Anurag Rajandekar

Blog Author

As a child, while watching a movie, I saw a person jumping off a plane with an umbrella-like object and landing safely without getting hurt. That stunt absolutely blew my mind (I had no idea about parachutes back then), so after my research – which of course was nothing but picking my parents’ brains – I found out that apparently, I can make my own parachute using a plastic bag.   Here’s what I am talking about: Today, if I think about my approach towards building a parachute, unknowingly, I built a Minimum Viable Product. Well, technically I cannot call that a final product, but building my own model plastic parachute taught me a lot about the functioning of an actual parachute. I understood that it’s not just about 4 threads hanging from a cloth, but more about giving the parachute the ability to guide itself in a particular direction. Building products involves certain costs. Costs could involve actual monetary costs, human resource, infrastructure, etc. Wouldn’t it be great if we could find out what the customer actually wants before we start building it and incurring all these costs? Explore our Popular Business Management Courses Leadership and Management in New-Age Business Post Graduate Certificate in Product Management Executive Post-Graduate Programme in Human Resource Management Professional Certificate Programme in HR Management and Analytics Executive Post-Graduate Programme in Healthcare Management Executive Management Programme in Strategic Innovation Digital Marketing and Business Analytics Certificate Programme in Finance for Non Finance Executives Certificate Programme in Operations Management and Analytics Global Master Certificate in Integrated Supply Chain Management upGrad's Job Linked Advanced General Management Program from IMT Ghaziabad Global Professional Certificate in Effective Leadership & Management Advanced General Management Program Strategic Human Resources Leadership Cornell Certificate Program Digital Transformation Cornell Certificate Program Executive Leadership Cornell Certificate Program Management Essentials Business Management Courses Building an MVP or Minimum Viable Product is the approach that allows you to test your idea viability before throwing all the resources at your disposal to convert it into a final product. Whether you are an entrepreneur or an individual Product Manager toying with a new idea, it is always better to do some prior testing with users to understand whether they really need this product or not. But hey, hang on! An MVP that can be released in the market can take months to build. Here, comes one of the most famous quotes to our rescue: Fake it, till you make it Yes, that’s the approach you should take to test your idea. In that sense, the MVP term can be slightly misleading because at the end of the day, you are building a product that can be used by a customer. You definitely don’t want to put up shoddy work in from of them.     So, here are some approaches which you can take for building your own MVP: Landing Page When you want to quickly and effectively convey to your user what your value proposition is and what price-point you are operating on, then landing pages come very handy. They are a great marketing tool where you can talk about the data gathered from surveys, interviews, etc.  Top Essential Management Skills to Learn SL. No Top Management Skills to Learn 1 Consumer Behaviour Online Certification Financial Analysis Certification FinTech Certification Online 2 HR Analytics Certification Online Communication Courses Online Effective Communication Certification 3 Research Methodology Certification Mastering Sales Certification Business Communication Certification 4 Fundamentals of Journalism Certification Economics Masterclass Online Certification Landing pages are quick to build and doesn’t cost much. But make sure to gather adequate attention through aesthetics. Even if you don’t have a working product, going over the concept and the benefits will help you gathering lot of interest from normal users. You can provide a simple signup form, in case you want to keep track of users who have shown interest and at some point of time you can get back to them, when you are ready with your product. Explainer Video An explainer video can be part of the landing page or a stand-alone video. These are used to convey the product concept in under a minute. Here is an example of an explainer video from a company called WaveOptics. They don’t have any product related information on their website. Instead, they have created a video illustration explaining the output of their product and what it can do in the real world. Wizard of Oz MVP “It is not necessary to build something, to build something.” The Wizard of Oz MVP takes this approach to the core. In this approach, you may just want to know if the concept works. For example: to know if your customer orders a particular type food or not, you don’t need an app or website. You can walk into a restaurant with your user and observe what kind of food he/she orders. This can give you a good idea about the user preference on food items. What I Learnt About Building Products by Watching Shark Tank upGrad’s Exclusive Product Management