Life of a Business Principal in Consulting

User Personas are a very good tool for the product owners, business analysts or product managers to be able to co-create with designers. It is predominantly a product of the user research and should not be an amalgamation of demographic data. It is the best way for us to list all scenarios that a persona would take when they want to attain a goal. It is predominantly used to build empathy with user, focus the team and build consensus in a large diverse stakeholder group. The website I referred to is here:  https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/08/a-closer-look-at-personas-part-1/

Lean PMO in everyday agile from Prashanth Madhavan Narasimhan

Enterprise agile from Prashanth Madhavan Narasimhan

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...

Pivoting is a very painful decision for Product Managers. It is also a decision that we , as product managers, dread. Pivoting in essence is one of the key decision points that a product manager needs to always be on the look-out for. A little bit of Context The job of the product manager, at various levels, is also to look at it from a 30,000 feet level, understand the context the product is perceived by the customer and understand how he can make the product better for the customer. This is easily said that done. Product managers tend to get lost in the daily details of running the show that their interactions are always on the transactional level. Irrespective of whether the product is doing well or not, a product manager needs to watch out for the changing landscape. To Pivot ot Persevere The product manager needs to make a hypothesis on whether there needs to be a revision on what problem it is solving. The hypothesis needs to provide a result that will hel...

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...