Anuradha Sridharan

 Product positioning is a concept that I'm extremely fascinated about. My very first talk in a Product Camp event was on the topic of Product Positioning . One of the professional projects that has given me so much satisfaction is being part of the repositioning exercise when Mindtickle repositioned from an HR employee onboarding platform to a sales readiness platform back in 2014. It is a classic case study of how positioning can play a pivotal role in building unicorn businesses. I used to follow April Dunford' s writings through her blog and her Twitter handle. Her thought leadership on product positioning and B2B marketing, in general, is quite inspiring. Her book " Obviously Awesome: How to nail product positioning so customers get it, buy it, love it " is an easy-to-read, practical guide on Positioning. It starts with the basic definition "Positioning is the act of deliberately defining how you are the best at something that a defined market cares a lot abo...

  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...

A couple of days back, I was at a supermarket, shopping for groceries, when a new promotional coffee stand inside the premises caught my attention. There were 2 guys standing, along with few coffee packs lined up in front of them. Curiosity caught the better of me and I asked them what it is. The tallest among the two (Let’s call him A) quickly responded, “Ma'am, this is Nescafe Latte. You can quickly prepare coffee when you come back from work or when you have guests. Please taste it”. Being a coffee lover, I thought why not and said, “Just a sample”. A instructed the other person(Let’s call him B) to make one for me. B promptly emptied a sachet of coffee mix and added hot water till it reached half a cup. When I said “enough”, he stopped but A instructed him in a low voice that the coffee will taste sweet and that he needs to add more hot water for one sachet. B followed the instruction and he handed me a full cup of hot coffee. Meanwhile, my little girl who accompanied me start...

Over the past 4 years working on multiple products, I noticed an interesting pattern on the problems that many product managers are trying to solve. They seem to fall under one of these five major themes: Evangelizing the product Driving product adoption Effective onboarding Increasing user engagement Demonstrating value during the customer lifecycle The debate on whether we are building the right product or not seems to have settled down. The much bigger question many are grappling with is how to communicate the right value to the right target customers. This makes me ponder if the role of product marketing is now becoming a lot more important and crucial for product success. Many of these problems involve identifying the right audience, right channels, right message and right context. That explains the proliferation of contextual communication platforms such as Intercom, WebEngage, Customer.io, Appcues, Autosend etc. With plenty of tools and platfor...

Image Source: http://blog.drift.com/what-is-product-marketing  It's been almost a year since I moved on from a fast-growing SaaS startup. It was an enriching learning experience, working with smart people on various aspects related to target market definition, positioning, customer development, stakeholders motivation, buyer journey and funnel conversion factors that helped me understand the importance and role of product marketing, especially for B2B products. Before the memory fades away, I'm jotting down the 10 lessons I learnt that are important for effective product marketing. Hope you find it useful. (1) Understand the motivations and goals of all stakeholders. The stakeholders involved in a typical B2B purchasing decision are the decision maker, influencer, buyer and end-user. Being aware of the organization's business goals, priorities and challenges are crucial in understanding stakeholder's motivations and expected behaviors. (2) Identify where your p...

In my earlier work, I was driving the efforts to optimize the free trial experience of a SaaS product. The key objective was to increase the free trial conversion rate. We first tried to fix the low hanging fruits by evaluating the first-time customer experience with the product. We came up with a structured onboarding flow, video tutorials, relevant lifecycle communications and a clear call-to-action to experience early wins. We also evaluated if there are any friction points in the prospect's first run with the product and fixed those as well. These worked well for prospects who were willing to take the time out to evaluate the product. If we map this to BJ Fogg's behavior model B=MAT, the prospects were high on motivation (M) ; we increased their ability (A) by fixing the above mentioned product gaps and sent appropriate triggers (T) through lifecycle communication strategy. So the expected behavior (B) of "going through product free trial and experiencing value...

Image Source: http://www.jtdesigns.com/jtblog/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/rent-vs-buy1.jpg One of the important lessons I learnt in product marketing is - Emphasizing on benefits (and not features) is extremely important when it comes to marketing collaterals and product messaging. Most of the times, we don't give much thought into the benefits our product offers to your customers. We get obsessed about the cool features of our product and our messaging would proudly list them out. Even if we do talk about the benefits, it's more superficial and biased by our own assumptions and experiences. But if we dig deeper, we can figure out the actual value our product can bring into the lives of customers. I call it the "benefits discovery" exercise. This can be done before launch - either as part of your customer development interviews, MVP validation or usability testing feedback. Ask this one question repeatedly to atleast 12-15 target customers:  "How does that help y...

Much of my work time in July was spent working on a competitive landscape analysis for a client of mine. It was an interesting learning experience, given that the scope was broad and there were many competitors to be analyzed. A step-by-step approach helped me to unravel the various dimensions, analyze competition and identify the underserved areas (or green-fields). Do note that although these perspectives are specific to a B2B product standpoint, the approach can be customized to B2C context as well. Here's my 9-step approach to perform a B2B competitive landscape analysis. 1) Define the scope of your domain Which verticals fall under this domain? What are the adjacent/dependent areas in the value-chain? What activities fall under this domain? Let's say, the domain of your interest is "Customer Service". The verticals relevant to this domain are customer support, sales and account management. The supporting functions are product development, procurement/shipment (in...

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...

In the last few days, I have been reading up on best practices of email marketing in relation to a B2B email campaign I'm working on. It's quite fascinating to see the amount of research done and content available in optimizing one of the most important facets of an email - the subject line. Having an appealing subject line is extremely important to get higher open rates. The email content then follows it up with a call to action for the reader. Here are the 4 ways by which you can make an impact through the subject line. I have collated this list based on multiple sources for my reference. Hope it is helpful to you as well. 1) Convey the intent of the email in a crisp manner that provokes interest. Use the language of the target audience - the words that either communicate an attractive opportunity for them or appeal to the problems they are facing. Research also says that subject line framed as questions have a higher open rate than average. Think about questions your target...

An article I had written on "Product trials": Peter Drucker in his book "The Practice of Management" says "There is only one valid definition of a business purpose - to create a customer". In this era of globalization, many different brands are eying for consumer's attention at the same time. So it becomes essential for the brand to try different strategies for building awareness about its offerings, thereby creating a presence in the mind of the consumer. One such strategy that has been in existence for a while is to give consumers a chance to try out the product.  The “trial” strategy gives consumers a first-hand experience of the product, which helps the brand to develop certain associations in the minds of the consumers. The recent Nescafe ad starring Vir Das illustrates this aspect where the primary focus is on getting new consumers to try out their “first cup of coffee”. This ad appeals to the target segment – the current youth generation. ...

Having touched upon the idea of integrating user behavior into the product design in the previous post, let me explore further on this topic. One of the approaches that I have found to be very useful is this idea of "user personas". By trying to build a persona, one gets to understand the intricacies of the user behavior. This provides valuable inputs that can be fed into the product design. A user persona is a mechanism to understand the potential users of your product or service. The idea of a persona derives more from the behavioral and psychographic aspects of the users. In order to build a user persona, explore the following questions: * Who is my customer? * Where does he live? * What does his typical day look like? * Whom does he interact with on a typical day? * What motivates him to do something? * What irritates him the most? * What is his typical personality? * Is he intrinsically or extrinsically motivated? * Under what circumstances does he feel t...