Life of a Business Principal in Consulting

In the good old days of retailers having a single channel with a steady and relatively well forecasted demand, pricing was the forte of the merchandising managers. Ability to negotiate with CPG majors or wholesalers, retailing based on shelf space and target segment was very helpful. The basket analysis can be used very effectively - having Key Value items and anchor items to be able to optimize product mix and margins as well. This ensures we have a good rein on retail operations and also contributing to both the top line and the bottom line.

We talk about a lot of agile practices that enterprise needs to adapt. Continuous deployment is an engineering practices in the agile practices arsenal. Till recently, I was a vocal supporter of this practice for enterprise as well. Yet, a few thoughts and happenings have made me rethink blindly supporting this for the enterprise. I still support it but do it with a lot more rational approach. This is a sign of me understanding how enterprise read and understand agile.

Omni-channel digital strategy cannot be driven in isolation. This is one of the most common practices that organizations use. However, the reasons these happen is because of the way most organizations are structured. Organizations that have not had an IT department tend to invest more on them to catchup with their competitors. This leads to a more skewed digital strategy Some best practices that will help: Digital strategy should always be in tandem with the organization’s business strategy. Digital strategy should be used as an enabler A sound digital strategy includes planning for pivots in your business model based on your digital strategy. For more information on pivots, refer to this post here .

Any organization that has ever run a marketing campaign or has engaged a marketing partner would know that they need to have a clear and directed messaging strategy when targeting users through multiple channels. What helps when you are looking at omni-channel digital strategy - specifically with respect to messaging - is what feeling or image does your organization evoke in your digital connection’s minds. This is the reason why digital strategy is not something that can be easily consulted on by external agencies or a clear plan of action be provided for the organization to be put in motion. What can instead be done is a set of practices, principles and guidelines that can drive a simple and clear messaging across channels.

Organizations cannot be run completely online or offline. It has to be a hybrid. Similarly, digital strategy cannot be completely online. It is not possible to have engaging digital connections online. Organizations have to create opportunities to interact with their digital connections offline. There are several ways in which you can connect with digital connections offline.

How do you know that your digital connections are engaged? One of the most effective and popular ways it to have a forum. A forum could be a discussion board on your own website or it could be a social site that could act as your forum. Several organizations that have omni-channel strategy make sure that they have an internal forum as well as forums on several social sites. They also make sure that the forums are inter-operable. There are certain key practices that can make sure you have an engaged forum:

Coming in a week, we are going to present a series of posts on Omni-Channel Digital strategy and how companies can be more prepared to understand and handle digital strategy in today's world. Companies, both digital as well as brick and mortar, are acquiring digital contacts through various channels.  These channels include social, enterprise, support, mobile, partners among others. The main challenge is how to make sure that they stay engaged. In a series of posts, we will discuss what will help them with this challenge. In a Nutshell, the companies will have to do the following : Personalise Content Strong Forums Connect with online contacts offline Unified messaging across all channels Drive digital strategy through business strategy We will discuss in detail about each of these in the coming weeks.

Consumer Vs Enterprise Every time there is a consumer use product, we see that the enterprise comes up with a very customized version so that the enterprise does not have to adapt. This is with good reason. Enterprise is an entity that is too complex and having it to change would mean a disruption to the business  - something that the stakeholders are not very happy about. For example, take the iPhone and Blackberry. iPhone is a consumer centric product while Blackberry is a very enterprise centric product. However, iPhone introduced major disruptions to the way the enterprise security functions and forced enterprises to be more flexible with the way they allow employees to view email. This increased productivity since employees could view their emails at home or anywhere on the move and respond more quickly. Another example is Microsoft word Vs Google docs. The days when a simple document would have to go through multiple revisions with the whole track changes turn...

India has a nascent and a very active market place. With good interest, the right climate for growth and right product mix, the indian retail marketplace seems to be going places. However, there are some alarming signals that seem to be ignored for growth that have a good chance of being dangerous to all the stakeholders involved. The issue I am talking about is the sale of counterfeit goods in all the indian market places. India has not had a history of strong Intellectual property rights. This time it is getting messier. The Indian marketplace model is very interesting and suits well to a country as diverse as India. The market place model floated by all the major e-railers suits the fact that the seller and the buyer can be connected for serving the needs for every day goods that are not necessarily covered by IP laws. India needs more effective IP laws since it is struggling with some products like traditional indian products that cannot be covered by IP versus modern produc...

