Srilakshmi's Blog

How to analyze sales data to increase profits  The key to increasing profits from sales is to analyze your sales results to figure out not only what people are buying, but also how and why. This will help you sell the best products at the best prices using the best distribution channels. You also need to remember that increasing your profits doesn’t necessarily mean increasing your sales volumes. You can increase profits by selling fewer items with bigger margins, for example. You can also sell the same amount of units but decrease your cost of goods sold. Of course, increasing sales volumes is also important, and data can help there, too. Here’s how your company can use data from your sales to improve your bottom line.  Create data categories The first step to increasing your profits using sales data is to generate the right kind of data. This means having your salespeople and accountant record sales using the following tracking categories: Product units sold...

When I was 12 years old, I had visited my uncle’s farm near Hyderabad. His farm was a beautiful, lush haven symbiotically flourishing with farm animals. I used to enjoy spending my time there, and every morning, along with my aunt, I’d pick up the eggs laid by the hens. A few days after returning from the farm, I developed tiny red dots all over my skin. The doctor diagnosed it to be chickenpox. I started associating the chickenpox with the “chickens” at the farm, believing that they were the cause of my misery. One day, after I got better, I went back to the farm during my summer vacation, and my aunt asked if I wanted me to come with her to the chicken coop to collect the eggs. Frightened by the memory of the chickenpox, I vehemently said, “NOOOOO!” Puzzled by my behavior, she asked me why. I told her that I hate chickens because “they” had given me the chickenpox. Initially, no amount of explanation or coercion could make me see the light that the chickens were not the cause of ...

IN BRIEF:  You can’t recreate an existing company’s culture from scratch. To shift a culture, build new strategies from the company’s founding values. Lessons in Situational Leadership I really enjoyed watching this video - Time well spent.

Imagine you come across three builders working on the same project. You ask each the same question: what are you working on? The first says, “I lay one brick after the other.” The second says, “I’m building a wall.” The third, “I’m erecting a cathedral.” What is the moral of this aphorism? I see two. The first is to keep the greater vision of our work in mind. Said another way, “If you wish to build a ship, do not divide the men into teams and send them to the forest to cut wood. Instead, teach them to long for the vast and endless.” The second is we work on different levels. Without the vision of the cathedral, we may never motivate ourselves to achieve grandeur. Instead, we might create a cluster of one-room, square red brick houses. Equally true: without the focus on the bricks or the wall, the cathedral will never be built. A grand vision lacking execution is just a dream. It’s really hard to keep these three levels in mind all the time. I find myself trying to ...

Why Is Prioritization So Hard? Product creators are given a lot of responsibility, but often without all the authority to get things done.  Executives are pushing requests down to their teams while customers and sales people are bubbling up requests for custom features and bug fixes. It’s hard to say no. We’ve observed that most product managers and leaders don’t have such a method. These product pros need a simple method for filtering out what items are critical and what items can wait. Too many are relying on sales pressure, senior opinion or consensus as their filter. They need help. What they need is an instruction manual, not another manifesto. How Do You Filter The Priorities? It starts with having a clear vision and a path to get there.  But what if you don’t even have that? The good news is there is a simple and elegant solution for that too.  They are calling it   Radical Product , and it feels pretty rad to me. Step 1: Creating A Product...

Product management is all about choices. Making decisions about what opportunities are worth chasing, which problems are worth solving, what features will provide the most value, what the best time-to-market trade-offs are, and which customers are most important. While you’ll never make all the right choices, you have to make most of them right for your product to succeed. One of my favorite tools for helping to make the hard decisions is a persona (aka user profile). For those that don’t know what a persona is, they are a technique for capturing the important learnings from interviewing users and customers, and identifying and understanding the different types of people that will be using your product. The persona is an archetype description of an imaginary but very plausible user that personifies these traits – especially their behaviors, attitudes, and goals. The tool was first described in 1998 in one of my all-time favorite books, “The Inmates are Running the Asylum,” by...

Some of the most intense emotional responses in product management occur when five key areas of social experience collide. Intentionally or unintentionally — we’ve all been guilty of triggering them in team members. Perhaps you’ve had an experience similar to mine? Here’s what happened when I wasn’t aware of a few simple brain-based techniques for avoiding mistakes that cripple collaboration… As a software executive, I once oversaw a team working to bring a new solution to market. Within this group were two individuals who did not work well together. In fact, the person tasked with leading the effort didn’t value the education, experience, or background of the other. This individual continually pointed out their colleague’s professional weaknesses. They set unclear expectations around work assignments and didn’t trust their teammate to make decisions. Not once did they show any interest in them as a person. And they blamed their coworker when the product launch was less than...