Shiva Badruswamy's Blog on Product Management, Marketing, Pricing and Analytics Strategy

I have always wanted to write an article that explained why I chose the Q-bits background image for my LinkedIn profile. For those who follow the evolution of quantum computing and know its intricate evolution path, they will readily see the disruptions a quantum cloud compute environment is all set to produce in the near-future. Others- mainly the skeptics, the curious and the uninitiated, please read on. I may end up changing your world view on Quantum Computing and what is can do for us, homo sapiens and the planet we inhabit. Of course, I am not saying we have the first Quantum Computer available for sale on an e-commerce site and SW vendors are shipping applications that run on Quantum computers. There is still the issue of non-availability of a taxonomy-defined instruction set needed to actually program Quantum Compute (QC) machines, even if the hardware could be prototyped. But, to think that articulating a quantum processor instruction architecture set is...

Think about Maslow's hierarchy of needs (see Maslow's hierarchy of needs ) and the basic needs he espouses: his pyramidal hierarchy of needs meets our physical existential requirements. But there is also the behavioral cravings that humans have and that also has a hierarchy of needs. For a product, there is also the need to meet a customer's psychometric or behavioral needs. And, again, there are basic behavioral needs that are at the bottom of the pyramid. As a product manager, ask yourself, if your product appeals to the 3 basic behavioral needs that each of us exhibit in our lives and how the product addresses those needs. Psychologists have identified 3 basic needs that most of us want to have a grip on: Competence, Autonomy, and Connectedness. Are you doing A/B testing where you are taking into account a customer's behavioral needs? Are you incorporating these basic cravings of ours into the UX design? Behavioral need 1: Competence - Human beings have a...

Most of the times, as a product manager, I solve complex problems under constraints within a short 2 to 3 weeks time, while not sacrificing creative thinking. The actual work shown here below demonstrates how I use a technique called Issue Tree Analysis (that I learnt from McKinsey Academy's problem Solving Leadership Program that I was nominated to attend by my company GE Digital) to investigate in a structured yet creative way. Structuring the issue as a SMART (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, Timely) problem  and ensuring the identified issues were MECE (Mutually exclusive, completely exhaustive) were the most significant challenges I faced. On the positive side, such issue trees helped me capture a 360 degree view of the impacts solving the problem would have and help cover any unexpected failures due to major risk items not being identified for mitigation.

I recently published a simple, 4-page e-book: "11 ways to feature boost your Software Platform to Delight and Monetize". In this e-book, I present 11 succinct strategies that helped power boost an actual customer's software platform capabilities to delight their customers while extending monetization methods in ways that product managers, marketers and entrepreneurs normally may not have thought of typically. Download this e-book at the link below to get the maximum out of your platform.It is your development money, after all. Send me an email at sbadrus@digitalmobileforce.com if you don't agree with my suggestions or want to debate further. Look me up on LinkedIn or on Slack under the moniker "Product Lord" ( I am active in the product management and marketing channels). Free E-Book Download here

Product management is an intricate function and is really a confluence of Technology, Users and the Business. Some Product Managers (PM) love to use the venn diagram where they show that PM is the intersection of Users, Technology and Business and leave it at that. But I am a keen- eyed product manager, more organized and methodical and find that the PM work streams need to be spelt out a a lot more deeply. As a PM, I really love this detailed work stream interactions (not my chart; if you need source, ping me) based triangular confluence below. It demonstrates why Product Managers have to keep an eye on so many stakeholder interactions and not just be writing out engineering specs and participating in stand-up meetings. It take a lot folks to get a good product out and then measure the success KPIs of the product post release. Maintain or kill decision post release is one of the hardest things to do especially when you have sunk in millions of dollars into your product manag...

Above chart indicates that not only are healthcare apps ranked second in price paid per app but the percent of paid apps (of all apps published) is the highest in the top 10 price per app cohort. It appears android users are voting with their feet on the value of mobile healthcare apps and app makers are increasingly able to move away from free apps. Healthcare software vendors may want to carefully look at mobile apps publishing as an additional way to monetize their value based care software revenue streams.  Source: Data is from AppBrain, a company that compiles Android Appstore analytics. The data is as of November 30, 2016.

As 2014 closes today, I find that I am fortunate enough to work in a company (Microsoft) that has a massive worldwide footprint. This allows me to learn how complex international audiences respond to changes in corporate pricing and sale strategies. "Landing" a pricing or sales strategy worldwide requires patience, diplomacy, great negotiation skills, and impact modeling, in that order. If your global footprint is quite huge, like it is in my firm, landing periods could be as long as 3 years depending upon the complexity of the pricing strategies. One way to speed up landing strategies is to deploy intelligently automated tool sets that accelerate landing and feedback loops so sales and pricing strategies can be tweaked dynamically based on local market feedback. But automation is not the be all and end all. It is one thing to sit in corporate head quarters and price out a service and it is quite another thing to systematically field test the acceptability of the price in a ...

The title of this post may not be readily intuitive at first. Marketing and sales managers might think if I reduce my production or variable costs the profits might go up a lot more than increasing price; or they might think if I can cut down on my company fixed costs (overhead costs that do not vary with the quantity of items sold), then my profitability might go up even higher. So, before you go and layoff a bunch of overhead folks such as accountants and sales operations or convert an office mortgage into a lower opex lease to save on fixed costs, you may want to read this post. Profitability is basically in its simplest form can be defined as: Profits = (Price-Var. Cost)*Qty Sold - Fixed Costs . I am going to assign symbols to these words so we can make things a bit easier to depict. In symbols: Pr = (P - VC)*Q - FC ................................Eq. A Now let's assume a company's current profitability situation: Microsoft sells a version of Surface Pro 3 tablet...

