Back to Snow Land

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I am back to snow land(Boston) after spending a month in Bay Area. Going from the sunny weather of California

to cold weather of Boston

was very depressing. I landed in JFK and started driving to Boston yesterday evening. Final semester at MIT and so looking forward to running back to CA :).

How to be a good product manager

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Product Manager is one of the most versatile roles in any organization. Product Managers have to deal with developers, marketing, legal, finance and designers. Its a role which touches every aspect of the product evolution. The most challenging part of this job is the fact that there are no direct reportees to any product manager. They need to carve a niche for themselves through influence rather than authority. What they need to do is to understand and bring together different lines of thoughts from different teams together to create a single successful product.

This becomes quiet challenging in technology companies. Most of the successful product managers in my experience come from strong technical background. This is important because the most difficult part of their job is to deal with developers. While raising a feature request they need to understand a developers point of view. Its also important for them to be able to relate their technical expertise to gain respect and influence among developers and still be able to appreciate and evaluate the creative and the artistic side of the product.

Any company would want their product managers to have the right product instincts and creative sense. Its not simple to develop product instincts over a day. Although a few people have natural instincts in analyzing products and knowing what would work and what will not, for most of them this is developed over a period of time. You need to analyze the market, understand their needs, and see how products should be developed to meet these needs while generating profit for the company.

While preparing for product managers role, take several good technology products and see what makes a product fail or succeed. Read case studies because that helps you in understanding the market. Try to take failed product for the company you are interviewing for and see why it failed, how it can be improved and what changes you would recommend.

So what attributes make a good product manager.. Below are some of my thoughts

• Needs to have a deep business understanding. 
• Should be able to communicate across multiple departments and multiple levels in a company.
• Very analytical and scrupulous while analyzing product features.
• Deep technical understanding.
• Strong customer focus and marketing acumen.

China's remarkable growth and India's missed opportunities

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A good article(http://money.cnn.com/2011/01/10/news/international/china_magnus/index.htm) on china's rising economic and political dominance on international stage was published on CNN. It claims that the  China's remarkable achievements over the past 20 years were in part due to rapid globalization, which are  now at risk due rising tide of currency, trade and inflation. 

I can't help but wonder why did India not exploit all the opportunities it had in the last two decades? What exactly went wrong? Why didn't India not capitalize on the amazing once in a century opportunity, it was handed over by the talented engineers and outsourcing wave.

I believe India lacks many fundamental infrastructure and policies to rise to the world stage irrespective of all the opportunities. As it is said luck is opportunity meets the preparedness, India was simple not prepared. The evidence of shortsightedness is also visible in their entrepreneurial success. Most of the companies who have succeeded from India are in the service industry. In spite of all the knowledge base, opportunities and resources, India never truly created products which competed on international stage.


Take for example Infosys. It created a product called Finacle for core banking in 1999 and after over a decade, it only constitutes less than 3% of it's revenue. With all the financial backing and technical know-how it is still not able to make Finacle a world leader  in financial industry. 


Well, I do not plan to answer this question tonight, but just continue wondering. 

The Content dilemma

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In the world of internet, digitization of information is important. There is a lot of content floating on the web but to associate it with credibility and filtering it out of the irrelevant information has been the business model for many companies. Think about Quora. This new startup which created waves in the technology world, started a network where people could ask questions and be assured that the information given to them is backed by someone credible. It hence was able to distinguish itself from Yahoo! Answers which was hit by its own popularity and people started posting too much content which made it difficult  for users to use it effectively. 

Article from one of my co-founder recently titled "Clearing the clutter from Google" highlights the same issue. Too much content is as bad as no content. Its important for internet domain companies to realize that with the amount of content which exists now in web, its impossible for search engines to filter the relevant stuff, and this calls for the growth of social networks. Rise of twitter specially in the context of Tunisia highlights the fact that people are using these social networks to get news which comes from some one they trust or "Follow".  This news has a lot more relevancy than reading a random blog on web. 

As such, I believe there will continue to be growth of companies who can filter signal from noise and form networks which helps filter information. 

User Interface Design vs. Visual Design

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As a product manager, I have been reading a lot about design issues lately.It took me a long time to comprehend just how important(even more than engineering) design is for success of the product. No matter how great your engineering team is, it needs to be told on what to build.