Webinar for you – How to craft GTM Strategy for a Product? document.createElement('video'); https://cdn.upgrad.com/blog/panel-discussion-on-crafting-gtm-strategy-for-a-product.mp4   Our Top Management Articles Top 7 Career Options in Management To Choose [For Freshers & Experienced] Online Product Management Courses to Kickstart your Career Top 10 Career Options in Business Management in India 8 Crucial Business Management Skills Every Manager Should Have Future Scope of Management: Scope, Salary, Career Opportunities Career Options After MBA – Highest Paying Management Jobs 5 Key Skills Required for Successful Management Career & How To Achieve Those Skills? What is The Nature and Scope of Management? Importance of Management in Every Organisation – [A Complete Guide] Concierge MVP A Concierge MVP is almost similar to the Wizard of Oz MVP – but there is one stark difference. Customers actually see the product. For select customers, you manually take care of the services offered by the product. Customers won’t know that they are dealing with the manual operation from the back-end because they are seeing the product interface. Single Feature MVP If you are clear about what you want to build, this is a good approach as it can help you in focusing your resources in building one functionality. It is also good from a customer’s point of view, as they are less distracted from your offering and probably have the best feature of the product at their disposal. Questions you should ask before building an MVP This is an interesting and important point. We now know the different types of MVPs that can be built and in what ways, but what you extract from building them is the gold dust. Here are some important questions to ask yourself: What hypothesis do I want to test? Building a hypothesis before you start thinking about building your MVP is important to identify the riskiest assumptions associated with the hypothesis. The better you mitigate the risky assumptions, the better are the chances of success. Is the customer willing to order food online or do they prefer to go to their favorite restaurant? Is the customer willing to pay for renting furniture online? And so on. How should I measure success and failure? To sustain any business, you need to earn money and for that you have to devise a solution for a particular pain-point of consumers – for which they would be interested to pay money. To check if your efforts are in the right direction you should definitely ask these questions: How long do I want to try for before I can call it off? Are people really looking for a specific kind of option and am I building something else entirely? Can I confidently say that yes, there is a need for this solution and people are ready to pay for this? Can I explain this to a layman? Often successful companies are the ones whose products are adopted by masses. If your product is doing something which can only be understood by a rocket scientist, you may be looking at a very small segment as your target market. Ask this question, can you explain the concept to your grandmother? If the answer is yes, then go ahead and test out your MVP. Would someone pay for this? As I said earlier, success and failure of your business depends upon the paying customers. This is the most important question to ask, as it can lay the foundation for your product or may even result in a decision to completely scrap it. The Ultimate Product Management Resource List Sometimes, in the process of building an MVP, you may uncover some hidden patterns which otherwise are not very obvious to be considered for assumption. Recently, a rule has been passed by the US National highway Traffic Safety Administration, to make electric and hybrid cars slightly noisier. Yes, you heard it right, they want to make your car sound louder. Reason: as humans we depend on our natural senses to alert ourselves from upcoming danger. During these years, all the effort went into making electric cars more and more silent, which created a new type of problem where pedestrians were completely unaware of their presence at high speeds. Who could have thought about this type of rule being implemented for electric car manufacturers, a few years ago? This is one such example where hidden pattern/issues got uncovered while building the product or MVP in general. At the end of the day, whatever approach you take, should answer all the questions that crop up in your mind with respect to your idea/product. “Keep calm and trust the MVP.” Study Product Management Courses online from the World’s top Universities. Earn Masters, Executive PGP, or Advanced Certificate Programs to fast-track your career. Featured Program for you: Design Thinking Certification Program from Duke CE  

