Anuradha Sridharan

  A pic of my home and a glimpse of my childhood in the late 80s. Mom would leave for work around 8:30 AM and return home by 5:30 PM. She was working as a teacher. Dad would leave for work around 8:45 AM and return home by 9:30 PM. He was working in the private sector. My paternal grandma took over the complete responsibility of the house - cooking, cleaning, taking care of us and disciplining us. My maternal grandparents' house was next door and we would spend most of our time there. Grandpa would have a strict eye on us and catch us red-handed when we were up to some mischief. My aunt (mom's sister) helped us with school homework. My aunt and maternal grandma would take turns, plaiting my long hair in the morning rush hours before school. All of them took turns in dropping and picking us up from school when we were very young. My paternal grandma would make evening snacks for us when we return from school. The old saying goes - It takes a village to raise a child. Having grow...

It's really heartening to see technology companies taking the steps to support working mothers by extending the maternity leave upto 6 months. Kudos to Flipkart for thinking beyond these 6 months by supporting flexible working hours and supporting a year off without salary. But there's also much more that can be done to enable mothers to return to workplace with a confident, happy and motivated mindset. Especially for mothers who do not have a family support system in place. What happens to the mothers(and their infants) after 6 months? They would need to look for safe and secure day care options. Multiple factors have to be considered in order to narrow down this decision - the location, the care-takers, security, hygiene, food, number of children, child:care-taker ratio, timings etc. It's extremely challenging to find a daycare that matches all the criteria that works best for the parents. Given the traffic situation, mothers have to spend an extra hour or two in managi...

One of the best books I have read recently is " Rework " by the 37signals' founders. This book is filled with many interesting and innovative ideas on how businesses should run and adapt. One of the many phrases that left me thinking even after finishing the book is " Decommoditize your product ". The chapter in the book uses this phrase in the context of " Competition " and how you can protect your product/feature from being copied. The example of Zappos and it's obsession with excellent customer service is a good case study of creating a unique product experience. "Pour yourself into your product and everything around your product too. Competitors can never copy the you in your product" I started thinking about the relevance of this phrase to web products or mobile apps. It doesn't refer to differentiating your product alone, but rather investing more effort in giving a unique product experience and taking care of all the little ...

I was going over the recently published HubSpot's culture deck a few days ago and was mighty impressed and inspired by it. Many points resonated with my thinking in terms of building and maintaining organization culture. I always believed that vision/mission/values statements shouldn't just be something that a firm creates for the sake of it, with some jazzy words and jargon laden phrases, stuck on the walls of every conference room in the office premises. It has to mean something and represent in everything the firm does. I highly recommend you to go over this deck. Some of the points which I noted down for my future reference: "Solve for the customer, not just their happiness but also their success" This statement is relevant not just for organization culture but also while envisioning a new product. Understanding customer's problems and creating a solution through your product is just not enough. We should take a step forward in empathizi...