I often debate what is more important, User Interface Design or Visual Design? Truth be told, both are equally important, but if I had to choose one, I would lean towards usability design. In essence the interaction of the user with your product and how easily he gets to do what he intends to do with the product is supremely important.

You could have an OK visual design, but a great user interface design and have a hit product on your hand. Good example is Google itself. But no matter how great your visual UI design is, if the product is not well designed for user interaction, it will not have a long shelf life.

I am trying to use many of these principles at Faqden Labs and I will continue writing about my experiences and thoughts.

If you are at MIT, 6.831 is an amazing course on User Interface Design( http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.831/2011/handouts/gr1-analysis/gr1.shtml)

G-Lab vs. China/India Lab - MITSloan

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I am writing this for the benefit of future SDM cohort who plans to take one of the Action-Based Learning course at Sloan.


G-Lab: Students work in a team of 3-4 students with a start-up company, culminating in an on-site 2 or 3 week internship. These companies are generally small and entrepreneurial. Onsite internship is during the IAP for 3 weeks at locations in Asia, New Zealand, South America and the Middle East.

China/India Lab: The partner companies could be startups or large enterprises. Example: Reuters Corning etc. In China Lab, two MIT students work on a team with two Chinese students.  In India Lab, teams consist of four MIT students.  The onsite is over SIP and spring break.  The China/India Lab teaching staff hold an information session in October and details the application process.  The application process consists of writing a few essays and then an interview.


For more information contact Michellana Jester, who is the director of Action-Based Learning at Sloan.

Media Labs and Course 6 Schedule for Spring 2011

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I am back in school mode and trying to focus on graduating. Last couple of weeks, I had been so involved with Faqden Labs, that I could not concentrate on either RA or finalizing my class schedule. I am hoping to load up on courses from both Media Labs and Course 6. Primary objective is to take necessary courses for building product manager skills.

1. 6.813/6.831  User Interface Design & Implementation(http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.831/2011/handouts/gr1-analysis/gr1.shtml)

2. 6.083: Building Mobile Applications (http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.083/)

3. 6.868/MAS.731J: Society of Mind (http://web.media.mit.edu/~dustin/6.868/)

4. MAS.533  Imaging Ventures ~ Cameras, Displays, & Visual Computing Innovation & Entrepreneurship(https://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/MAS/sp11/MAS.533/)

Redefining Search! Google should be worried

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I rarely write reviews of upcoming products, for the fear of they turning out to be vapoware, but Qwiki has truly amazed me. This startup is trying to create a product which makes Information an experience that you can watch.

They are still in alpha testing stage, but check out some of demos below. I hope I could build such cool products at Faqden Labs or atleast work for them.

@TechCrunch


Qwiki at TechCrunch Disrupt from Qwiki on Vimeo.



Cool

Good Morning, Doug from Qwiki on Vimeo.

Apple is beating Android handsomely in the Enterprise arena!

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My research topic with CISR focuses on Enterprise Mobile Strategy(http://cisr.mit.edu/research/current-projects/mobility-innovations-to-be-reckoned-with/). As part of the research we are interviewing senior IT leaders in Fortune 500 companies on their mobile strategy. We are talking to various type of companies including BCG, Chevron, EMC etc. It is interesting to hear from diverse set of firms about their approach towards mobility. One theme seems to be emerging clearly. Apple is beating Android handsomely in the Enterprise arena!

Mobility: Innovations to be Reckoned With

Project Description:
Rapid innovation in mobile devices is continuously introducing new opportunities for disseminating information and designing workflows anywhere, anytime. The speed of change presents technical challenges, but the organizational challenges of adopting emerging mobile technologies and quickly implementing new ways of working will likely define the difference between clever idea and notable business success. Firms sometimes equip information workers with mobile technologies to enable more effective customer interactions or to facilitate remote work. And sometimes information workers equip themselves with mobile devices, whether or not their firms support those devices. In both cases, mobile devices may make information workers more effective—or not. This project will examine the efforts of a small set of leading edge firms to identify the opportunities and challenges associated with implementing mobile technologies.

