovate three times more for the same amount of dollars!

Interestingly everyone was in agreement that “any arbitrage will tend to eliminate itself over time”. So the cost advantage enjoyed by Indian software services industry is going to be fetching diminishing returns. This is going to create some interesting conditions for the local IT market and will push it further in the direction of higher margin business models such as becoming product development companies.

All in all, I had a very good time at the conference and am looking forward to attending and participating in more such events by NASSCOM.

-Suhas A. Kelkar
VP, Product Management,
Digite

my first blog...

2007-11-15T02:31:00.000-08:00

After lot of procrastination, I have finally gotten around to creating a blog page. I plan to brag-err-blog about our product features and other general things that pertain to various topics such as,

Project Portfolio Management
Application Life cycle Management
SaaS, Web 2.0
etc. etc.