Recently, while browsing Youtube, I stumbled upon an episode of Shark Tank. As usual, one video led to another and a few hours later, I found myself still hooked to the series. But, unlike other TV series or movies, after watching Shark Tank, I felt like I had gained something rather than simply wasting my time with a fictional series. As a budding product manager, I found a lot of hidden lessons for me in the series, which I’m going to share with you. Technology is just an enabler A product is created because somewhere it solves the pain point of users. But, most often ideas fail because people implementing them forget about this very foundation and get carried away by new technology, etc.  If you build products under the assumption that people will use it because the technology is cool, then you are probably wandering in the wrong orbit. Here, I would like to specifically point out one example from a Shark Tank episode regarding a company called Rolodoc, which pitched its idea. Youtube video to watch! Rolodoc wanted to create a social network for doctors. They worked under the assumption that doctors will use social media just like any other person. True to some extent. But they couldn’t back up their claim with any validation like whether patients will know if they are talking to a real doctor, how confidential medical information will be exchanged over the network, etc. Creating a social media platform nowadays is pretty simple, but at the same time you have to back it up with real credible facts on why that setup is going to work. Explore our Popular Business Management Courses Leadership and Management in New-Age Business Post Graduate Certificate in Product Management Executive Post-Graduate Programme in Human Resource Management Professional Certificate Programme in HR Management and Analytics Executive Post-Graduate Programme in Healthcare Management Executive Management Programme in Strategic Innovation Digital Marketing and Business Analytics Certificate Programme in Finance for Non Finance Executives Certificate Programme in Operations Management and Analytics Global Master Certificate in Integrated Supply Chain Management upGrad's Job Linked Advanced General Management Program from IMT Ghaziabad Global Professional Certificate in Effective Leadership & Management Advanced General Management Program Strategic Human Resources Leadership Cornell Certificate Program Digital Transformation Cornell Certificate Program Executive Leadership Cornell Certificate Program Management Essentials Business Management Courses Market size matters As a Product Manager, you will be responsible for understanding the market and its size. Moreover, if you are starting out as a Product Manager in an early-stage startup, where the product is still in the ideation stage, it becomes even more important for you to design a product that caters to a large segment of the market. There is a famous quote I would like to borrow from Mark Cuban’s statement (one of the sharks from Shark Tank) and it goes like: “70% of watermelon is always better than 100% of grape.” If you are building a product for 0.1% of the total population (say India), then you shouldn’t expect revenue worth billions of dollars being earned from that product. Build something that can create demand among a larger set of people and with some percentage of a margin for error. You will still be able to hit the ball out of the park. upGrad’s Exclusive Product Management Webinar for you – How to craft GTM Strategy for a Product? document.createElement('video'); https://cdn.upgrad.com/blog/panel-discussion-on-crafting-gtm-strategy-for-a-product.mp4 Back your idea with numbers As a PM, you will have to interact with senior management of the company about the growth aspects of the product. In case you have a new idea and you want to pitch the same to your senior management, it is no different than an entrepreneur pitching their idea to investors. At the end of the day, you need investments and resources for your idea to take shape, and that will only come by if you can show that the numbers make sense, with respect to your product. Shark Tank hosted a company called Lovepop, which is into handcrafted, 3D-printed greeting cards business. To secure the investment of $300,000 for a 15% stake in their company, they answered all sort of questions ranging from customer acquisition cost to per card price point to the cost of making thousands of cards at a time. This led to a gain in confidence from the Sharks (Investors) and was followed by a round of funding for them Presentation is crucial When you present a new idea or a feature or pitch your startup to any investor, make sure that you show conviction and clearly articulate or deliver on what other stakeholders want to hear. Judgement begins within 10 seconds of your presentation itself, so you have a pretty small window but an important one too. Guy Kawasaki, one of the best evangelists the of 10/20/30 rule has a lot to say on how to structure your presentation. If you are presenting to a person whose area of work is primarily technical, you should focus more on explaining how you have put together your product, the technology stack behind its working, whether it can scale and if there are any challenges related to your approach. Similarly, if your audience is more interested in understanding the market, then there is no point in talking about code. Rather, you should try to focus your presentation on the target user, market size, user research conducted, etc. Bring out your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) as soon as possible Another big lesson for me here was how much time and money one should spend to build the MVP so that