I have been attending SVPMA monthly events the past few months. At the events, I enjoy meeting other silicon valley Product Managers and listening to PM gurus share their perspectives about a particular aspect of the PM profession in a lecture-style presentation. I couldn’t resist sharing September presentation by Steve Blank, who teaches entrepreneurship at UCB and Stanford, on being a PM at a startup. I liked how the presenter articulated 1. the difference between agile and lean startups and 2. tips on customer development and tying it to product development.
This is a followup on my earlier post on BI applications being offered through the SaaS model. Here’s some stuff I learnt recently on what could be called Google’s BI offerings…
Big Query labs — It is Google’s computing and networking infrastructure offered in the form of a giant SQL crunching service. BQL competes with Amazon RDS, Oracle database, etc.
Google Storage — Storage in the cloud offering, competing with Amazon S3, Box.net, etc. Here’s Google’s pricing.
Location enabling infrastructure — Latitude, a api set that provides device location in real time and also location history.
It is great to customers and entrepreneurs benefiting from the competition. This opens up a few possibilities for entrepreneurs who are developing applications for transportation, education, retail, communications, healthcare, etc. It will be interesting to follow how BQL compares with competing offerings in TPCC benchmark tests. More on this in future posts.
Yesterday, I attended the PCamp 2010, an annual event for Product Managers to share Prod Mgmt best practices from, mostly software, product companies of various sizes. Attended several good sessions on PM practices, met interesting people, product use cases, and learnt about how PMs operate and make decisions in the agile (as opposed to waterfall) development world.
I picked up a few things at the conference:
Porter’s 5 forces, and other strategic models to understand the market environment and formulate / articulate strategy.
Agile Product Management processes: Companies that need have shorter times to market on small budgets, for various reasons, use agile engineering processes, an umbrella term for various styles of development processes. The goals of the Product Manager who works in such an agile development org are the same as that of the traditional “enterprise / watnerfall” PM, building great products that customers love. But the agile PM has to work within the constraints of fewer resources and dramatically shorter schedules under a more flexible management structure. In agile PM methodology, product design is done by smaller teams of more empowered PMs, design decisions & processes are documented less (PMs don’t have a lot of time for 100 page MRDs, PRDs, etc) in favor of getting things done faster, project mgmt is done on symbolic white boards, etc. The lightweight process of gathering requirements uses frameworks to a). gather requirements, model and validate the customer business process and value chain in a white-boarding style discussion with a subject matter expert from the customer organization in a live face-to-face setting, as opposed to customer advisory board meetings, surveys, etc and b). prioritize product features, identify dependencies, define scope for releases, identify / mitigate risks, develop schedules etc, without using classical project management techniques. There is a lot more..
Chatted with PMs from Insurance industry who build products that use predictive modeling; more on this in a future post.
I loved the presentation on Porter’s 5 forces. On this topic, I found the following ppt on slideshare, not related to PCamp, for future reference on the topic.
SaaS BI application space is evolving fast but, painfully. Learnt recently through friends that LucidEra, a SaaS BI app vendor for CRM ceased operations a few months back. Here are some lessons to be learned. Meanwhile, other SaaS BI app vendors who serve other industry verticals / horizontal focus areas, like Pivotlink (CRM), Justice PM/ Threshold consulting (Court Mgmt), and Sigma Quest (Manufacturing), are operating in niche markets and claim to be doing well. Spoke with the CTOs of some of these companies. My general impression from those conversation is that while there are mature software platforms / architectures for delivering transactional apps through the saas / cloud model, technology to support SaaS BI is still evolving. Also, met other BI / security app and platform vendors this year at Openworld, CTC, Educause, and RSA conferences who are capitalizing on the interest in this space. Looks like BI SaaS business is getting ready for prime-time..
I was wearing my BI dashboard designer hat last week and helping an ISV partner design compelling BI dashboards around their transactional app for their end customer. As I researched the topic last week, I was amazed at the amount of material that is available for those getting started, by viewing the results of an amazon / google search! Thought I’d capture some discoveries on this topic in a brief blog post, for future reference.
I edited post for clarity, multiple times.. with apologies.