The 2 skillsets that a product manager needs a lot are Analysis and Synthesis. I am a business analyst who turned into a product manager. It is easier for me to be reliant on my analysis skills since that is what I am trained as a business analyst. However, what is also equally important is the synthesis skills. How are they different Analysis refers to the ability to break down a problem into constituents and start attacking them. This helps the product manager a lot when there is enough feedback from users and all the product manager has to do is just carry it out. There is no need for prioritisation from the side of the product manager since the user’s preference would clearly give that information as well. This works well when the product is an already released product and it is not difficult to understand what is needed and why it is needed. Synthesis, on the other hand, refers to the ability to piece together multiple pieces of information to understand t...

When we create a new product, Product managers always grapple with the problem of when to take the product for customer validation. Taking it too soon would be the prospects are not interested in what is being demonstrated. Taking it too late means that we could be grossly wrong and any feedback that comes could not be that valuable. Another problem is taking it to all the prospects might lead to unsatisfactory  comments on how the product is still not complete. How do we manage thing timing issue? A simple concept of minimum viable product could help us understand when is the right time to start the demonstrations. Minimum viable product is the core product that satisfies the needs of a chosen subset of the target audience. It has just enough for us to focus on a subset of prospects, validate understanding and move on. What it is not MVP is often misunderstood as a the bare minimum of a product that can be developed. This understanding is incorrect. The e...

How would you decide what is the best business model for your product? Deciding on the right business model is very important for the product. It does not necessarily mean what is the price of your product. There could be no price for your product - though that is a myth. For example, we think google or Facebook is free. However, we are never the customers for Google or Facebook. It is the advertisers that are its customers. What we need to figure out when we decide on a business model are as follows: Who is my target audience? Who is my customer What is the price. How is the support model going to work Who are my partners While we do not absolutely need to price a product, we need to understand how we would make money. For example Open ERP does not price its product. However, its product is not the ERP software but really the hosting, service and training that it offers. While pricing is an important part, what is more important is in realising who is you...

What is in it for your customer and user to buy and use your product? While we all would have answers for this question, we need to understand what the users think of our product. When we started our product, this is what we came up with: We were all excited and would roll our tongues and try to convince our prospects that this is the business value that it was providing. Turns out we were wrong. While we are providing these value adding aspects in our product, these are not the real “ BUSINESS " values. Notice that the word business is in bold. What they really wanted was a simple web page that tells them how their business is doing without jumping through hoola hoops. The biggest business value for saving time on doing mundane calculations. They did not want to manually consolidate sales of 3 stores every month or every time they needed to take a decision. Once you have captured the business value, how would you track how you are doing on that business val...

Being a business analyst is probably the easiest part of the product manager. I did not start out as a product manager and the role evolved naturally. When I started my role in the product team, the following questions kept coming back. Why are we doing this product? Is there enough need out there and do we know what returns we would get? Do we know who we are building for and what are we building? While these are innocuous questions that can be posed to a business analyst working on any IT project, what differed was there were no one person or team we could pose these questions to to arrive at answers. We could also not design workshops in case there were multiple stakeholders to arrive at these answers. I ended up doing the following and slowly what I started doing defined the role that I had taken up. I started doing market research to understand what are the market segments available for my product Visiting retailers and trying to understand their pain points h...

I work as a Lead consultant at Thoughtworks and my role is usually called Business Analyst. This post is entirely about hoe I ended up becoming a Product Manager. Like what Steven Haines tells in this book: “THE PRODUCT MANAGER’S DESK REFERENCE”, Product Manager is an accidental profession. "You may have backed into Product Management from another field or business discipline.” I landed this position because of the following reasons: We are a services company. No one was interested in a product team. No one was sure what to do as a Business Analyst in the product team No one was convinced that this specific product would be successful. I ended up getting the job and was left to figure out what to do in the team. I was to be the business analyst trying to line up functional work for the product engineering team I have to manage the team - with respect to the team members and make sure I plan for the functional work to complete I was to interact with our current...