Happy IPO Facebook.

I was probably one of the first to join the Facebook and one of the first ones to join Google+. Orkut was the close product that came close to social network. But soon the Facebook simplicity made me to move from Orkut to Facebook. The fun part was that I DID find my old school friends, college friends, colleagues, family and neighbors on the Facebook. Probably Facebook was the only product that understood people’s “need to connect”. The more i used Facebook, i got addicted to it. Because all my friends are on Facebook and we shared videos, photos, ideas, reviews and views. I was so addictive on Facebook that I used to wish people on the Facebook for their birthdays and anniversaries instead of calling them. Soon, things changed, Facebook started sharing the likes and my data to companies for the advertisements. Facebook’s CEO started commenting that the “privacy is dead”. I could not close my Facebook account (only deactivate). I could not get all my data back to my local disk. The privacy and sharing controls are getting out of the hand.

At the end of the day, everyone wants to know your preferences and habits so there are more targeted ads. The more you share and spend time on the website the more they can learn more about you and hence more ad revenue. Your likes and dislikes give the companies a direct access to the product #analytics. The only danger with this approach is that you are always being tracked. You would never know what information could lead to what ? If you leave a public share saying that “I am off to a vacation in Hawai”. You house might be targeted by a burglar who is also on Facebook (or for that matter any #socialnetwork). However, it is important for the company and end user to understand where their personal data is going to and the side effects of such data.

#Google came up with Wave and Buzz to enter into social space but failed miserably. I never even considered to use them in anyway. Google+ was the only product from #Google that not only integrated the social elements but also cared about the privacy. It felt more of an extension to my gmail and google groups rather than a separate product. I would rather trust a single company. Yes, Google could turn out to be evil too. But I would rather live with ONE evil and not with multiple ones.

Facebook definitely lead the innovation and birth of several technologies in the space of #artificalIntelligence, #bigdata, #predictiveanalytics, #nosql, #hbase, #hadoop, #apis, #platform, #cassandra,  ,  and many more. It is the great example of keeping the product simple, executing radically quick and getting continuous feedback from users.

Whether Facebook can sustain the competitive advantage in the long run or not. One thing is clear that the technology companies can grow faster than others with real products 🙂 This is a good news for all the people in the technology industry.

Goodluck to all the Facebook employees. This will keep rest of people like myself to be optimistic.

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Six essential tasks of a Product Manager

6 essential tasks of a Product Manager

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Product Manager vs Product Owner

There seems to be different versions of the responsibilities and accountability that’s floating around in the industry with #ProductManager and #ProductOwner. Especially, these days technology companies are creating several Product Manager positions like, “Tools Product Manager”, “UI Product Manager”, “API Product Manager”, “Technical Product Manager”. In that sense job applicants/employees are highly confused to see what their responsibilities are as a specialized product manager in a niche technology area.

Moreover people associate the #ProductOwner as more of an internal product champion relentlessly working with Engineering and QA to BUILD the product. Whereas #ProductManager works with external stakeholders (markets, customers and eco-system) and may not have time to work with the Engineering directly on a daily basis.

Does your organization view the Product Owner as Inbound Product Manager ? and Product Manager as Outbound Product Manager ? What specific differences do you see ?

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Powerpoint Presentation Tips

Presentations can be very easy or very challenging based on the speaker, audience and the topic. Though there is no math formula to make a presentation to stand out, there are few tips that would surely help you.
  1. Introduce the topic. Why should audience pay attention to this presentation ?
  2. Provide the facts, context.
  3. Whenever possible use the 10-20-30 rule. 10 slides, 20 minutes, 30 as the font size (from Guy Kawasaki)
  4. Contrast the colors – background and foreground.
  5. Never use fonts that are hard to read.
  6. Don’t put too much of text (unless its training slides).
  7. Don’s use more than one picture in a slide.
  8. If you use pictures or graphs then provide the credits.
  9. If there are multiple presenters, make sure that there is a natural transition.
  10. When starting a presentation or ending it, make sure its done gracefully. Don’t do them abruptly.
  11. Choose examples wisely. Don’t use too many examples that may lead to more questions
  12. Spell check the content. It seems silly but many presentations has misspelled words.
  13. Make sure that the sentences are complete. The presentation slide deck itself should be self-sustaining.
  14. If you use a graph/statistic make sure that you describe what it is. Don’t just put the graph there.
  15. Acknowledgement and source of the facts, figures and graphs should be mentioned “somewhere” in presentation.
  16. Finally, provide takeaways, summary.