Global Software Development using SCRUM

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I would like to discuss how a telecommunications enterprise, organically migrated from a waterfall methodology of software development to an iterative method for implementing a large project using an in-house, globally-distributed IT team.

Verizon’s globally distributed internal IT department and its captive development center in India traditionally used waterfall techniques for building large IT systems that provision and activate its core network for voice and data. A typical product development cycle would run from 3–6 months. It has a change control board to approve any changes or enhancements after the requirements document has been signed off on. The development teams were distributed 70% in India and 30% in the U.S.

Initially during the BAAIS Video implementation, Verizon followed its time tested waterfall model. This caused some unanticipated fallouts as noted below:

• Since video was a new domain for Verizon, the requirements for the project were changing frequently, as the LOB (Line of Business) clients were learning simultaneously.
• Long delivery cycles of four months, with no earlier access to the system for that particular phase, provided no opportunity for feedback from the clients. If the requirements were misunderstood or miscommunicated, they were realized only towards the end of the release phase, leading to huge delays.
• A gated model with required sign-offs meant longer requirements and functional design cycles up to 3–4 weeks, as every detail had to be captured.
• The detailed design, development and unit testing were split between onsite and offshore developers, and both teams would work on the same phase with interdependencies. This led to constant miscommunication during hand-offs and hand backs between onsite and offshore development teams.
• System integration testing (SIT) was done by a testing team eight weeks into development and would last for four weeks. There were always integration problems with code for up to two weeks into the SIT phase without a stable build to start testing. The developers ended up having to fix integration issues, even when the detailed documents were created to avoid such issues.
• This created high bug counts and unstable releases leading into the user acceptance testing. If the implemented features were not as expected, it led to unhappy clients and often resulted in a delay in release.
• Late requirement changes could not be accommodated and were especially difficult to communicate to the offshore team.

To address these challenges, we started making multiple changes in our development process:
We started documenting the test cases for user acceptance testing during the high level design stage. This approach brought the testing teams to the requirement meetings, where they helped to formulate different test scenarios. We also started involving representatives from offshore teams so that they receive the information first hand. This helped to greatly reduce mis-communications and gave the offshore team a heightened sense of responsibility to deliver the project.

To address the issue of code integration between offshore and onshore teams, we introduced a development server to perform automated code builds and a regression test every day after the first two weeks of development. Since the test cases were developed ahead of time, we could automate those tests for regression using simulated interfacing systems. Developers were required to check-in code often. The daily code build ensured that the compilation dependencies were resolved, and the regression test suite would catch any bugs that would break the expected functionality. This helped avoid any huge functionality gaps or code integration failures to creep in.

Once we had these tools in place to improve the quality of the development and delivery, we started to turn our attention towards the constant requirement changes from the clients. We started by creating a demo server, where the working version of the product was deployed, and which the clients had access to. This demo server was updated with the latest working version every four weeks. The possibility of changing the requirements before it was too late and the regular visibility into the working product led to a reduction of the detailed requirements design phase to less than one week from four weeks.

Since the overall project team size was less than 20, it was possible to conduct a short online meeting every day or two to discuss new plans, changes in current plans, issues between interfaces, etc. Each meeting would be led by lead developers on a rotation basis, and the meeting was automatically logged (for the managers to look at) since it was online and not a call. This way the team learned to be more self-organizing and more responsible.

Above changes made it possible to deliver a large project involving a globally distributed team without sacrificing the quality or the productivity. Both onshore and offshore teams became equal partners in the project with both approaching clients with equal visibility. Though Verizon is not a very process oriented company, just a due diligence effort to improve process led to agile/iterative techniques without a conscious effort. Though not all difficulties due to global collaboration were eliminated, most of them were definitely mitigated, resulting in a better product, a better (time) managed product life cycle and happier customers.

It had been stated that offshoring decreases the productivity by 0.7% for every 1% increase in offshore, and reduces quality in terms of the number of bugs increased by 1.5%. In my opinion, with this kind of methodology, though productivity may fall initially, it does improve over time with better coordination and by finding a non-physical way to reduce the proximity between the global teams. Like Martin Fowler quoted in Using an Agile Software Process with Offshore Development, "…separating teams by functionality and not activity boosted their morale and increased their sense of responsibility towards the final delivery of the product." This was well executed at Verizon in the example I gave above.