the idea can be validated in the market, with real people. Shark Tank hosted a lot of companies who already had their angel funding secured before coming to the show, every time somebody pitches their idea, they get confronted with one question: How much have you spent till date to build this? If someone says 80% of my money has gone in testing the prototype, it sure raises a red flag. MVP, by definition, should deal with the minimum of everything i.e. minimum functionality, minimum investment and minimum time required to build it. It is not about perfection at all. The great thing is that you cant build your MVP without creating a bit of your product also (Landing pages, Explainer video, Concierge MVP, etc). The earlier you release the MVP, the better are your chances of rectifying mistakes in your final product. Want an idea on how much it can roughly cost to build an MVP?  I will expand on this section with the help of a second blog on building Minimum Viable Products (MVP). Study Product Management Courses online from the World’s top Universities. Earn Masters, Executive PGP, or Advanced Certificate Programs to fast-track your career. Our Top Management Articles Top 7 Career Options in Management To Choose [For Freshers & Experienced] Online Product Management Courses to Kickstart your Career Top 10 Career Options in Business Management in India 8 Crucial Business Management Skills Every Manager Should Have Future Scope of Management: Scope, Salary, Career Opportunities Career Options After MBA – Highest Paying Management Jobs 5 Key Skills Required for Successful Management Career & How To Achieve Those Skills? What is The Nature and Scope of Management? Importance of Management in Every Organisation – [A Complete Guide] Featured Program for you: Design Thinking Certification Program from Duke CE

Yesterday, I woke up at 6 AM, and in a half-conscious state reached out to my mobile and started scrolling through WhatsApp for new messages. Later during the day I began wondering, whether the act of reaching out to my mobile for the new WhatsApp messages was intentionally designed to be so, or is it just me who cannot control the urge to look for that new/missing text (read FOMO: Fear Of Missing Out). Turns out, I am not a total weirdo, it is, in fact, the product (in this case, WhatsApp) that is designed to use my psyche to trigger an action of using the product. Sounds too scientific for something so simple, doesn’t it? I would recommend you to go through this amazing book called Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products By Nir Eyal, which explains clearly how our internal triggers, coupled with targeted design, force us to get hooked on certain products. How Habits are Formed If you keep doing something again and again, after a long period of time, you will get comfortable with the activity and when the trigger takes place, your behaviour will automatically force you to perform the same action. In other words, you will perform the task as per your habit. Every habit is formed out of a habit loop. A habit loop consists of three parts: Trigger, Routine and Reward. First, the trigger can be anything from an event to a location to a feeling. Let’s look at this example; you reach out for water when you feel thirsty. In this case, thirst is an external trigger that forced you to reach out for water. Your brain automatically tells you to drink water or another cold beverage to satisfy your thirst. Similarly,  in case of some external or internal trigger, your brain directs you to perform a certain activity, at the end of which you will get some reward, which in this case is the quenching of your thirst. Then comes the routine part. Behaviour can be classified as something that you want to change or you want to reinforce. For example, you want to change your smoking habit or you want to reinforce healthy diet. The routine involves your daily or hourly interaction with your surrounding environment or objects. Leaving office at 5:30 PM daily is a routine. The third step is the reward which is the ultimate result of you performing the action triggered. With rewards, you complete the habit loop. Check out our management programs to upskill yourself. The Behaviour Change Effect If we try to dig deeper to understand what changes our behaviour, we can easily see a pattern emerging. According to BJ Fogg’s behaviour model, three elements must converge at the same moment for a behavior to occur: Motivation, Ability and Trigger. If any of these three elements are missing, the action will not turn into a behaviour. Suppose, you are building a new product (a camera app) for which a user has a very high motivation, such as taking a picture. At the same time, if you force the user to perform 5 clicks before he/she reaches the actual camera button, then that action is unlikely to turn into behavior. If you observe the iPhone, there is a small camera icon hidden at the lower corner of the screen. Whenever a user has an urge to click a picture, he/she just has to tap that icon and the camera will be ready to operate. Over time this becomes the user’s behavior and he/she will repeat that action of tapping the camera icon. Are You Building a Product or Behaviour? Ask