Just Ship It!

In big companies, processes and meetings are the norm. Many months are spent on planning features and arguing details with the goal of everyone reaching an agreement on what is the “right” thing for the customer.

That may be the right approach for shrink-wrapped software, but with the web we have an incredible advantage. Just ship it! Let the user tell you if it’s the right thing and if it’s not, hey you can fix it and ship it to the web the same day if you want! There is no word stronger than the customer’s - resist the urge to engage in long-winded meetings and arguments. Just ship it and prove a point.

Much easier said than done — this implies:

* Months of planning are not necessary.
* Months of writing specs are not necessary — specs should have the foundations nailed and details figured out and refined during the development phase. Don’t try to close all open issues and nail every single detail before development starts.
* Ship less features, but quality features.
* You don’t need a big bang approach with a whole new release and bunch of features. Give the users byte-size pieces that they can digest.
* If there are minor bugs, ship it as soon you have the core scenarios nailed and ship the bug fixes to web gradually after that.

The faster you get the user feedback the better. Ideas can sound great on paper but in practice turn out to be suboptimal. The sooner you find out about fundamental issues that are wrong with an idea, the better.

Once you iterate quickly and react on customer feedback, you will establish a customer connection. Remember the goal is to win the customer by building what they want.

Invest In Asia

Why Corporations are interested in investing in Asia

All people do ask this question and ask it all the time.

Few years back the straight forward answer was the cost to the company is very less.  Globalization helped in the phenomena of free trade.

Main intention of any organizations is to provide a solution to a customer problem.

The whole structure of the organization i.e. to invent, develop, design, manufacture products to solve a problem.

India's highly skilled professionals, low-cost operations, a booming economy, good telecommunications links and a rapidly growing market have made many companies announce big investments or increase existing investments in the country.

One of the quote:- "We depend on India for manpower that is why we are scaling operations here. We have 4,000 people today and we will be 7,000 over the next three to four years. We are hiring as fast as we can"

India has a fantastic pool of engineering professionals. The world needs to benefit from this. Nobody ever think with so little product companies software services sector will grow so strong as it has grown here.

But after a decade, if we just pause a moment and think, why is it that organizations invest in Asia. It started with low cost centre. Solving problems in more cost centric manner is highly acceptable.  

But times have changed; right now it is a matter of scale.

How many research and development can be started in parallel? How fast can we bring products to the market? How fast can we get in people together?

The low cost centre is not the deciding factor right now. The factors of deciding are products to market. It’s a race where all organizations would like to bring products in the market as much less time as possible.

Only with scale of operations you could get this in place.