In my current dual-role as an outbound product manager and business development manager, I work with passionate techies and savvy business types working for various software and hardware companies (“partners”) in the fields of digital security, higher education, and public sector. Being something of a diehard intrapreneur at my company, I empathise and enjoy working with small, innovative companies that are trying to make a difference. Based on my experience, here are some tips for such companies in the software space to grow their business in the current market:
Focus on the business problem: Validate your product and go-to-market strategy with real end customers and industry experts. Get help from technology vendors for technical help (see “Reach out to…” below). Don’t get carried out by the thrill of solving a difficult technology problem in a field that is in your comfort zone.
Find good business partners: Find technology vendors who can be good business partners, and can provide you valuable go-to-market support and be good channel partners. Negotiate a win-win deal with them and leverage the relationships to close more customer deals, faster.
Reach out to outbound engg / business development org: If you are an ISV using a technology vendor’s infrastructure, don’t bother reading the technical manuals to figure out how to make things work. Life is too short. Reach out to outbound product managers / engineers from the vendor co who exist just to help you.
Get funded: .. if you are not already funded. Customers purchase products from software vendors who are financially viable (who have a decent runway). Funding is tough but there is funding even in this environment. Check out your local VC hangouts (SVASE, TIE for bay area startups) for private funding and SBIR for government funding.
These tips are by no means exhaustive and there is no right or wrong way to do it. Please feel free to share your experiences and thoughts, through email/blog comments, and I would be happy to hear from you!
Just came across this google book search feature to embed books into html pages. Nothing revolutionary but an elegant way to post online reference to documents on, say, discussion forums than simply posting urls. Posting reference to Julius Caesar, one of my favorite plays.
Conceptually, congestion pricing for traffic management is related to smart grid technologies from the perspective of influencing demand for a valuable resource, in certain ways. They both help smoothen out the peaks in demand through providing incentives to drivers / consumers, make demand for the resource (road / electricity) more predictable, and help match supply with demand by using less infrastructure / investment. In addition to influencing demand by incentivizing consumers to alter their consumption patterns, smart energy grid technologies makes the power grid more “dynamically” stable, secure, and cost-effective. More on this in a future blog. I am posting some reference urls to content on smart electricity grids:
Over the past few months, I have been working with ISVs in the public sector space, helping them grow their business by using my company’s technology and partner support infrastructure. Two focus areas for me over the coming months will be ISVs in the areas of transportation and public safety. In the transportation ISV segment, I found the idea of congestion pricing interesting. The following youtube video illustrates the idea.
With my 401K in the doldrums, and with hope of being a more diligent investor in 2009, I looked for personal finance mgmt tools that would help me build a more diversified portfolio. I found some interesting sites. Also, in this post are some thoughts from Analytics / Security perspective.
Social investing websites that tap the collective intelligence of their user base- Covestor (UK based), Zecco (local- based in Burlingame), Bullpoo / Duedee (due diligence), Marketocracy (San Mateo based), Cake Financial and Wikinvest (based in san fran). There are atleast a dozen more. Many of these companies have great mgmt teams, boasting alums from Etrade, Goldman Sachs, etc, and seem to be well funded to survive 2009. Here’s an outlier- Zignals (based in Ireland), provides a technical investing platform.
Here are my thoughts on these websites from Analytics / Security perspective:
Analytics: Many of the above websites are in their infancy, having been launched no more than 2 years ago. As investors become more sophisticated- they will seek better ways to make sense of what is happening to their portfolios, how it ties with what is going on in the markets, where the long term investment opportunities lie, and how they can choose an investing strategy that will help them achieve their investment goals (where realistic). Some of these cos have pretty decent analytics already, but they have a long way to go in terms of fulfilling the above needs.
Security: Some of the above websites allow users to link their * real * investment accounts with schwab, etrade, etc and pull the real investment info into the website’s own databases over the internet, for analysis. Without going into details of the authentication infrastructure (simple form fields based user id / password entry), coding methodology (un-encrypted urls), etc being used, these websites could become the weakest security link and face the risk of becoming juicy targets for hackers worldwide.
For those interested in the technologies that are shaping the products in the higher end version of products in this market, check out this money tech conf website.