What makes a Product Successful?

It is a million dollar question and I wish there was some recipe for it. Unfortunately, there is no one recipe for it.  Nevertheless, after working for over 6 years in 3 start-ups developing and working on some innovative products, there are few key things that will make the product successful which I have outlined below.

Idea and Conceptualization:  The foremost thing is to have an idea. Once you have an idea, you need to conceptualize and think through it so that it lasts forever. This is where the vision comes in to picture and you really need to think hard what new things are coming up and how can it be applied to the business problems in the market. The way you present and position it in the market matters, there may be lot of people who are doing the same thing, but the way you position and differentiate will matter the clients the most.

Execution: Having an idea is one thing, executing is another! One of my friend says, Ideas are the cheapest things available so, what matters most is execution. Putting the right people in the right place, making them aware of your goals and ensuring things are going as per your plan. Also, ensuring the team is focused and doesn’t lose its direction on a day to day basis matters a lot.  Just because you are the first one to do it and nobody else has done it, doesn’t mean you will be successful. Remember Google was not the first search engine, but it’s still successful.

Presentation and Usability:  In some conversation, some one said, market needs two things one that works and one that looks good. Both needs to be done in parallel. Unless you have an excellent, clean and uncluttered user interface nobody will use it.  Not just clean interface, but should be easily usable as well. Initially there used to be lot of login forms to be filled before you logged on to the application, but these days you can log on using a simple email id and you start off! Making the application simple and easily usable interface is of foremost importance.

Market: While you are building the product, you need to start capturing the market and understanding it. One of my Prof. Said,  the pulse of the market needs to be understood and you should be able to gauge know what works and what doesn’t. And, getting the right feedback from the clients and implementing it is the key. This should work in an iterative way!

Education:  You may have nice usability and presentation. However, if the client is unaware of how to use it, it would be a disaster. I remember in one of the instance, one of the users used a certain user interface to delete from db. However, he meant to delete it temporarily, but it erased the entire table and hence the information was lost forever. It is vital that the client is educated and sufficient training is provided so that he knows to use it effectively.

Awareness: Well, you might have given proper training and education to the client. However, there may be so many features and it becomes impossible to remember each of the features due to information overload. Every now and then you should make the user to remind him of a feature that is being developed or present. Like some websites, throw a pop up to make the user aware of the feature. Awareness plays a key role to make the product more usable and sustaining it.

Adoption: You have an excellent product and it solves the most challenging problem, but without the adaptability of the people to use the product it would be a failure.  It has been said that only 5% of the products are successful. The inability of the people to adapt to new solution is a hindrance to the growth and hence a debacle to the product. In my initial days at one of the company, any idea that was thrown to the people was thrown in to dust bin literally.  Lack of knowledge,  unwillingness to learn new things,  inability to fore see the future were all making the product to be scrapped. But the commitment from the management ensured it was successful, but it got delayed by over a year due to adoption issues.

Scale: You have solid product, it is usable, and it is adopted. That’s very well done! You may want to relax..! But, in order to continue the momentum and an everlasting product you need a product that’s scalable to different verticals in short period of time. Not just scale of product, scale of team, team management, processes, adopting to change of markets will all play a crucial role so that there is a growth otherwise the product loses its steam and hence needs to be scrapped!

In my little experience that I have gained, these are some of the aspects that are key to make a product successful.  There are several other aspects that might play a key role which are not covered.  

Again, as it is said, success is about being in the right place, at the right time with the right people.

 

Feel Blessed

Feel Blessed,

If you get two squares meal a day, there are millions who does not have food to survive

Feel Blessed,

If you have got some education, there are millions who do not get the opportunity to study.

Feel Blessed,

If you have parents, there are millions where parents have ditched their kids and/or are orphans.

Feel Blessed,

If you have a shelter, there are millions who stay on the roads and are devoid of shelter.

Feel Blessed,

If you have Eyes, Nose, Ears, Voice etc. there are millions without one or more of these.

Feel Blessed,

If you have a job, there are millions without a Job.

Feel Blessed,

If you have drinking water, there are millions where people travel miles to fetch few litres of water.

Feel Blessed,

If you have a vehicle, there are millions without one.

Feel Blessed,

If you can afford to buy clothes, there are millions where these are not on their priority list.

Feel Blessed,

If you are able to travel, there are millions where they have not gone beyond a few kilometres in their life.

Feel Blessed,

If you know internet, there are millions where it is still a luxury for them.

Feel Blessed,

If you have Kids, there are millions without kids.

Feel Blessed,

If you are alive, there are millions who die just after birth or killed in the Womb.

         

Feel Blessed,

And, try to bring some change in one’s life.       