If you were to bet on one company for being the best in IaaS and PaaS leadership, it ought to be Microsoft. Here's why: 1. Network Effect: There is the evergreen argument that the PC is dying so MSFT may soon see its market share decline but quite contrary would be the direction. It is easier for MSFT to move its solutions to the cloud and become a Platform Services provider for its existing large customer base and retain that base, rather than for a new entrant to come in and develop office solutions afresh on the cloud and acquire new customers. Granted MSFT has lagged a little bit in getting its Azure Cloud Service out but the fact that Azure is being used by half of the fortune 500 companies means the supply chain that supports these large enterprise companies would need to run Azure cloud as well. Competitors such as Google are simply not present in the enterprise segment or others such as Amazon Web Services despite having the leading market share in cloud deployments, sim...

When designing channel incentives, I always keep in mind that at the end of the day I am dealing with a human being. Incentive design, therefore, must be aimed at both the rational and emotional side of the account manager or channel partner. Neuro-scientific and other studies have for some time now established that human beings are swayed by BOTH rational and emotional rewards. In 1970, Jeffrey Alan Gray, a behavioral psychologist, created the BAS and BIS system of behavioral traits. BAS is the Behavioral Approach System and BIS is the Behavioral Inhibition System. Someone with a BAS prefers to acquire more gains so they can be rewarded further. They play to reach for more and want to get rewarded for getting more. They embrace the risk-reward paradigm. On the other hand the BIS folks tend to want to stay put at a certain level and have a fear of losing their status. They fear being downgraded to a lower status level by not meeting their targets. Taking the same channel incentive de...

I have designed several promotional pricing offers, SPIFFs, and compensation kickers used in accelerator/decelerator design. When I designed these offers, I always found that the most effective offers are ones that are short term and focused on achieving a specific objective. Firstly, a discussion on offers that did not work. We designed a port in credit (PIC) offer where customers get paid a certain amount  (vis bill credit) when porting in from a competitor as opposed to no bill credits if they are not transferring over from a competitor. While the offer itself was sound, two things went awry -  it targeted the wrong business segments and the offer was extended for several quarters, making it almost perennial. By offering the PIC to the wrong business segment we found that we were simply paying such credits to customers who would have ported in anyways. In other words we were offering PICs to segments which already had a high port in rate. We can confirm this hypothesis by...

Recently, I had the opportunity to interact with Amazon Web Services (AWS) team. As we all know Amazon is a company that obsesses itself with customer service. And as part of that service, Amazon philosophy is to get its pricing right - the pricing that would generate the best possible costs for its customers. According to them that pricing framework is found in the pay as you go or pay per use model. In their publicly available Pricing Overview paper, they contend that: “While the number and types of services offered by AWS has increased dramatically, our philosophy on pricing has not changed. You pay as you go, pay for what you use, pay less as you use more, and pay even less when you reserve capacity. Projecting costs for a use case, such as web application hosting, can be challenging, because a solution typically uses multiple features across multiple AWS products, which in turn means there are more factors and purchase options to consider.” (Source and copyright: http://media.am...

How many reps realize that customer tenure is the biggest driver of margins bar none? The focus during the selling process typically has been mostly toward tweaking variables that only marginally impact profitability. Unfortunately, the highest influencer of margins - an account's effective tenure is not readily understood as it takes some math to envision the parts to the puzzle. I will try to deconstruct the math for the sales folks here, so they can use churn as a powerful tool in their arsenal to earn more. Customer tenure is defined as the number of months a customer pays the monthly recurring service charge in a recurring revenue contract. Note that when a customer signs up a 24-month contract with a service provider, it does not mean that every single user license of the customer or, in the wireless carrier world, a line subscriber will stay with the provider all 24 months. Let's assume a customer has signed up 1000 end user licenses or subscriber lines for its employee...

There are various ways to price out capacity at a wholesale level but two of my favorite ways are pooling and stacking. When I designed the stackable plan for the Federal Government sector, I was conscious of the advantages and disadvantages a stackable plan offered over a pooling plan. But, before we get there, let me first explain with examples how these two plans work. Suppose a business customer wants a large amounts of data but does not know how much each smart phone or mobile broadband line would consume, then a pooled data plan might be a good idea. Here's how it works. Enterprise customers could buy a 100GB data plan for let's say $1000 per month. For this $1000 per month the customer also gets 50 lines included in the plan.  If the customer wants more than 50 lines, additional lines would cost $5 per line to add to the $1000 pool. remember you can add a line here, but you do not get any additional data capacity. You are capped at the total 100GB. The important thing, h...

While studying various compensation approaches that line up with the way we want to grow our business, one approach that largely stood out and was well aligned for both us and the partner was the residual compensation approach. Simply put, a residual compensation approach is one where instead of paying all the compensation upfront for getting a widget (a line activation), we would end up splitting the compensation into a small upfront compensation plus a percent of compensation in equal installments over the life of the activated line (or the life of the customer). Let's consider some examples. In the carrier (or Uncarrier, should I say) world, the revenue that comes every month with every single line activated is called Monthly Recurring Revenues (MRCs in short). MRCs are the prices of rate plans and features added but do not include overages, fees etc. Typically compensation is paid as a multiplier of MRC. Let's assume for simplicity sake, the carrier's policy is to pay 4...