User Personas - Experience Report

This is a quick experience report on User Personas - Where it has worked well, where I had challenges and why I had those challenges.

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How to get more zing out of your job

A job is a social contract - the one between the individual and the organization as an entity. The organization wants our skills as much as we want the opportunity and the money One of my first mentors told me that for employees , employability is more important that employment. That means that we need to pick up skills as we do our job - skills that will help us continue in our employment. This is the age of knowledge workers and we have enough avenues to pick up new skills. This is what I do:

Who owns my tractor ???

Pretty stupid question, right? Actually No. This is the new debate that is going on. For more details read here: Wired article on John Deere Do the manufacturer own the product because the product has some software that is owned by John Deere or is it owned by customers. The concept of ownership has been pretty clear for the last century or so, barely going through a debate despite the rise and fall of communism.

Finding your target audience

The biggest task of the product manager is to find your target audience. Typically it is a very tight rope walk. You define it too narrowly and you would struggle to generalize the product later. You define it too broad and you would struggle to satisfy a lot of people and the product might not take off at all. There is this awesome post by Dave Mcclure on why Niche target segment works. Blog link here . What he says is mostly right and that is what we did as well. We did it mostly by accident. We had to define our niche because we could only talk to those kind of retailers and get data from them to start developing the data. It did have its upside. We were very clear on what we wanted to develop and we are slowly talking to retailers and adding more scenarios. As we are doing this, we are also talking to a slightly different set of retailers. This helps us incrementally build our product while also generalizing the existing features. In our case, we did not fin...

Life of a Business Principal in Consulting

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