this question: what am I building? Are you building just another product that solves some problem, but still won’t be noticed by millions of potential users? Highly successful companies build products that become habits of their users. Why not focus on triggers (external and internal) and then make your product so easy to use that your user crosses the threshold and starts using your product again and again – instead of one time or just a few times. Let’s talk about Youtube. People are spending around 40 minutes of their life per session on YouTube. Yes, 40 minutes per session. That’s a large amount of time. You could do a lot in 40 minutes. You can prepare a meal or finish that pending assignment you have been procrastinating about. But instead of that people choose to spend 40 precious minutes watching assorted Youtube videos (remember that ‘Charlie bit my finger’ video that went viral?) upGrad’s Exclusive Product Management Webinar for you – How to craft GTM Strategy for a Product? document.createElement('video'); https://cdn.upgrad.com/blog/panel-discussion-on-crafting-gtm-strategy-for-a-product.mp4   If we try to think and understand the reason behind the popularity of Youtube, you will find an interesting pattern that connects to human behaviour. Apart from all the direct reasons like content discovery, social media sharing, content generation, one reason is the connection with the emotional trigger of a user.   People often watch digital videos when they get bored. Getting bored is also a trigger that brings users to Youtube’s platform. Youtube’s focus on building behaviour around watching videos enables it to retain its users without putting any extra marketing effort. Small increments like making videos available offline, ease of sharing videos and better performance on low bandwidth, makes it an ideal platform for content consumption as well as creation. How Product Design Can Help in Building Behaviour Aaron Otani, explains pretty well the behavioral approach to product design. According to him, it is important to consider the aesthetics of your product and whether it looks inviting enough or not. Can it be personalized for every user? Is your product able to make recommendations to users based on their search patterns? Examples of Some of the Better Designed Products In our day to day life, we use products that have greatly solved some of the recurring and most nagging problems we face on a daily basis. The way these products have been designed has definitely brought some improvement to our lives. Let’s go over some of these products and understand their design strategy: Explore our Popular Management Programs Leadership and Management in New-Age Business Post Graduate Certificate in Product Management Executive Post-Graduate Programme in Human Resource Management Professional Certificate Programme in HR Management and Analytics Executive Post-Graduate Programme in Healthcare Management Executive Management Programme in Strategic Innovation Digital Marketing and Business Analytics Certificate Programme in Finance for Non Finance Executives Certificate Programme in Operations Management and Analytics Global Master Certificate in Integrated Supply Chain Management upGrad's Job Linked Advanced General Management Program from IMT Ghaziabad Global Professional Certificate in Effective Leadership & Management Advanced General Management Program Strategic Human Resources Leadership Cornell Certificate Program Digital Transformation Cornell Certificate Program Executive Leadership Cornell Certificate Program Management Essentials Management Programs 1. Wireless charging Who doesn’t hate to see their mobile phone battery hitting the last 1%? In addition to that, the worst part is searching for the charging cable and an adequately positioned electric point every time you want to charge your mobile phone. My first major smartphone was a Nokia Lumia 920 and the only reason I went for that phone (knowing it won’t stand a chance in terms of apps and ecosystems, compared to Android and iOS) was wireless charging. It was such a nice experience simply putting the phone down and its battery being fully charged when I picked it back up. It was a smart move from Microsoft, launching the Lumia 920 model, as none of the major players at that time supported inbuilt wireless charging. They targeted the frustration point of users – regarding plugging their smartphones every time to charge. This catapulted them into the smartphone user’s mind. 2. Uber Connecting to drivers and tracking them in real time is fairly common nowadays. Thanks to apps like Uber, the experience has become very seamless. But remember the days when you have to cancel a late night trip to your friend’s place because you were unsure whether you will get a taxi in the middle of the night or not? Uber has targeted the right pain points and created a product that is very easy to use. Therefore, they have a huge brand recall – external trigger invoked in user’s mind. Another important fact is that since Uber targeted these triggers, which are common among people across the world, they were able to gain market share at a very large scale. Top Management Skills to Learn SL. No Top Management Skills to Learn 1 