Life of a Business Principal in Consulting

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.

One of my first projects as a scrum master was to develop a product that would be used by teenage girls and mothers who are afraid of an unexpected pregnancy. I had to work with my clients on this project that was sensitive in nature on multiple grounds. Sensitivity #1: I was working with women on a topic related to measuring menstrual cycles and ovulation periods. It is not easy for people in India to hear a guy talk about menstrual cycles so openly. I had to balance between being sensible on how do we treat the entire topic as an objective discussion to shape the product while at the same time not seem like turning women into objects. It was a tight rope but we did it. Sensitivity #2: This was a realm that fell between medical and religious. The stand that the product took was not overtly endorsed by the medical fraternity in India. It was a new methodology that had data that was not collected by medical fraternity and hence concerns were there. This was a blessing ...

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...

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...