Anuradha Sridharan

In the biography of Steve Jobs, I came across an interesting point made by Jonathan Ive, Chief Designer at Apple. He says, "Ideas are very fragile, so you have to be tender when they are in development". During the course of the day, your mind could be brimming with a lot of ideas. It could be a startup idea you want to explore, an idea for a book you would like to write, a thought process/framework you want to ideate upon based on an article you read recently, a presentation that you plan to give to an audience and many more. These ideas can be very exciting to begin with but at the same time, are potential areas where we might procrastinate, due to their inherent vagueness. David Allen, in his book "Getting Things Done" says that we tend to procrastinate on projects where we don't know the next action steps to be taken. Living in a world of distractions and its inherent busyness, it becomes even more challenging for us to dissipate the vagueness and gain clari...

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...

I believe in juggling many interests and not focus on ONE single thing the whole day. It might sound contradicting from a productivity standpoint but experience has taught me that this is how I prefer my ideal day to be. While I was working full time, my time was spent in 9-10 hours of work in office and 2-3 hours of commute. I didn't make much time for hobbies/activities/interests except I used to blog occasionally and cook new dishes during the weekends. Now that I work from home, manage a toddler and the household chores, nurture my new found interests towards baking and healthy eating, keep up with fitness, writing and reading, my mind often gets bombarded with a lot of things to do. I used to practice GTD diligently a while back but have stopped completely. I wanted a simpler system to keep myself sane and ensure I make progress in all my areas of interest every week. " Necessity is the mother of Invention " - I hacked up a simple weekly goals system and I'm se...

I felt extremely happy and grateful when one of my friends asked me if I had written a blog post on "Introduction to solids". I'm neither a pediatrician nor a dietitian but I have been sharing my experiences related to child nutrition in the past 2 years. One of my goals is to ensure that every Indian mother has the right information/knowledge about child nutrition and the packaged foods industry wouldn't be able to influence us in the wrong direction. These blogposts are just a fraction of efforts towards that goal. I started off this series by talking about the importance of breastfeeding your baby in the first six months of his/her life. This is the second post in this series where I want to talk about how to introduce solids in a phased manner. This is applicable for babies in the 6-8 month range. "Solids" may not be the appropriate word since you start off with liquids (other than milk) and pureed/mashed foods. For the sake of simplicity, I will refer...

Over the last few years working for a couple of startups, I have learnt this important lesson -  For a startup to be successful, the following 2 principles are extremely important and in the same order as below: Focus Momentum These 2 principles are crucial, especially in the initial few years when you are trying to establish your foothold. Focus : I came across an interesting article this morning which reiterated my learnings. It talks about how Facebook in the initial years was relentlessly pursuing "growth" to be the key focus area, although many skeptics wondered how they would monetize or generate revenue eventually. I believe - "A startup should have a vision that is so big, that it inspires everyone around you. At the same time, it should have a focus that is so clearly defined, that it serves as a guiding light to everyone around you." Focus is even more important if you are entering a new product category. Yes, you will foresee multiple opportunities in di...

One of the challenges I had faced as a product manager in an earlier job role was to ensure that my users are actively engaging with my product/app. When I looked at the numbers, I noticed there was a tremendous dropout after the first login. There wasn't any huge marketing budgets back then and so the users who were visiting our product/app were primarily organic. After a round of data analysis as well as talking to a few users, the conclusion was that the onboarding experience wasn't so great. We went back to the drawing board and redesigned the entire onboarding experience from the ground up. I have been reading up and researching quite a bit on the best practices of onboarding since then and I have distilled it down to the following 10 points: (1) Issues such as time constraints, short attention span and cognitive overload make it much more important to design a smooth and intuitive onboarding experience. In case of mobile apps, it is even more imperative, given the challen...

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...