Consumer Behaviour Online Programs Financial Analysis Programs FinTech Programs Online 2 HR Analytics Programs Online Communication Programs Online Effective Communication Programs 3 Research Methodology Programs Mastering Sales Programs Business Communication Programs 4 Fundamentals of Journalism Programs Economics Masterclass Online Programs 3. Tangle Free Earphones Life is too precious to keep sorting out tangled earphones. We have all experienced the tedious task that is untangling earphones – each time after we take them out of our bags, pockets, etc. Yet a simple alteration/innovation of manufacturing earphones and headphones with flat wires, instead of cylindrical-shaped ones, reduced their chance of getting tangled. In terms of product design, this is a very simple change, but if you see it from the user’s perspective, this is a huge time-saver. 4. Amazon Go Shopping Stores This is a great example of how improving user experience drastically changes your business and gets customers hooked to your product. The concept of Amazon Go demonstrated the future of shopping where users can simply walk into the store, pick an item and leave. Imagine trying to do this 10 years ago. There was really no option unless you were comfortable with being a shoplifter! But once somebody experiences such ease in shopping, they would not want to go back to standing in lines so that they can get the items billed at the counter. This concept is a very good example of changing user behaviour for good. It’s a win-win situation for both storekeepers and shoppers. Introducing Inefficiency to Grab User Attention While designing an App, everybody focuses on streamlining the user experience by removing all bottlenecks from the workflow. Sure, that’s a good thing, but what if adding inefficiencies or challenges are sometimes necessary to change user behaviour? Let’s see some of the examples where adding challenges in the workflow reinforces users to change their behaviour: 1. App to prevent texting while driving Texting while driving is one of the leading causes of road accidents, worldwide. The habit of continuously checking our smartphones sometimes comes in the way of safety; and when on the road – 100% of your attention should be just on the act of driving. So how do you reinforce or change user behaviour to ensure people do not look at their phone screens while driving? By introducing an alternate behavior such as storing all messages that are received while driving and only prompting the person (showing the message on the screen display) once he/she comes to a halt. You could also consider a way to alert or discourage the user in some way if he/she picks up the mobile phone while driving. This sort of behaviour change can result in saving human lives. 2. Challenge based alarm clocks Almost everybody, at some point of time, has struggled to wake up early in the morning. Even though we have multiple alarms set, one thing is always there at the back of our mind that, if we hit the snooze button, we can continue sleeping. So, the discomfort is momentary and does not result in any change in our behaviour. Now, instead of providing a simple snooze button, showing a math problem and asking the user to solve that in order to allow access to the snooze button, is adding a far greater level of complexity. This makes sure that the user spends more time in becoming fully attentive/losing sleep to solve the math question. This approach ultimately reduces your chances of going back to sleep. You have become attentive and have been hearing that alarm buzzing for way too long. In conclusion, keeping tabs on a user’s mental make-up while designing products ensures that the right set of problems are targeted by a product owner or manager. This way, your product won’t be just another product in an already competitive landscape, but in the true sense, a useful one. A product that the customer would love to use again and again. This is how, and why, we should focus on creating habit-forming products – that improve lives. Comment below to let us know what are some of the products/apps you are addicted. If you are a product manager – what are your thoughts or ideas on habitual products that can improve lives? Our Top Management Articles Top 7 Career Options in Management To Choose [For Freshers & Experienced] Online Product Management Courses to Kickstart your Career Top 10 Career Options in Business Management in India 8 Crucial Business Management Skills Every Manager Should Have Future Scope of Management: Scope, Salary, Career Opportunities Career Options After MBA – Highest Paying Management Jobs 5 Key Skills Required for Successful Management Career & How To Achieve Those Skills? What is The Nature and Scope of Management? Importance of Management in Every Organisation – [A Complete Guide] Study Product Management Courses online from the World’s top Universities. Earn Masters, Executive PGP, or Advanced Certificate Programs to fast-track your career. If you are highly intrigued by what you read, you can enroll in the Post Graduate Certificate in Product Management offered by upGrad. The certification program delivered by experts will help you kickstart your career to be a successful product manager.

