Life of a Business Principal in Consulting

Outcome based product management seems to be taking off. Along with Hypothesis based development, this has turned around product development from detailed product roadmaps that we used to have to more customer and user focussed product development. However, We seem to fall under the trap of Build-Measure-Learn and not measure the right things. A lot of times, we measure lag indicators that do not help us learn faster. Lag indicators are history, they tell us what we did right and wrong post-facto after the event has happened. We need a way to understand and measure how features can go into a product roadmap as we are building it or as we are considering it. Lead measures help us with that.

As a Business Principal, I have been coming across the term Machine learning for a long time. Several business executives have wondered what this animal is and how does it help them. The series of posts is to list out what Machine learning means to a business principal and some basic industry standard approaches that has been tried out in the past few years.

Context The current typical model of starting a large program is to have a discovery workshop for the program followed by detailed project inceptions. The project inceptions are spaced and detailed. There are not a lot of discovery workshops we do that is mutual discovery. It is more of sense making of an earlier discovery process. The Pitfalls and some thoughts With the discovery process feeding into the project Inceptions was great. it gave direction. However, validation of the direction based on feedback from projects seems to be missing. The reason the feedback is missing is 2-fold: #1 - The discovery workshops don't seem to have a cadence with the project Inceptions #2 - The team that does discovery workshops is to involved with the project inceptions and vice versa,

Before I jump into the topic, I will start with some context. We were working on a very complex product - Complexity in multiple dimensions. As a team, We needed a simple way for us to understand how we manage complexity as team scales and use it as a simple communication tool.  To generalise: Context: A complex project A fairly large team High Volatility Product Engineering team Challenges A way to manage complexity as a team Tool for communication on progress  A mechanism to calibrate progress with the bigger roadmap Crystal Ball Crystal Ball is a simple tool for visualising progress on a granular scale. It helps in tracking progress and for teams to look at what they can achieve going forward.  It helps in internalising the progress that the team made in the past few weeks and then relate to it as they plan forward. How we used it Our team was fairly big - a 7 pair dev team with 3 Was , 1 BA and a PM. We also had an XD and...

User  story  mapping  is  a  technique  that  allows  you  to  add  a  second  dimension  to  your backlog. The  visualization  enables  you  to  see  the  big  picture  of  the  Product  Backlog. I references a lot of material from Jeff Patton's website here:   http://jpattonassociates.com/the-new-backlog/

Proto-typing is the next step after doing your user journeys. A lot of us put in a lot of effort in port typing. However, remember that this is not a creative exercise. The goal is to increase the flow of information and reduce uncertainty. Hence the concept of lo-fi prototyping A lot of the content on this video is from: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/10/the-skeptics-guide-to-low-fidelity-prototyping/  

I gave a try at an automatic leave leter generator. Loading... Features: PDF of leave letter generated Emailed to the person automatically It takes care of a generic set of situations and is generic enough. Feedback welcome. Loading...

User Journey is an activity that we do right after detailing user personas. It is primarily used for: Understanding user behaviour Identify high level functionality Demonstrate vision of the project How do you go about creating a user Journey Your user’s goals Their motivations Their current pain points Their overall character The main tasks they want to achieve Courtesy:  http://theuxreview.co.uk/user-journeys-beginners-guide/

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

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/

 I have been thinking of writing a simple app for locating trash cans at Chennai. The first thing anyone would do was to see if the idea has been already implemented. Sure enough, it has been. This is the app - Check it out. http://trashithere.herokuapp.com/ When I tried using the app, I found out that there were only few trash cans. This was a crowd sourced application. I guess this app was not used much. The Spark This led me to questioning myself - What problem led me to this application. I yearned to live in a place that was clean. My assumption was that if people found places to throw thrash, they would not litter. Going ahead with your idea

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.  

What started as a simple thought has now taken the shape of an idea in my mind now. Instead of just trying to keep it hidden, I want to understand what do people think of this idea and would it make sense. If it does make sense, what are the factors that are good in this idea? Are there any ideas that can be used to extend this concept further. More details on the concept here: Product Barter Marketplace from Prashanth Madhavan Narasimhan

Have you ever noticed how terrible the parking signs are in any major US city. When you need to park your car in any major US city, it takes 5 minutes to decipher the information in the parking sign to understand if it is ok to park in that spot. Nikki Sylianteng , a designer , turned this problem into an opportunity and posted her designs nearby some of these parking signs. The new designs evoked good response. You can read all bout that here at Priceonomics .