Cacophony

Grand Slam(GS) finals are very competitive. It’s not uncommon to see 2 players battle it out till the end when a small error by one of the players in a decisive stage results in a championship loss. In such situations, it’s hard to conclusively decide the better player considering that the match was so close. Today all Grand Slams have a simple table for the prize amount disbursement. In Wimbledon, prize money for singles winners is GBP 2.35M. The runners-up get GBP 1.175M(half the winners prize). A simple structure to decide what a match-winner and match loser get makes sense till the semi-final stage of the tournament. The amounts being disbursed to players isn’t much. The focus of the players is to reach the last four stage and beyond and is less about the match money. While winning in the earlier rounds is a significant event, but it’s a tad less hearty given that there are many big steps yet to win the cup. Should be there be a different way to decide the prize money in the finals...

Apple's iPhone global market share** is about 11%. But this 11% translates to 66% of the industries profit and 32% of the revenue. That's a huge premium for a brand. Samsung which has a global market share** of 22%, brings in only about 17% of the industry profits.  Apple's iPhone strategy has clarity. iPhone 1, was a revolutionary product. The subsequent models haven't had path-breaking innovations but noticeable improvements that have kept user interest high. Some of the improvements are fingerprint sensor, bezel-less phones, face recognition, multiple cameras and a fast processor. Some key observations on their strategy: Keep costs low (e.g. dropping the fingerprint sensor, headphone slot, charger, etc.). Don't offer features which customers haven't asked or don't value.  If software can deliver the experience instead of hardware shift to software. This reduces the cost but the selling price remains the same. Stick to a design/model for a few years. Apple...

Many of you would have read books or articles on product management (PM). A consistent message in PM literature is that products are built to solve customers problems. The product roadmap, prioritisation, etc. should be aligned with customer needs. It's important to speak to customers regularly and be in-synch with their problems/pain areas. Following these basic tenets would help the PM and tech teams build products that customers want to use/buy.  The above message seems logical and pragmatic. But is there more to this? Have PM books/ articles missed a few corner cases? A few cases that come to mind are: Do customers always know the problems they are facing? Do they care about their problems?  If the customer problem involves several external and internal entities, where does one start? Isn't the MVP going to be difficult? Does one only take up new or unsolved problems? How do PM teams of mature products(like Windows 10, Gmail) spend their time? Lets go over these cases and ...

  In this article, we will compare ride-hailing with another popular marketplace used by most of us, i.e. stock exchanges. Most of us have hailed a taxi on our smartphone and done equity trading on an exchange through a stock broker. How do these 2 marketplaces compare? Ride hailing market places are companies like OLA, Uber, Lyft, and Grab. Equity stock exchanges are companies like NSE, NYSE and Nasdaq. What is a market place? A market place is a medium where two parties exchange goods and services. In ride hailing the buyers are passengers who need a car ride and sellers are cab drivers. In ride-hailing market places the technology platform like an OLA decides the price of the service on behalf of the two parties. The inputs for the price are real-time demand, distance, and traffic intensity. There various types of stock exchanges are order driven, quote driven or a combination(hybrid). In order driven any sale or trade will happen only if the buy order matches (price, quantity, ...