Sometime back I received an email about a job opening. The job description was for a Front-End Developer position. One of the expected qualities/skill-sets listed that captured my attention was that an ideal candidate would be someone with a design sense (NON-NEGOTIABLE). When something is written in bold, capital letters, you have got to pay attention to it. But what made me think more about this requirement was the fact that none of the developer-specific skills were marked in the same bold letters as the ‘non-negotiable design capabilities.’ Strange, isn’t it? But yes, I feel it’s perfectly normal to have such expectations, as the process of designing and developing a software product is not the same as it was a few years ago. Check out our business management courses to upskill yourself. What Is Front End Development? Have you ever wondered what changes the orientation of websites when you browse them on a mobile device as compared to browsing through them on a desktop? How everything that is rendered on device screens like buttons, images, text boxes, etc, works magically together? Well, it’s not magic (but close enough), it is the interactivity that Front-End Developers add to these elements that binds everything on that web page to provide you a unique experience as a user. Web-designers create static designs. They focus on the look and feel of an app or website, trying to enhance the visual aspects of the product. Front-end developers are mostly responsible for bringing these static designs to life and also making sure that they work well on all screen sizes, etc. Front-end developers use HTML, CSS, Javascript to create and add interactivity to web components and also make them reusable. Since every browser has a different way of understanding the code written for the front end, sometimes the interface looks different on different browsers. Developers make sure that their code runs on different browsers without any issues and retains all the layouts, color combinations, spacing, text format and interactivity of the app/website. Why Should We Care About Product Design? When you see an iPhone you can’t help but notice the finer details that have gone into making it a worldwide phenomenon. As humans, we are naturally attracted towards beautiful objects and appreciate the effort that goes into making things beautiful and simple. As the article says, simple and minimalist things are easy to use and learn. I couldn’t agree more. Explore our Popular Business Management Courses Leadership and Management in New-Age Business Post Graduate Certificate in Product Management Executive Post-Graduate Programme in Human Resource Management Professional Certificate Programme in HR Management and Analytics Executive Post-Graduate Programme in Healthcare Management Executive Management Programme in Strategic Innovation Digital Marketing and Business Analytics Certificate Programme in Finance for Non Finance Executives Certificate Programme in Operations Management and Analytics Global Master Certificate in Integrated Supply Chain Management upGrad's Job Linked Advanced General Management Program from IMT Ghaziabad Global Professional Certificate in Effective Leadership & Management Advanced General Management Program Strategic Human Resources Leadership Cornell Certificate Program Digital Transformation Cornell Certificate Program Executive Leadership Cornell Certificate Program Management Essentials Business Management Courses The same principle applies to the field of product design. That’s why we are hooked to apps that are simple and easy to use. Take an example from your day to day life: Google, WhatsApp, Instagram, other photo apps, etc. These apps help you in performing tasks in a minimum number of steps and a quick response time. upGrad’s Exclusive Product Management Webinar for you – How to craft GTM Strategy for a Product? document.createElement('video'); https://cdn.upgrad.com/blog/panel-discussion-on-crafting-gtm-strategy-for-a-product.mp4 Product design for web involves owning the process of creating the design for different screen sizes. A designer who simply draws the screen specs and hands it over to the development team is frankly, not a product designer. They are merely playing the role of illustrators. Product design for web involves owning the complete process of sketching, collaborating, designing, creating HTML markups, writing CSS rules and structuring everything in a proper package. Developers can take and integrate the designs in their workflow, without compromising on the design quality Top Essential Management Skills to Learn SL. No Top Management Skills to Learn 1 Consumer Behaviour Online Certification Financial Analysis Certification FinTech Certification Online 2 HR Analytics Certification Online Communication Courses Online Effective Communication Certification 3 Research Methodology Certification Mastering Sales Certification Business Communication Certification 4 Fundamentals of Journalism Certification Economics Masterclass Online Certification .   