In conclusion, the iterative or agile methodology is an efficient way of managing globally distributed software projects. Agile methodology simplifies the communication and coordination problems rather than increasing them, and is a better approach than resorting to the waterfall method for solving technical and organizational challenges while distributing work globally. It also accommodates changing customer requirements, and there are a lot of success stories out there, as demonstrated by the articles and my example. Companies setting up offshore units just need to invest a little time implementing their own successful global delivery model using agile methodology.

PowerVocab - My first iPhone app is finally live on app store

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PowerVocab app is finally live on app store. It was approved on Monday and went live today morning...check it out at http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/powervocab-lite/id413511366?mt=8&ls=1

a.      

      In case you plan to review it, here are the steps :)

      

1.       Go to  App Store on iPhone
2.       Search for powervocab and select powervocab lite to install
3.        After installation, go the app page on app store again and click “No Ratings button”
4.        Click on the Write review button and write a review.

 I will write another blog about my experience developing an iPhone app and a guide for any one planning to do build one in future. Of course you are welcome to get in touch with me anytime if you need guidance.

Venture Capital Fund Raising At A Seven Year Low

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Thought of sharing for those of you, considering a choice between entrepreneurship or working for big firms. Mobile, LBS and few segments are doing extremely well relative to the overall the VC funding scenario.

Valley Style

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In a typical silicon valley style, I am working at Starbucks in Sunnyvale today. This is my first experience of working at Starbucks.

No, thats not me :). I am in Bay-Area the whole month of Jan, trying to prototype few iPhone/Android applications.

Will United States lose its ability to invent the next big technology?

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Outsourcing engineering jobs to countries like India and China is a norm these days. The sequence of events which generally follow such developments are scary. Eventually research and design jobs will also be outsourced to India and China. Next Google or Apple could be lingering in the alleys of Bangalore or Shanghai.

Popular belief seems to be that US needs to graduate more engineering students to compete globally. This  argument is fallacious on multiple fronts, but primarily it leads us to believe that the outsourcing trend is tied to the shortage of engineering graduates in United States. Such conclusions are dangerous because they could lead to wrong policy decisions, there by further jeopardizing the long term competitive advantage of United States.

Closely looking at the unemployment numbers and tracking engineering graduates seem to indicate that there is no real shortage of engineering graduates. Ofcourse these numbers could be eschewed by international students graduating from masters and Phd programs from US schools.

I suspect that it has a lot to do with the H1B policies and the salary parities between the countries rather than the shortage of engineering graduates. United states used to be a dream land for education, but the recent Visa restrictions and the non-transparent process of granting or rejecting Visas has made it difficult for bright students to consider US for their future education. Its difficult for international students to integrate with the society here. H1B visa regulations are very difficult and restrictive. Temporary workers cannot start a business or make long term plans to stay in United States. Losing these highly skilled labors can ultimately have next Google and Apple dwelling in the countries outside US.

Another big reason for this trend, is that the cost of operations in US is much higher compared to the cost of running the same operations in India/China.  Outsourcing trend first started with jobs which did not require high skilled labor. But ultimately this has grown to nearly all kind of jobs being outsourced. Product oriented companies have research centers set up in India and China and a chunk of innovation for these companies comes from there. Government is trying to stop blind outsourcing by imposing tax restrictions, but they will not be very effective keeping in mind the high financial gains made by such efforts. In such scenario, not motivating international students to settle in the US can be a bad strategy.


US should create the excitement for domestic students, and make it really cool and rewarding to become a scientist or engineer. They should make it easier for temporary workers to start businesses, and  help the United States compete globally. H1B workers contribute to the economy, create jobs, and lead innovation.We must also make it easier for foreign students to stay after they graduate. 

Oct 29 2010 Is Social Media a Fad?

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Faqden Labs website is ready!

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Finally the Faqden Labs website is complete and deployed. Facebook integration is pending, but everything else looks decent now.  www.faqden.com

So far people seem to like it. The goal of Faqden Labs is to create in-house mobile products. Based on the insistence of one of our partner companies we are also exploring Facebook apps. Lets see how that goes.