Reminisicing the Beloved , Dedicated and Inspiring Teachers'

God could not be everywhere that’s why he created mother. Mother who gives an unconditional love, affection to her child is the First Guru also known Aadi Guru to the child. It is the mother’s voice that reaches the child first and there starts journey of learning of the good, bad and ugly of life. Search Google for the word Guru and you shall find over 0.4 billion results with various meanings of the Guru. Guru - means Teacher in Sanskrit, imparter of knowledge, It also means one who dispels darkness of ignorance. On the eve of Teachers’ day, this blog is a tribute to the teachers in my life and a special thanks to them for making me what I am today. A Teacher plays a very important role in one’s life. The significance of the Guru and Shishya is very much evident from Mahabharata, where Krishna is the Guru and Arjuna the Disciple. It is Krishna who guides and navigates Arjuna through various conundrums that Arjuna faces.                                                         

Teachers’ Day – A day dedicated to teachers’ and their accomplishments. Different countries celebrate this day on different days, mainly as a celebration to their accomplishments and their effort to nurture and make the students life bright and prosperous. In India, it is celebrated on 5^th September to commemorate the Birth Anniversary of Dr. Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan. Dr.Radhakrishan was the first Vice President and the Second President of India. He was a great Scholar and a Philosopher too. One of his best quotes was “When we think we know we cease to learn”. He was awarded Bharat Ratna in 1954.

Painting by: Amit Shah

The school days are the best days in life and are filled with fun, naughtiness, learning, mischief etc. And, everyone wants to go back to those days. You can write any number of incidences in your school. One such incidence is my first speech and if I remember it correctly it was on Teachers’ Day. The first speech is always scary, nervous and especially when you have a stage fear you tend to forget few words or lines. And, same thing happened to me, But, a very low voice from behind was helping me to recollect the words and lines. Guess who it was, it was my English Teacher :). Gone are the days of the stage fear and now I am confident of giving even extempore. The name of the school is named after Swami Vivkenand known as Shri Vivekanand English Medium School. And, who can forget his message from Swami Vivekand – Arise, Awake and Stop not till the goal is reached.

 

Another incidence in the school was during the send off ceremony as we were about to complete 10^th standard. Our Maths teacher gave us some valuable message as follows.‘Dear Students, You are like my children. So many days you were with us and we were protecting you from all evils. You were swimming in a pond; you shall soon start swimming in ocean.  The depth of ocean is never known, ocean is beautiful, you get fins to swim like a fish and there are no boundaries. But it has sharks, dolphins and many other creatures. You have to swim carefully and cautiously and be successful in life’. It was a great message; most of us have followed them and are trying to be as successful as possible. 

After completing 10^th and 12^th, I landed up at Engineering at BVB College of Engineering and Technology, Hubli. During one of our class in the morning, Our Prof. asked us “What are the news headlines for the day”? My friend said “We don't read the news for the day as  we get late to reach college in the morning?”. Prof gave a witty reply “What is yesterday’s headline?” The message was loud and clear that emphasize to keep updated about the happenings around the world. The Prof. was a mentor to me and also guide to our final year project. I got an opportunity to assist in his PhD Thesis by implementing a C program to simulate the Robotics model he had proposed. 

After Engineering I had break in between and then Pursued M. Tech at IIIT-B. During one of the lecture events at IIIT-B, I had been to invite one of the Prof. for the event; the reply was ‘I am what I am’. The message is clear, follow your own path and be what you want to be! At another incidence during the Open House, two Profs started debating about a certain model used in the project, soon scores of students started surrounding which was one of the great discussion to listen. Knowledge is like Honey, you just get attracted to it. True to the punch line of the college ‘Jnanam Uttamam – Knowledge is supreme.'

The incidences at each of the institutes I studied are endless. ‘Alma mater’ as it is known as, which means ‘nourishing mother’ in Latin has made me what I am today and given me a way of life. At every step there were teachers’ who guided and nurtured me.  Guru, Teacher, Mentor – call them whatever you like. They are the important people who are needed at every age of your life. Teachers’ are the most revered people on earth; they guide you, mentor you and help you navigate the intricacies. Even in professional life at every place I went there was someone who guided me to navigate the nuances of work life.  Teachers' are the most revered persons forever and in every one’s life. You might not have met your teachers' since ages, but definitely you remember them and they are in your hearts always. Wishing all the teachers ‘A Very Happy Teachers Day’.

In an Uncertain but Predictable World

Uncertainty! In a world surrounded by corruption, scams, recession, job loss etc., the world we live in has become more volatile and highly uncertain. Amidst the uncertainty we are always curious and intrigued to know what happens next, tomorrow and so on and so forth. The mind is always speculative, take the example of news these days – Intense Speculation! We are very much eager to know what would happen to life – that’s why Astrology! We are very much eager to predict the stocks – that’s why Stock Trading. We are very much eager to  know the outcome of a match – that’s why Betting (And, Fixing)!Our mind continuously debates to predict the outcome of something or the other. 

