Anuradha Sridharan

  Many years back, my husband K and I attended a 4-day "Art of Living" course. One of the phrases that the instructor mentioned is clearly etched in my memory - " Expectations reduce joy, Surprises increase joy ". When I enrolled for the 2-day weekend farm visit organized by Bhoomi College in their Gumalapura organic farm, I absolutely had no expectations. All I wanted was a break from the usual weekend routine. It was such a memorable experience for our whole family. If you love nature, farms, fresh air and interaction with good set of people, I'd highly recommend you enroll for this weekend programme. Yes, get surprised like us. It will be a unique experience for the kids as well as city-bred adults. Don't read the finer details mentioned below. I'm jotting down here, so I can revisit the experience through my own words years later. Even if I go there again, I may or may not feel the same joy I felt while returning home on Sunday evening...

Couple of weeks back, I participated in a Product Camp event in Ebay-PayPal office premises in Bangalore. It was one of the well-planned and executed events. Product Camp is an unconference where the interested speakers volunteer for a topic they want to speak about and participants vote on such topics before the event. The schedule of the event is decided just before it starts, based on popular topics and speaker availability. The event kicked off with two inspiring keynote speeches. Piyush Shah, VP of Products at InMobi talked about how the playing ground for mobile startups is the same irrespective of geography. Couple of interesting points he shared: "You can build and launch an app in 100+ countries on the same day" "Fast iterations, pilots and making mistakes crucial to learn in fast paced markets like mobile" "Make every detail perfect and limit the number of details" The second keynote was by Ravi Gururaj, Serial Entrepreneur and Chair - Product C...

I had the opportunity to attend a master class on Entrepreneurship couple of days back by Scott Cook , Founder of Intuit. It was fascinating to hear about his experiences of building Intuit in the 80s. He is an amazing speaker with perfect clarity of thoughts and words. He spoke about 2 principles of creating successful products. 1) Keep looking for insights from customers If you are building products just for yourself and for your friends/family, insights may not be that relevant. But in most of the cases, we build products for a larger community. The only way to learn is through deriving insights. Insights can be obtained using data gathered on product usage. But the most useful source of insights is "observation". During the session, Scott demonstrated the power of observation through an airplane making exercise. You tend to gather a lot more insights and surprise elements by observing how people use your product rather than asking/interviewing them about how the product e...

I participated in the Nasscom Product Conclave event from Oct 28th - 30th. It was my first professional networking event in the past 3 years. It was a good experience, interacting with industry experts and peers. Also, it was great to catch up with many of my ex-colleagues from Yahoo! and Cleartrip. Though I was there on all 3 days, because of the distance, I couldn't spend as much time as I would have liked to. Here are the notes from some of the sessions I attended: Day 1: Growth Hacking workshop by Ravi Trivedi - one of the best sessions I attended. He was extremely clear and focused on the topic. I only wish we had more time. 1 hour was just not enough. Growth hacks - are short-lived - Requires limited spend - Focused towards rapid growth Three ways: - Inbound marketing - customers convert better - Conversation marketing - make sure to check if the customer is ready - Organic customer acquisition (organic search) 3 step marketing plan: - Identify your...

It didn't start out as expected, thanks to two flat tires our car ended up with. We missed out on the opening keynote since we reached the venue only at 11 AM. But the event turned out to be a very good experience. On Saturday, a bunch of people including me and my husband turned up at Yahoo! Bagmane Tech Park to participate in Bangalore's first product camp. Because of the delay, we could just catch up the last few points of the session by Vihari, Product Manager from Google. His topic was on product design. It was good to see that he recommended balsamic for low fidelity prototyping. Key Take-aways from this session:    * One of his points was on cognitive walkthrough technique with customers. When you are showing a demo or conducting usability testing with customers on new product features/flow, ask this question  - "Before taking action, what do you expect to see?" Were customers able to guess the flow as designed? This will provide good insights related to discov...

Last week, I attended the Nasscom Product Conclave on Oct 27 and 28. Although I couldn't attend all the sessions as they were overlapping, I managed to attend a few interesting sessions and panel discussions. Most of the discussions were focused on issues related to startups, business plans and GTM strategies. Focus on specific product related issues was rather missing. But overall, it was a set of useful discussions. The twitter session was entertaining but I don't really agree with some of the strategies suggested by Guy Kawasaki in using twitter as a marketing tool. Bombarding the followers with interesting links will just be an overkill in order to add more followers. But Guy is an entertaining speaker and definitely a good marketer. I'm sure the number of pageviews to Alltop would have increased in the past one week. Raw notes from the sessions below: Guy Kawasaki's key note (The art of the start) Put everything in the cloud Ship, then test Use TweetMem...