Gunjan Doshi

As the CEO of InRhythm, I am blessed with a team of super-stars. We are building a world-class thought-leadership consultancy. As an angel investor and board of advisors to several companies, I am helping build high-performing centers of excellence. In my journey of life - I am blessed with great family and friends.

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Measuring success of Enterprise Agile Adoption

How do you know your Agile Adoption is successful? Few things to look for before and after:

Product Quality: Improvement of Code quality over a period of time. This can be measured as simply as open defects.

Customer Satisfaction: Because of the customer-driven prioritization, frequent releases and increased responsiveness, there is increased alignment between customer needs and product. Hence, customers are more satisfied. This can be measured using a simple product satisfaction survey before and after and seeing product usage.

Time to market: Most of Agile processes reduce lead time by promoting smaller batch-sizes, limited work in progress and continuous improvement. This can be measured using before and after lead-times to get a complete feature out to production.

Employee Satisfaction: Nothing motivates the practitioners of software development more than seeing their code working in the hands of customers. Once the process is adopted - we find a spike in the employee satisfaction and ownership. This can be measured using simple metrics like employee referrals, employee satisfaction etc.

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What are the best strategies for dealing with email overload?

Most of the communication that comes over email is a waste of time. At InRhythm - we try hard to minimize communication over email. Here are some of the patterns that works for us:

For instant communication we use HipChat. 

For anything that requires multiple people and/or multiple tasks we use Jira. We have also used Trello in the past.

Google's Configure inbox and tab options are helpful. It is easy to select all emails and delete them.

I have used Google tasks to remind me of emails on which I will take actions later and archive those emails so it does not remain in the inbox.

I have tried to create fixed windows of time to check emails but it has not worked as we are in a service business and customer response is important. 

Finally - we practice Inbox Zero.

Personally, I feel email is a problem when it comes to productivity as it disrupts your focus and creative thinking. 

This was my reply on Quora

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Avoid Feature Frenzy

I am fortunate to sit in many product strategy meetings. The majority of these meetings usually focus around adding functional features. However, there are those rare occasions when the following issues are discussed:

"I saw Billy using our app. I could not believe it took him 5 steps to get to it. We should fix that."

"I saw Jena struggling with the reporting. What can we do to improve"

"I used our competitors’ product, and I loved how focused their feature set looked. We should look at it."

Discussions like the above are driven by customers pain points. The team's priorities shift to solving for what the customer actually needs instead of just adding a shiny new feature on the product roadmap. Unfortunately, most product roadmap meetings are driven by assumptions or by gut decision making rather than from true product discovery. To avoid that common pitfall, the first activity before any product strategy or roadmap meeting is to have teams actually go ahead and spend time with customers and use competitor’s products.

As an added benefit, pain point driven teams also have much better relationship with technology teams. There is a stronger partnership in driving customer focused product development where typically the following questions are asked:

What features can we sunset?

How can we minimize the complexity of the feature?

What would it take to improve the offline experience?

Are there ways we can eliminate our technical debt?

Will this improve performance?

While adding features is cool, high performing teams understand that solving real pain points are the recipe to accelerate product market fit fastest.

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Our Monthly Growth Meet-up. 

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Our monthly team gathering where team shares their learning and growth.

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Case-study on Focused Strategy: Letting go of 2 Billion Dollars in Revenue

Here is a case study on enterprise strategy to walk the walk on focus. CVS wanted to become a focused health-care provider and be known for that. Hence they boldly decided to eliminate offerings that do not align with that focus. This decision is costly in short-term with an immediate impact on revenue (almost $2 Billion dollars). However, in long run it is decisions like this that position companies for greatness.

Link to original article from WSJ

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Chipotle Reducing the Lead-time manually by adding people

Sometimes the only way to reduce the lead-time is by adding people. It should be the least-preferred way as it adds to the costs and is not-scalable.

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What makes a great company culture great?

As we discuss with our clients - there are several levers like Process, People, Structure, Culture, Strategy etc that determine how the company prospers.

At InRhythm, we are big fans of culture. I think Culture trumps lots of other levers that makes a company better than others. While Culture comes from top - this article covers other components that define a company culture. Good Read.

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I would 

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Must watch interview about how a company of 25 engineers is serving 400 million active users. Excellent customer focused company.

A quick update on WhatsApp by its co-founder and CEO Jan Koum. Moderated by David Rowan, WIRED UK.

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So you want to manage a product?

What no one tells you about the role

Good read on what a Product Manager does

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How Walmart.ca's Responsive Redesign Boost Conversion by 20% - responsive design Conversion Optimization, Mobile

Quick read on how Agile, Responsive Design and Table First all came together for Walmart.ca to boost conversion by 20%. Please note that even though this was a major re-design effort - they still stuck to 2 week sprints.

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Innovative Products: frozen yogurt pops. Why wait to just have a business around frozen yogurt. How about frozen yogurt pops? 

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Quiet Friday View. Happy Friday!

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The quality of conversation during an interview is far better when the candidate has done thorough homework on company and interviewees.

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Innovative Product Designs that creates real value

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Should Product Managers on Agile teams own Profit & Loss?

One of the questions I often get asked is should Product Managers on Agile teams own Profit & Loss? Ideally - Yes.In Reality - Very difficult. Usually - three road blocks I commonly see in organizations that makes this difficult:

The Existing set-up of product accounting makes it difficult to carve out individual P&L’s

Product Managers lack the skill-set and confidence to own a P&L

The culture does not promote independent decision-making, problem-solving and ownership at Product Management level.

First one is easier to solve. In the first case - we recommend starting with a very focused P&L model with following thoughts in mind:

Make your model simple to understand and own. Most of the financial P&L models are difficult to understand. We tell PM’s that  do not try to be very accurate  and do not try to cover every aspect.

Make friends with your finance department and CFO.

Make it publicly available to everyone in the company. More people that look at it - more it is going to be used.

Finally, keep the big picture in mind. You want to use this to make high-quality decisions for the business.

Issues two and three require personnel changes (either training or upgrading) and need to be carefully planned and executed. It takes time to have a product manager go through the process of learning P&L ownership and make decisions based on that and avoid th tendency of gut-level feature-based decisions only. Finally, culture is the most difficult to change and  takes significant commitment and support from executives to make that happen. Whatever the case - it is beneficial to have some level of P&L based decision making to balance the gut-level feature-based decision-making that is prevalent today.