Anuradha Sridharan

  As a product enthusiast, I have been exploring the concept of Jobs-to-be-done framework and its applications in building products customers love. The popular milkshake example by Clayton Christensen was such an "aha" moment when I read about it a few years back. I had jotted down a few thoughts on the same topic. Intercom's e-book on Jobs-to-be-done is a fantastic resource to understand this theory in detail. A few people that I have found to be sharing interesting perspectives on JTBD are Kathy Sierra, Samuel Hulick, Ryan Singer, Des Traynor, Paul Adams and Alan Klement. Kathy Sierra's Badass: Making users awesome is such an interesting book that I read a few years back. That reminds me, I should revisit it soon. I recently finished reading this book on JTBD / Customer Jobs theory written by Alan Klement titled " When coffee and kale compete " (available on Kindle Unlimited). If you are unfamiliar with the Jobs concept, the author takes...

One of my favourite hobbies is to analyze search trends of popular topics using Google Trends . Since we rely on Google so much for our informational needs, the search trends give a good indication of various issues pertaining to lifestyle, health, nutrition, shopping etc.  Given that food and nutrition is my passion, I looked at the search trends pertaining to the following diet patterns in India over the last 2 years (Jul 2015 - Jul 2017): 1. Millets (not really a diet per se) 2. Keto diet 3. Paleo diet 4. Vegan diet 5. Gluten free diet     Source: Google Trends Overall, as you can see, interest towards Keto diet is the highest, followed by Paleo and millets. Surprisingly, vegan and gluten free diet aren't as popular as compared to the other diets.   Other observations: 1. Interest towards millets started increasing sometime in the middle of 2016. Karnataka, Telengana and Tamilnadu are the top 3 states where people seem to be really...

I'm sure every product startup founder must have asked themselves and their teams these 3 important questions - How to get my product in front of my users/customers? => Acquisition How to get them to try it out? => Activation How to ensure they come back to it repeatedly? => Retention For the last few months, I have been investing time in understanding the second question pertaining to " Activation ". Activation corresponds to different goals for different types of markets and products. For social products like Facebook or Twitter, it could mean adding X number of friends or followers. For SaaS products focused on certain business needs, it could mean completing a certain workflow. For e-commerce products, it could mean making the first purchase. The key insight from all these goals is that the intended person understands the " value " your product brings in and the " perceived benefit " he can get as a result of using your product. Demonstrat...

The last month has been a good learning experience in understanding how to perform a B2B market segmentation and sizing exercise. Though I have read about the best practices and frameworks in my marketing courses, getting the hands-on experience is extremely valuable. The whole exercise took about a month and 3 presentations and culminated with identifying a prioritized list of market segments to go after. Academic inputs and theories did provide the required direction and focus since market sizing can be a daunting task without it. Here are the 7 lessons I learnt that I would want to reflect back whenever I take up a similar project in the future. Hope you find them useful too. 1) Start off with a framework or structure At the beginning of any market segmentation exercise, the definition of your market will be very broad. In order to identify your niche or specific target segments, you need a step-by-step approach to navigating the market space . The framework needn't be something...

As part of a consulting assignment, I have been investigating US market data from public sources for a B2B product offering. I found the following 3 sources to be extremely useful. If you have a product idea targeted towards B2B customers in the US and would like to evaluate the market potential, then you might want to check out these public data sources: 1) US Census Bureau data for Business & Industry This source provides a good sense of different industries, number of firms within each industry and employment figures distributed across different ranges based on number of people employed by the firm. You can start off with the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) and then dive into specific industries of interest. Depending on whether you are planning to target SMEs or large corporations, you can download and check out the employment sizes distribution as part of your market sizing exercise. 2) Bureau of Labor Statistics - Industries at a glance Based on the NA...

A couple of weeks back, I was chatting with a wannabe-startupper. The key problem he wants to solve is that consumers spend a lot of time on purchase decisions by visiting online e-commerce sites as well as offline retail stores. He plans to build a price aggregator (somewhat similar to what compareindia does). We discussed about many aspects of decision making including - involvement level of product categories - different stages involved - showrooming behavior During our chat, I did sense an urgency towards building the solution, rather than understanding the context and framing the problem statement. It's quite natural as engineers that we want to jump into the solution to the problem for which we have a reasonable understanding. But is this knowledge sufficient? In this specific scenario, I suggested him to pursue a few initiatives in parallel to building out the solution. - Narrow down a specific product category, preferably one that requires high involvement like consumer ...

The recent trend of burgeoning mobile apps has piqued my interest in the last few weeks. Though I'm late into the smartphone segment as a consumer, it's quite interesting to observe the market dynamics, especially in India. First, a few statistics that might be of interest:    * 70% of India's population has mobile phones    * According to the latest Mary Meeker's Internet trends report , the smartphones user base is just around 4% of overall mobile phone users. In China, the smartphone user base is around 24% and globally, this segment is around 17%.    * Though the previous data point may not be encouraging, the smartphone subscriber base in India has grown by 52% in 2012 as compared to 2011    * Only 12% of India's population are Internet users    * Mobile Internet usage has surpassed desktop Internet usage in May 2012 From a demand perspective, the smartphone user base is growing and as a result, the need for innovative a...