Posts

Three Circles of Life & Intersection Point

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There is an interesting phenomenon that i had observed in many things. This is more profound in things that DEPEND on one another but have have a CONFLICT of interest. Business: Let us begin with a simple case of any business /company. The stake holders here are Employees, Management & Inventors. Each have an interest in being associated and some times there is synergy and sometimes there are conflicts about what each stakeholder is expecting from each other  in the association. The higher the ‘area’ of the intersection, there greater is the chance for the business to survive.     Google: In case of Google search, the stakeholders are Users - Google – Advertisers. Here users interest lie is finding things they are looking for quickly, Advertisers interest lie in their Ads being shown up for the most relevant users, google’s interest lie in making money. At the center lies the common interest among all the participants. The responsibility of balancing the inter...
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“Personalize” to drive Customer Adoption

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Today when i logged into ‘blogger’ (where this blog is hosted) i saw a pop-up asking me “if i would update my ‘profile’ to the all new Google + Profile?” . As always, i was curious to see how are they going to convince me (Yes, when your customers have a choice, then y ou will have to convince them) and hence wanted to give it a try. When i landed on the next page i saw the following image with some texts that outlined things that will change, benefits and how i can revert back if i do not like the new stuff. If you leave texts (or rather nicely worded words), what stood out was that they had taken some pains to personalize the above to show my profile picture, my profile details and had put the ‘before’ and ‘after’ scenarios very nicely. Not a big thing, but this little personalization did help them (Google guys) in ensuring my adopting of their new feature. To me this small little change is nothing, but to them it may be of immense value - like having a centralized user profile do...
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Use Simple Metrics & Flaunt Them !!!

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Sometime back on my other blog ( http://allthingsproductmanagement.info ) i had posted the following http://allthingsproductmanagement.info/stay-focused-it-is-all-about-focus-honey-part which was about using metrics to measure performance. Today, metrics are everywhere, but the saddest thing is that metrics are defined at at every level – individual level, departmental level, product level. The biggest assumption here is that if the lower level metrics track good, then the organizational level metrics like profitability, ROI etc., must be good as well. But that is not always the case. In most cases, the metrics of one product / department works against the metrics of another product/ department. Let us take the case of QA. Their metrics are heavily tilted towards number of defects/bugs identified during the various stages of a product development. But wait a minute!!! if one has to justify for the existence of QA, does it mean defects/bugs needs to be introduced in the product deve...
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Achieving Simplicity - in User Registration

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Today, i just came across the most simplest registration for a website at www.docstoc.com . Just give your e-mail id and nothing else. I could have used my facebook id and get started, instead wanted to try out the registration experience. Once i gave my e-mail id, i am ‘in’ as a registered user and was able to access most of the features offered by docstoc.com This is completely in contrast to most website that take the following steps: Fill-up at least 4 to 6 details like user name, e-mail, password, verifyy password, First & Last Name (optional) E-mail verification Password resetting Display account/ profile details and ask for more information. Automatically sign-up for ‘E-mail notifications’ and make the user to opt out (which is the most irritating thing to do) By following the above processes, most website combined two things in ‘one go’ – user registration and capturing quality user details (authentic details). But, looks like docstoc.com separated the two and ju...
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Purple Ideas– Intro

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This blog will be about appreciating ‘simple things / ideas’ that i come across during my day to day interactions with people & things. Also will try to pen my thoughts on how we can approach or solve complex problems using simple ideas or rather ‘purple ideas’ I do hope you will enjoy the journey and do write back to me in case you have interesting thoughts or suggestions. Srini
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