Good luck for your next presentation! Remember that everyone wants to present like Steve Jobs. But there is/was only one.

I would be glad to hear other view points.

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Goodreads give away : IBM Rational Team Concert Essentials book

 

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Ibm Rational Team Concert 2 Essentials by Suresh Krishna

Ibm Rational Team Concert 2 Essentials

by Suresh Krishna

Giveaway ends December 25, 2011.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win

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A new chapter in life (Aug 2011)

My exciting journey with Oracle has come to an end yesterday. I am glad to have so much fun helping customers adopting the Oracle Technologies and Applications. I am taking my passion on building platforms, SDKs and working with Agile teams a step further to the cloud. Starting tomorrow (Aug 15th 2011) is going to be a chapter in my life and I am joining Skire in Menlo Park, CA. Incidentally, India’s independence day falls on Aug 15th too 🙂

This move will bring me more closer to the customers, product strategy and cloud. I will be helping the Skire to move forward and accelerate the next generation platform in cloud. I will post more updates on the company and how i am doing there in a while. But for now, i am very excited to see the new team and especially with the great Product Management Team at Skire.

For those who is interested about the company…

Skire Home : www.skire.com

Skire Platform : http://www.skire.com/index.php/platform/

About Skire : http://www.skire.com/index.php/company/about/

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Good Boss & Bad Boss (mindmap)

A quick mindmap on the good boss and bad boss. Do you guys feel the same too ? Please leave me your feedback if i missed something.

 

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Rational Team Concert Book is featured on Jazz.net website

My recent book IBM Rational Team Concert 2 Essentials has been featured on the jazz.net site. Check this out if you are having problems with integrating several development tools and have a hard time in implementing the process in your team. Rational Team Concert and Jazz Platform answers these issues by having a Application Life Cycle Platform and integrating Process in to the tools.

Below is on the http://jazz.net/library/ website.

Rational Team Concert

Below is on the Jazz.net website.

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Agile Development in Rational Team Concert

Scrum is a concrete discipline of Agile software engineering. While Agile methodologies place emphasis on the principles and benefits of the iterative and incremental software development, Scrum constitutes a concrete set of management practices for highly flexible and productive teams.

Scrum is a popular form of Agile methodology practiced these days. In this article, the BookManager application uses the Scrum development template.

Please read more at … http://www.packtpub.com/article/ibm-rational-team-concert-agile-development

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Cost vs Price – The bottom line

For a consumer both the terms “Cost” and “Price” seems to be synonymous. Very often we see friends asking “What’s the cost of that Mp3 Player?” or simply put “What’s the cost”. While we use it inter-changeably, it has a huge significance for businesses.

Price refers to the amount of money that you have to give up to acquire a good or service. e.g. price of an iPhone 3GSwith 2 year contract is $200

Cost is the amount of money the that a manufacturer incurred to produce that good or service.e.g. Cost of an iPhone for Apple to manufacture it is $150

So, what’s this difference? As you can imagine it is simple and/or complex. It has the following components hidden in it and depending on the organization and the good it is selling.

  • Profit
  • Value Chain Costs
  • Supply Chain Costs
  • Govt. Regulation Costs
  • others..

Below is a very simplified demonstration of how the $ gets distributed. As you see the Price = Cost + others. Again, this gets more complicated when you do Cost based vs. Value based pricing.

So, why are we talk about it. As a manager when you talk about increasing the profits, you are basically talking about TWO things.

  • Decreasing the Cost (Cost of Goods Sold)
  • Increasing the Profit Margins (possibly by increasing the Price and NOT the Cost)

Note : Above graphic illustrations are completely “imaginary”. Clearly, the real allocations will/may vary.

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