Should We Listen to our Customers?

In an insightful post, the strategy guru Roger Martin talks about the different facets of customer feedback, from a product development perspective. You can read his entire post here. If you are a product manager or in any way responsible for collecting customer feedback, I would highly recommend that you read his entire post first. He explores this question from the lens of the context within which the customers are requested for feedback, which brings a very interesting perspective to the topic. He takes a topic that is very divisive and thought of as “binary” by most people (customers know […]

What Do You Do when you are stressed

Premise: We all live in a world where we have stressors all around us and our ability to manage stress becomes an element that determines how successful we are in whatever we do. Managing Stress: As with everything else in life, stress also has two faces. One kind of stress allows us to be alert and in the moment and leads us to be at our best. The other kind of stress takes a toll on our abilities and leads us to perform at far lower levels than we are capable of. The truth of the matter is that it […]

To succeed, Optimise the one variable that matters

Premise: One of the things that almost everyone of us does is to optimize. We optimise our time, our money and at times even our relationships. We want maximum efficiency in almost everything that we do. In organisations, we compensate sales guys on sales made, product managers on product development, marketing folks on leads generated, manufacturing folks on operational efficiency. Everywhere we look, we can find efforts to maximise efficiency in that part. This, in general, is our attempt to gain local optima. We try to reach optimal performance in that specific domain with no regards to the effect it […]

Superconsumers – A Simple, Speedy, and Sustainable Path to Superior Growth

Everyone wants to grow their business – irrespective of the current size or the level of competition. This also means that growth is not easy. So, any strategy that can help grow our business is a welcome addition to all the material that we already have. So, when I got my hands on the book – Superconsumers by Eddie Yoon, I was eager to read and understand the strategy. I must say, that on the face of it, it doesn’t seem like much different from what all the literature around managing your most profitable customers and growing from there. However, […]

The Tale of 2 Hair Stylists

I would like to share with you what I have seen happen with two hair stylists in my neighbourhood. I would call the first hair stylist one as HS1. This saloon has been around in my neighbourhood for a long time, about 15 – 16 years. The stylists who work here used to know all their customers by name. They were very good at what they did. However, over time, the owner became cynical and took his customers for granted. All the small talk vanished and instead was replaced by a cynical look and the scorn on face. This change […]