The caption of the website is "We can create what we can imagine" represented by the image below.

                                      
It represents the fact that, Faqden Labs will partner with anyone who has a good idea. We invite them to come and sit with us to discuss more. We can and will create what we can imagine!

How Circular links affect Google's Page Rank

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Google's Page Rank algorithm is not as simple as I describe in my post. I am just trying to highlight one aspect of it and how circular links are dealt with by Google.

To decide Page Rank for a page, google crawler goes through the web and sees how many times a web page is hit. More is the number of hits better will be the Page Rank. During its early days, when people discovered this algorithm, they started creating circular links i.e. A->B->A.  Once crawler reaches A, it will hit B and then back to A and so on. This helped them increase page ranks.  Google algorithm could ofcourse track small circular links and ignore them. But when the links are quite big, its not really possible to detect and eliminate them. They might eliminate a few genuine links in that case. To exploit this loophole, people started creating something called "Page farms", which are a set of unused popular links with high page ranking, you buy from the domain name owner and then use it to point a link to your website. These kind of links would then form long circular links difficult to detect at any time.  Since page rank of a page also depends on the page rank of the pages which point to this page, it helped in raising the page rank tremendously.

To counter such efforts, google came up with a  probability model. At any time when crawler reaches a page it goes to the link pointed to by this page with probability x and to some random link with probability (1-x).  So the probability of going through the circular link is reduced by (1-x) at every step. Because crawler has some randomization added which cannot be predicted and manipulated, it helps is generating a better page rank.

It is also important to note that "Page Rank" is not the only factor that determines where your Page is listed on Google. There are several more important factors to it like content relevancy. At anytime it is better to optimize your content and to advertise it through social media rather than generating circular links to increase Page Rank :)

INFINITE POSSIBILITES WITH MOBILE SOCIAL NETWORKING

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Social networking is the fastest growing activity among the Internet mobile users with a growth rate of 187% in 2009 according to eMarketer.com. This site also predicts that the amount of mobile social network users will grow from 223 million (4.6% of mobile users) in 2010 to 760 million (13.3% of mobile users) in 2014. With the recent surge of activities among several successful companies to build and launch mobile versions of their applications (apps) and the war of smartphones heating up on both the price and features front, the end consumer will be the real winners. Mobile devices embedded with still camera, video/voice recorder, GPS, and social networking apps are fueling the growth of user generated content. Mobile social networking truly has the potential to make Kevin Kelly's vision of single global machine (We Are the Web) a reality.

Mobile phones provide richer social interaction by enabling users to take part in an event, capture it, provide comments and share it with friends all in an instant. Without the mobile versions of their apps, social networking sites like Twitter or Yelp would not have been as successful as they are. Video social networking sites like Qik and Knockinglive let you share moments with anyone, anywhere in the world in realtime using LIVE video streaming through cell phones.

Although each of these companies (like Twitter, Yelp, Facebook) have created a niche for themselves in a particular segment of the market, it is the convergence of various platforms (social networking services — SNS, mobile platforms), which will create the maximum value for the consumers. 

Impact on News Media

Information travel is much more personal and sometimes even faster than the regular news media. All of this is made possible by social networking on mobile devices. News travels fast, but it travels faster with mobile social networking, as is evident by the 25 million Facebook users who accessed the site on their mobile devices in January 2010 (an increase of 112% over January 2009) and the 4.7 million Twitter accounts accessed in January 2010 (an increase of 347% over January 2009), according to eMarketer.com. I see the trend going towards news media investing directly with SNS giants like Facebook and Twitter to get news the fastest way they can. CNN already relies on “iReporters” to post their live experiences of an event. However, they could take it a step further and collaborate with the search engines to grab the most popular topics circulating the social networking sphere. This would make them omnipresent. The location services, now increasingly available on mobile phones, can be used to verify the authenticity of a post.

