Category: Product Management
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The Present Future of Audio: Talk, Music, Video, Interactivity – a16z Podcast
a16z podcast has had two very interesting episodes on the past, present and future of audio. This episode goes deeper into understanding the trends, why audio as a content format looks promising and some great insights into Spotify’s journey of launching podcasts within the same app. Here are my notes/summary of the episode. Understanding Audio…
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Masters of Search in the streaming era
Search Experience on Netflix, Amazon Prime and You Tube Across both audio and video formats, the online media consumption in our generation is higher than ever before. This growing consumption by an ever increasing base of consumers will also mean varied consumer journeys – i.e. how the content gets discovered and consumed may have multiple…
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Understanding the power of gamification
For the last 2 weeks, I have been learning Spanish on Duolingo. It’s amazing. The Duolingo app is just phenomenally well designed for helping one go deeper into the world of a new language – one chapter/session at a time. Thanks to its regular in-between-session nudges I have been super regular. Built a 13 days…
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Problem Framing and choice of adjectives – story of ventilators and sanitizers
Problem Framing is considered a crucial step in the development of a new solution/product or in problem solving. Yet, we miss spending enough quality time on this step, many a times. Disclaimer: I will be over-simplifying a few aspects, to drive home the key point so please humor me. Since early March, as the Corona…
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Varying rates of digital adoption across send and receive-sides impact payment-flows
Very simplistically put, payment is the movement of money from A to B. And the world is becoming increasingly comfortable with money flow going digital. Whether its a consumer paying another consumer (P2P) or consumer paying a merchant (P2M) or business paying its vendors/suppliers (B2B) – the levels of digitization of these use-cases is very…
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Find what’s really broken before fixing it
I enjoy coding. While I have a long way to go as a programmer, coding does put me in a zen kind of a state. The mix of learning and building something new, is almost magical. It does fuel and inspire the problem solver in me. And it is a great teacher too. I just…
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Factory and Lab mindsets in product management teams
Factories and laboratories evoke very different images. With a factory – I am usually thinking the industrial revolution in all its glory – machines, assembly lines, robots, workers, all working in a disciplined and predictable manner – churning out products that are all identical and meet the claimed specifications. Low room for error. Designed for…
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Quest for Friction Less Experiences
Yesterday, I got to experience the WhatsApp payment flows. It surely felt like a neat friction-less experience both for adding/mapping bank accounts and for in-chat payments. And in my excitement I forwarded it to a friend who didn’t have any UPI handle so far. And I was surprised by the reaction. How does WhatsApp know…
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Beyond Big Data – A Small and fast data example
Big Data is all the rage. Everywhere you go, any meeting or presentation one sits through, Big Data seems to be there. But there are opportunities beyond big data. E.g. how we handle small data fast. Here’s an example of small data that I experience almost everyday. In many corporate buildings in India, you would…
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Good rules should be designed for higher adoption
How do we drive adoption for rules in a community, or even at a country level ? Should a good rule be designed to make it easily enforceable too? I think it should be. If we want to build a society where most follow the rules, enforceability should be an important criteria. To decide whether…
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Search Vs Social – the long tail of ad revenues
Google and Facebook together took away 64% of the total US online advertising spends. And Facebook had around 65% of the overall online display ad-spends. These are incredible levels of consolidation in the ad spends among the leaders. Enough has been said and discussed about the challenges Google is facing and how mobile ad revenues…
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Unit Economics in the times of Auction Marketing Models
Unit Economics is all we hear these days in the consumer technology world. Unfortunately for many start-ups seeking venture funds, this is the biggest hurdle they need to cross to build a strong case for their business. What is the concept of Unit Economics I will not go into the definition and relevance of Unit…
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Public policy, ripple effects and feedback loops
I have always been intrigued by product design and by extension policy design (& implementation). If the government were to look at itself as a start-up technology venture, the policies, schemes and guidelines issued by the government would possibly be the “products” of this venture. And like any good product manager, one should study not…
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Payments are a critical piece – Digital Banking ToolKit
In India, digital and mobile Payments is a really HOT space right now. HDFC Bank introduced PayZapp which intends to be the gateway for all m-commerce transactions, with incremental offers as the initial incentive ICICI bank introduced “Pockets” – a way for even non-ICICI Bank customers to have access to mobile payments Axis bank launched…
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Showing Contact Addresses in Google Maps
Quick Summary: Here’s a small product feature recommendation for Google Maps on Android. Currently when I am in Google Maps and typing in the search box, it throws results that match with Google Places directory on the web. If it also throws matches with local contacts in the phone (or Google account) that have an…
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Thin Mobile App or a Fat one – Digital banking toolkit
Mobile is the new frontier and banks know this well. Amongst the various choices to make as part of the bank’s overall mobile initiative, is the decision around the structuring of mobile app(s). Thin App Vs a Fat App. These might sound strange terms especially in reference to mobile apps and no, we are not…
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SMS is reborn as an acqui channel in the Smartphone age
In the early days of Deal4Loans, we used to get a lot of traffic and leads through SMS campaigns. Especially for products like Personal Loans (Simple pitch and high-urgency in a need based product) During those days, NDNC (National DO NOT CALL) list was not introduced and there were very few players who were sending…
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Uber and Free Market Economics
Uber has changed the way we travel within cities. On a recent trip to Jaipur, the first thing I did on reaching the city, was to top-up my PayTm wallet to get going on Uber. (yeah no card-on-file yet 🙂 ) And over the next 3 days I took more than 12 rides across the…