What’s In It For Product Managers? Product managers (PMs) have the responsibility for the overall growth of the product. From my own experience of working in a B2B industry – sometimes PMs tend to focus more on adding functionalities to a product, which may make the product complex to use. Sometimes just making things simple is the most difficult thing to do. There is always the risk of changing customer behavior, but if the change is for the better, then one should not hesitate to make that change. Coming to the B2C industry – providing a great user experience (UX) is the key to survival because unlike B2B customers who are bound by software licenses, B2C customers can switch to the rival platform in the blink of an eye. Applying product design principles help PMs to iterate fast on ideas and remove the options that are not going to work after all. Our Top Management Articles Top 7 Career Options in Management To Choose [For Freshers & Experienced] Online Product Management Courses to Kickstart your Career Top 10 Career Options in Business Management in India 8 Crucial Business Management Skills Every Manager Should Have Future Scope of Management: Scope, Salary, Career Opportunities Career Options After MBA – Highest Paying Management Jobs 5 Key Skills Required for Successful Management Career & How To Achieve Those Skills? What is The Nature and Scope of Management? Importance of Management in Every Organisation – [A Complete Guide]   Importance Of Design Thinking Companies that become highly successful are those that can create products that people love to use and which become an integral part of their lives. For instance, there are probably 100+ social networking platforms out there but there is only one Facebook. Design thinking helps in setting the right assumptions; especially of those who are working on developing the product (designers, developers, product managers). It may be the case that you assume that the customer is going to buy your product because of that ‘one cool feature’ you are planning to introduce, but in reality, your customer may just be looking for a simpler way to upload some data. As you can see in the above graph, the rework part that will cost you the least is in the design phase (architecture and UX both). It is always better to make mistakes early and identify them so that they don’t impact the product at a later stage. It’s Time For De(v)signers! While everybody plays a role in the overall product development process, not everyone is able to wear a customer’s hat all the time. It is generally an accepted fact that designers like to think from a user’s perspective. Today, a designer’s job is not just restricted to creating visual designs and handing these over to developers. They have to work hand in hand with developers to ensure that the design guidelines are followed till the last pixel gets perfected. This forms a new breed of creative professionals that possess good design skills as well as implementation skills. It is not only good from the organization’s perspective to have such people on board as they can wear multiple hats resulting in a lot of time and money saved, but also from the individual’s perspective. If someone has an idea that can prove to be useful for the company or the product, it will be easy for that individual to work on it on their own, without any dependency. Choice Of Tools With the advance of cloud services, it has become easy to set up basic infrastructure for web-based product development. From version control (git), responsive web design (Angular, Backbone, SASS, SCSS) to design collaboration (Marvel, Invision, WebFlow). Language skills like HTML, CSS, Javascript which were mostly confined to developers are now mandatory for designers to understand and be proficient in. These skills provide a baseline for all the frameworks in the market. Given that there are so many choices of tools now available, it is important to keep focused on the actual requirement and not get bogged down by the sheer abundance of the tools. This is where having a design thinking capability can make a difference – rather than creating just another clone of a product, you can create a truly great one. Future Trends Apps, as we know today, may become history tomorrow. Does that mean we will stop using our favorite services? No, it means that we will probably interact with them in a completely different way. I am listing some of the future trends, that might change the way we interact with the real and virtual world: Chatbots and Artificial Intelligence – It started with Siri, then Google Now, then Cortono, Alexa, I guess you get the point. Programs are getting intelligent and the conversation is moving from text to voice (natural language). Having an artificially intelligent assistant controlling your work schedule and other parts of the day is going to be the new normal.  Even with text, chatbots are getting more and more responsive. Learning from user data can help developers personalize the app experience for users. Mixed and Virtual Reality – Devices like Google Glass, HoloLens, Oculus Rift, have paved the way for mixed reality based development. Interaction design principles for these platforms are completely different from those of mobile devices. Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality are the next areas of growth and will see a lot of innovation. Data-Driven Approach – Considering the volume and types of data being generated from everything. Your fitness tracker to the temperature control of critical electrical sub-systems, there is an increasing need to understand data with ease. Data analysis and visualization helps in taking a decision based on these huge amounts of data. Study Product Management Courses online from the World’s top Universities. Earn Masters, Executive PGP, or Advanced Certificate Programs to fast-track your career. Featured Program for you: Design Thinking Certification Program from Duke CE