Location Based Services

The input of location on mobile devices has the potential to change all the outputs. People want their mobile devices to tell them what to do, where to go, who to meet, what to eat, where to shop. Yelp is a good example of such a service, but SNS (Facebook and Twitter) and PNS (Linkedin) can leverage such capabilities to provide innovative services. SNS websites let you strengthen the realworld relationships, but it is the overlay of the online social graph on to the real world using location based services that will create the best opportunities for the future. The following applications are possible: 

    – During a professional networking event, the guest list could be a Linkedin identifier, which will enable you to quickly overlay the professional social graph on the attendee lists. You can access their public profile and integrated Twitter to see the latest Tweets, which can be a conversation starter and a networking opportunity in the real world.

    – If you are out and looking for a place to eat, based on your previous food choices or postings or reviews you wrote, check out Yelp for nearby popular joints and it should be able to create a list of nearby best choices for you without you giving any additional input. If you read books and have virtual connections related to similar interests in books, it should tell you if you are both in the same bookstore or neighborhood so that you could share or swap your collection. It should be able to make specific and localized recommendations based on your status updates if you chose to and when relevant. 

This ease of information availability by people involved in or near an event, is making the big search giants like Google and Microsoft invest in searchable SNS posts. Armed with user locations, Microsoft and Google could sell more targeted ads and provide more relevant search results. 

Eisenmann’s WTA — Winner Take All (Most) Analysis

Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, and Linkedin all have network effects. But there is a room for differentiation among them and since the multihoming cost is low (free), it is highly unlikely that Facebook can envelope all other sites. The social networking domain could have multiple categories and each category could have a “winner take all (or most)” player. Twitter is broadcast based, celebrity-follower model unlike Facebook, which is based on reciprocal relationships. Facebook’s fan page has many features similar to Twitter, but it cannot envelope Twitter. The reason for this is the primary perception difference between following someone’s Tweets and becoming his/her fan. Yelp and Twitter as such will exist as independent sites. But there are lots of innovative solutions possible by the collaboration between Twitter and Yelp with Facebook and Linkedin. It’s also important to note that location based services or sites cannot exist as stand alone businesses in the long run. For instance, Loopt was quite innovative when it first started, letting people know where others in their network are. It’s difficult to come up with enhancements that would keep the app relevant in the long run, particularly when giants like Google,Twitter, and Facebook can envelope the functionality easily and faster. Same applies to another location based service called FourSquare.  

Some Implications/Impediments

Privacy — Users are willing to divulge more and more personal information on social networking websites everyday. Total personalization of services will require total transparency on the user’s part. The SNS platforms or the mobile platforms have minimal or no control over the content posted. This sometimes can affect the privacy of another individual or a group of individuals who did not choose to be a part of it. 

Quality — As we know, in the last 5-10 years, the latency of news bites changed dramatically and drastically. So did the quality of news bites. These days, it’s hard to sift for real news through the humongous list of most popular topics coming through the search engines. Adding SNS search results to this could highlight gossip over real news. So, the SNS platforms have to invest wisely in this area and implement intelligent algorithms to sift signal from noise.

Universal Social Network ID — As argued above, existence of multiple SNS companies is almost inevitable and so is the need for universal social networking handle. Keeping track of so many different social networking handles will become difficult over time. With Facebook‑Connect, Facebook is attempting to do the same. But in the long run, tying multiple social graphs from different SNS/PNS platforms to a single e-mail ID will be very beneficial to the user, as well as open up new opportunities.

“Open but not Open” strategy — Although convergence is good for the consumers, it does not create economic sense for platform players to open up their platform completely. How open to make the platform is a strategic decision. While Twitter has chosen the path of making the platform open, where the core feature could be accessed through any medium/application, companies like Facebook and Linkedin have followed the walled-garden approach(“Open but not Open” strategy), where you need to visit their website or mobile application to access the core features. Even in the smartphone market, Apple is following the “Open but not Open” strategy, as the apps written on the iPhone will not work on any other platform. Unlike Apple, Google has decided to make Andriod an open platform where the applications can be deployed on any device as long as it runs the Android OS. Open but not open strategy, will help monetize the platform, although it doesn’t let consumers link various social graphs (Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin) together. Many application developers might not have the resources to build apps for multiple mobile platforms, so the apps cannot become truly device agnostic. By doing this, they could be curbing the growth of innovative solutions possible by the convergence of various technologies and mobile/SNS/PNS platforms.

