Life of a Business Principal in Consulting

My 2016 resolutions

I am a socialist by education and a capitalist by profession. I am hence very confused by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s plan for Clean India Campaign . The Campaign has all the similarities of a typical silicon valley startup dream campaign. Market gap Healthy ecosystem Consumer need Very large market segment with similar need All these should be driving plenty of companies to have taken advantage of this campaign and started making money. Delving deeper , I see some issues that could be learnings and also a few opportunities. #1 - Public-Private cooperation This is a very abused word right now in the Indian governance. It rarely helps the normal citizen. I am not sure how it helps the private players. It does help the bureaucrats shift the blame though. Public-Private cooperation will not work for India with such a small concentration of urban space and will lead to skewed demand and supply that will make the issue worse. What we should instead look at is h...

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...

Working in cross functional teams is the occupational hazard for product managers. A typical product manager needs to work with 3 kinds of teams: Engineering team - comprising of developers, testers and IT operations Sales / Marketing team Management team The product manager needs to have different set of information - or rather information represented and expressed in different ways for the three different teams. Engineering Team Focus: Focus on what needs to be done. Define clear milestones  Clearly communicate focus of the product and end user gain Help take decisions to architect the product Detail the product road-map from the engineering side Sales/Marketing Team Focus: Focus on what the product positioning needs to be Map the competitive landscape and find out how we are different from our competitors Clearly communicate the overall marketing / sales goals - with respect to details like channels, goal for the period Detail out the communication pla...