Insights from India's Favourite Product Consultant & Coach

  Having worked in both the service and product segments of the software industry I have had some amount of exposure to Agile when implemented with products and while adopted for client deliverable. During early years I did not have sufficient authority to voice my opinions during decision making and exercise powers while shaping development processes. And to my irritation I still don’t have the power to question the authority or challenge the dominance of Agile. While I am struggling to understand why Agile is the best framework for me to adopt, I am also beginning to examine cases when it does work favourably for me. For those of you that undermine the power of Agile, let me put forward a few scenarios you would want to avoid regardless of which software methodology you follow. Identify your end customer:  Client project or product, you've got to identify who your customers are and what value your software offers to them while assessing opportunities for ...

Add a new dimension to product management - 'growth' and you become a growth hacker. Let me try to define growth in a single sentence without being superfluous. To put it simply, 'Growth' is a tangible increase in (certain) metrics that determine your online presence. And, what would 'Growth Hacking' mean? When I was a kid, I was told that hacking is a way to find a shortcut, a creative way or an unforeseen method to penetrate a functionality on a web application without following the conventional way. This unconventional way would have to fail the application in its traditional usage. That said, Growth Hacking when applied to a portal or online application would mean discovering alternate or underused ways to increase the popularity in terms of downloads, visits, usage, retention, etc. Unlike conventional ways of marketing, these ways will be experimentative in nature. Does a Product Manager have to learn 'Growth'? Isn't growth an inherent component...

Some of my friends here enjoy reading my articles and they've requested me to post more frequently. I was a regular blogger back in school and college and although I haven't blogged as frequently I'm trying to get back to the blogosphere and make my presence felt. A lot of my readers are young professionals who have recently (in the last 5 years or less) stepped into the corporate world and are looking to maximize their interviews. So I thought of writing today to provide some realistic tips around interviewing. Please remember that these pointers are to be considered only during ideal scenarios - realistically speaking, unless we base our assumptions on ideal situations, there can be no one-size-fits-all answer to this problem. Anyway, let's begin writing bullet points. Know the company you're interviewing with Always know the company that you're interviewing with. You may not have the time to read about or go through the company details but trust me, it reall...