Conclusion

The social networking craze amongst mobile users is boosting an adoption of mobile Internet. Mobile, in upcoming years, will become the primary conduit of interaction with social networking sites, benefitting the mobile device manufacturers (specifically smartphones) and mobile carriers. The mobile carriers/manufacturers with strong infrastructure, mobile commerce ramp-up, and respect for consumer privacy will see the strongest growth in the long run. But smartphones will become commodities because, in essence, it is the apps which make the smartphone devices as popular as they are. There will be a growth of technologies which can make mobile apps portable among different smartphone devices. “Visiongain believes that revenue from mobile social networking and user generated content will grow to around $60 billion in 2012. ” Hence, covergence not only brings innovative solutions to the market but also adds economic wealth to the companies if utilized correctly.

Working with designers - giving requirements

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I have been dealing with app UI designers and web UI designers for sometime now. Most of the things I learnt during these interactions have been invaluable. Coming from the engineering side of product development, I often neglected the importance of user interface designers. Of course, it gets apparent quiet quickly that it was a mistake. You might have the best code base but if it is not visually appealing and simple application from usability/user interface perspective,  it loses its charm. 


The biggest problem I face during these interactions is how to convey my train of thoughts effectively to designers. I often tried to give them a verbal and written product description. If this description is for a complex application, say for instance a game, giving verbal and written description gets challenging. Most of the times I dealt with this situation by researching about competitors products. This is where I started making bigger mistakes. As a product manager it is OK for you to understand and see what the competitors product looks like, but a designers job is creative. If you give him the slightest idea of competitors product, you are completely curbing his train of thoughts. Anything after that would be influenced by these designs. I often saw designers making refinements to an existing product rather than creating something completely new. And then your product becomes just one more in the crowd.


Explain the functionality and features of your product clearly to the designer using wire-frames. If possible, choose a designer who is closest to the target audience of the product. This will help him in coming up with a better design. Once the requirements have been conveyed, ask for functional flow diagrams, followed by wire-frames(not same as given by client), and finally mock-ups. At each step you need to agree upon 2 or 3 iterations. For example, an iteration of functional flow diagram is first version, followed by feedback. There needs to be at least 2 iterations for each step.  After the final mock ups are completed, then compare with other similar products and propose refinements to it.

Working with offshore developers - offshore vendor's point of view

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In my last post I mentioned a few points about dealing with offshore developers. I want to add further to my last post by talking about the offshore vendor side of the story. Through my years of experience in a variety of roles, I have worked  at all types of companies. ex: Enterprise IT(Verizon, AOL Time Warner), Products(Murex), Services(Sourcebits). I have been a client (Verizon, Murex, self) and a service provider.  I have lived and experienced different set of challenges, which each side faces and their perspective of the story.  

Here I list some of the issues which offshore developers face. 

1)  Clients generally give a very vague description of several features and some of these features are very broad and can be broken down to several sub-features. ex: include viral sharing capabilities. This simple line can be broken into multiple features depending on how you define it. 

2)  As mentioned in the previous post, service providers have many quote requests per day and the conversion rate is generally very low. It is very difficult to identify a deal which might be successful. In this scenario, you end up giving equal time to each quote request, there by doing it very superficially. And also, you are trying to turnaround the quote request as soon as possible to beat the competition(could vary from 24 hrs to 72 hrs). Once the bid is given it is impossible to increase it during further negotiations(time-frame after the bid and before the contract is signed).

3)  During SRS phase it is very easy for clients to creep in the requirements and pretty much every feature can be adjusted to include several sub-features. Its basicaly playing with words and since the language(intentionally) is so vague in the requirements document , that can give any twist to it.

4)  The project manager/delivery manager is focussed on optimizing the resources and completing the project on-time, finance/senior management is focused on making a profit and client tries to creep in as many features as possible within same budget. Amidst all this, one person who completely gets killed is the developer. On one side, he is required to finish the development on time, with quality, and on the other side he needs to keep the client happy sometimes fulfilling his last minutes requirement changes. 

I will write another blog some other day on how to deal with these issues and talk about  how a service company can sucessfully navigate the waters and make substantial profits(Based on my experience).