Prediction has been existing since the Roman Republic where the tracking of all adult male fit for military service were maintained in records and since then existed the census. The word ‘Census’ is derived from the Latin word ‘censere’ which means ‘to estimate’. In the year 1880 the census of the American population took over 8 years, the next census was estimated to take over 14 years. This gave impetus to sampling techniques. Sampling techniques are used in various places like to predict the outcome of an election – the field known as Psephology, to forecast the weather(predicting seasonal changes goes back to as old as 25000 years ago), to determine the behaviour of consumers by taking a sample survey and so on and so forth. How to decide a sample is itself a challenge and could give incorrect outcomes chosen a wrong sample. Various sampling techniques have evolved over a period of time. These have been applied to various available data forms. But with the advancement of technology, digitization of data, Plethora of challenges and opportunities exist to apply the prediction techniques to the emerging field known as Big Data. We have unleashed and solved myriad of problems that could have been never solved without technology and digitized data.

The emergence of new technologies viz. cheaper machines, hard disks, Hadoop, No SQL data bases, Artificial Intelligence - Artificial Intelligence – Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing and Linguistics have all aided to solve the problem of Big Data mainly to predict the outcome of a particular problem. Let us look at some of them to understand the impact of these on the life of people.

Recommendation:  With the advent of social networks, the recommendation engines are seen to be handy tool for marketers to promote the products. Take for example of 

Facebook: There are various recommended things viz. ‘You may know’ (person), ‘Suggested Group’, ‘Add to news feed’, ‘you may also like’, etc. All this is possible because by profiling the person to whom these are recommended. If you have page, it also give you an analytics about the demographics of the user and helps you identify your target customer profile. It also suggests the place that you currently live in based on other friends whom you are connected with. Because of recommendations, I am able to connect to friends whom I might have missed due to the distance gap.

Linkedin: ‘People you may know’, ‘recommended news’, ‘jobs you may be interested in’, ‘Groups you may like’, ‘Companies you may want to follow’ and so on and so forth. This helps you know where jobs are available, which are your relevant companies depending on your profile in real time. The idea of searching jobs or companies is kind of vanishing.

IMDB: International Movie Database – a recommendation engine for movies. It is built using an algorithm that rates the movies based on the votes of the users. It becomes easier to know what movies to watch and what can be left out!

Likewise, these recommendations are used on most e-commerce sites like amazon.com, flip kart and many other places to recommend you a particular product based on your usage history.

Markets

Stock Market Predictions - There have been models built using twitter to predict the stock market. Some of the references are ‘Twitter Mood Predicts the Stock Market’ , ‘Tweet Predictions’ . In fact, I got an opportunity to work on similar problem in my previous firm known as ‘Real Time Intelligence’. The idea was to predict the behaviour of the company so that the fund managers can decide on which company the investment should be made. Using the same problem, it was extended to health care, Enterprise Risk analysis and many other domains. We used new that was aggregated form disparate sources to predict the trend and also tweeter was used as well. Even there have been studies using Google Trends to predict the markets. References are here , here and here.

Algorithmic Trading – If tweeter and news can help to predict the outcome of the stock value of the company. Then algorithmic trading helps you invest in large number of companies based on the algorithms  you choose. Of course, there are guidelines and in some instances these algorithmic trading has halted the stock exchanges due to a bug in the system too. But, this helps to invest on large scale which was humanely impossible to invest.

Human Resource

Predicting Employee Exit – Several companies are using the tools to predict whether an employee is about to exit and these tools help to engage the companies to retain the talent. Training the employee is quite expensive for organization and retaining the employees is one of the agendas for the HR.

Predict Performance before Employee Joins – There are also tools that predict whether the employee is going to be successful in his job before he or she actually joins the company. Now, this might be incredible. Thanks to the data trails left by the employees on the web.

BMI Prediction – Usually, to calculate BMI you take the weight and height of the person and then calculate the BMI. How about looking at the face in a photograph and then calculating the BMI? Not possible then click here to believe it. 

Farecast  (Acquired by Bing) is used to predict when the best time to purchase a flight ticket is, Decide is used to predict when to buy electronic products and likewise the list of prediction applications is endless. One of the interesting predictions that I came across was about ‘Algorithms Calculate a Couple's Chances of Having a Baby via IVF’. And, the best ever has been by IBM Watson’s DeepQA project.  No industry is left without leveraging the Big Data technologies and Prediction algorithms. This has opened the flood gates of opportunities to the so called Data Scientist, Entrepreneurs and Academicians to solve challenging problems and to make an Uncertain World in to a Predictable One!