To be or not to be!

Mr Shakespeare , said it right centuries ago.. To be or not to be... The opening phrase of hamlet represents the dilemma of the investors , board of directors , management and just everyone....

How does it affect Product Managers! In smaller companies where one has to be very careful about utilizing the available resources , To Be or Not To Be is a very valid question.. Yes its a question thats difficult to answer... Especially when you are thinking of new products/ideas..

Sometimes , it gets too close to decide whether or not to pursue the plan.. Sometimes the convincing presentations don't work... The business plan doesn't make strategic sense..

And it gets to a situation where you believe in the idea and need to convince the stakeholders , get the backing from the solutions architect , get the technical evaluation done and guess what the timeline was yesterday! Did you just forget the sales team ?


I am working on some easy prototyping and technical evaluation templates... It might be seem simple but I am sure , people who have been there will have a different opinion..

What has helped me so far is creating a plan that has shows the resource utilization and most importantly the effect on the other projects..

This is where I started using Proto.io... The tool has actually helped tremendously to get a clear picture to the teams , stakeholders , customers and everyone..

I think prototyping has been traditionally used but with the improved functionalities of the prototyping tools , its been much more easier for everyone to visualize and improvise without putting a lot of time.

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Cutting through the clutter

One of the most important aspects of our jobs as product managers are cutting through the clutter! There will be a lot of requirements and lots of suggestions, sometimes it gets so difficult to get to the point but its essential. Generally everyone wants all the features and most importantly we get to hear how it needs to be done..

Being a talkative person , I love to hear and participate these discussions. Most importantly it opens up multiple ways of implementing a feature.. The difficult part is to get to the final one.. Sometimes it feels like a maze , cutting through the walls and getting the answers!

Yes cutting through the clutter is definitely interesting , challenging and most importantly its a learning experience. There are thousands of ways to present a solution , and there is no right or wrong way... The end goal is definitely to address the problem..

Here is one metrics I have created and use it for any implementations

The percentage can change depending on the company and the nature of the product. Depending upon the phase of the product /timelines an appropriate implementation needs to be chosen.


Well its not as difficult as it might sound. Its actually pretty interesting!

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Data Driven Prodcuts

First of all Wish you a very very Happy New year. This year CES has welcomed 2016 with a lot of exciting innovative products in the IOT world. My favorite was mood detector! I am going to buy that soon !

This month has been largely about data and data driven features/ understanding the user behaviors/patterns. We have been doing this exercise internally and I suggest its a must! 

Then I came across this blog post on mindtheproduct. Its a very very well written and well explained blog. 

http://www.mindtheproduct.com/2016/01/strange-user-behaviours-more-lessons-learned-at-mail-ru/

"Be open to real data, real user behavior and external events. Be ready to change your product to react to users’ new expectations, but also be open to the possibility of you being wrong. Don’t forget to double check your decisions, and be ready to test anything and everything possible. New real-life knowledge about your users will always result in a better product."

- Quoted from http://www.mindtheproduct.com/2016/01/strange-user-behaviours-more-lessons-learned-at-mail-ru/

Well its very easy to look at the data the way you want to look at it and completely ignore what the data is saying. So it is very very essential to remove "I love my product" hat or "I know that" hat or for that matter " This is so obvious" hat before looking at the data.

After spending half a day with tableau and looking at multiple visualizations ,  I felt lost but honestly thats where the GRAPH appeared and I did understand the problem. It is the data that will help me create the problem statement. More interestingly I wasn't looking to solve that problem , that problem was presented by the data.

I have genuine respect for all the data analysts/scientists ! These people can make supposedly non existing issue alive!! 

If your product does give you access the usage data , average time on page , pattern of clicks and more such KPIs nothing like it. The big data in this case might provide more information than the thick data from the user interviews/interactions !

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