The most important aspects of a business is to know who our users are. This would help us define our audience
Personal Projects – School | College
This thought was embedded in mind when I built my first project : bicycle phone charger. After I built it, I installed it in my cycle and used it to charge my own phone. I was then on the lookout for more people who would find this product useful.
Initially I used to just love the process of building something but then in time, I got to understand I was more excited when I got to know that someone is actually using my product. This taught me the importance of having a feedback cycle, I believe the speed of product development is directly proportional to time taken for feedback. The beauty of computer science is instant feedback, you know right away what you did works or not. This also gives closure to our initiatives.
Workshops – MIT Make in India
Corporate
When I joined a corporate and asked who are our end users, people usually talk about our customers but when I ask more questions, not everyone has an answer. Few of those questions are
- When did the last time you had a good conversation with your customer?
- What is the value add that your work is adding to the end customer?
- How often do you review the usage report?
- How often do you review testimonials?
- How is the work you do aligned to the vision of the company?
- What is the roadmap of the product you are working on?
- Did your manager share with the your contribution to the $ value add?
I was often directed to their respective product managers to get answers for these questions. I was quite surprised as this quite common when having conversations with my friends too. I then go to the product manager and ask the same set of questions and a few more
- What is the contribution of the team to overall revenue for the quarter / year?
- What is the target revenue for the quarter / year?
- What are the dependencies we have with the other teams?
- Are the other teams and their product managers aware of our roadmap and priorities and are we aware of theirs?
- What was our performance last year – what are we targeting this year – what is that we are doing different?
| No | Product | User | Time taken | Programming language used |
| 1 | Bicycle phone charger | Vegetable cart vendorsMobile vegetable vendors | 1 day | |
| 2 | Math chart | 1 day | ||
| 3 | Quadcopter | 3 days | ||
| 4 | Phone controlled toy car | |||
| 5 | Home automation | |||
| 6 | Phone message triggered RC car | |||
| 7 | Currency identifier for the visually challenged | |||
| 8 | Project Empathise | |||
| 9 | Slayer exciter | |||
| 10 | Jus’Print | |||
| 11 | Jus’Print CRM | |||
| 12 | Drawdio | |||
| 13 | Waterleak censor | |||
| 14 | Tablet reminder | |||
| 15 | Adsense game | |||
| 16 | Pig game |