Drishti – An Eye for Innovative Communications

For the past few days, I’ve been thinking about writing something on Drishti’s Blog. After brooding on a few thoughts, I zeroed in onto “What it takes to deliver a great product?”

Drishti has offered an amazing opportunity to me, in terms of getting a nice exposure to “Thinking Products” and more importantly “Delivering Products”. In a short span of 3 years, Drishti has established itself as a leader in Contact Center space in India and Philippines. The following has been derived from my experiences at Drishti.

In the first part I will try to cover Requirement definition. This perhaps is the most critical step in making a successful product.

RFPs (Request for Proposal)?

After writing this heading I looked at the word RFP carefully. India has been a services power house and we have excelled at the software development process. Most of the great products across the world have significant contributions from Indians. Through this has greatly impacted our economy and created employment, one area where it has pushed us back is, we today deliver based on well defined functional requirements. Assumption here is that Customer can think clearly what he needs from the product now and in future. This might not be entirely true. Many times customers think of a immediate need and look for a fitting solution. Building a product design around that would limit products’ extensibility.

Follow the Competition?

The other well accepted method is to collect feature documents from competitions’ manuals (if one is in crowded space) and make a product plan out of it. I believe it is important to understand what the competition is doing, but it should be done to probably fine-tune your plan and do a validation check on “Whether our design can cater to such requirements?” The basic flaw in following a competition is that you always will follow which, as a product company, is fatal. One needs to build differentiators otherwise its doomsday.

So … What should one do?

The following summarizes effective way to define customer needs:
To learn what your customer really needs, you must watch them and talk with them. You must be sure you understand their concerns and overall business issues. Only by thoroughly understanding the broad environment your customer lives in on a day-to-day basis, as well as their specific and detailed issues and concerns, can you apply the creative efforts necessary to design a compelling solution that will be successful.

So go out there, spend time with the user. Remember its the user who finally will have the verdict. Technology is just an enabler, the first step to a good product is “Get the Requirements right.”

Wishing all Product Teams … “Happy Thinking”

Sachin