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The labour pains of product development

On the last day of the NASSCOM'97 business conference, despite the heavyweight presence, one man was clearly the star: Pradeep Singh of the legendary Microsoft partner in India, Aditi Technologies.

He spoke gustily on how his development group of very talented youngsters learnt to compete globally, albeit after burning their fingers.

T O D A Y

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Though traditionally, Aditi has been a services company, it is fast gaining expertise in product strategy. Singh begins at the very first day. "I asked the group to produce a game at the end of 30 days. No help, no directions given. Just think on your feet. Thirty days later, there were 30 disasters, well not quite."

"Naidu came up with an idea of compiling a list of the most commonly made mistakes you make while running a programme, I said, great, go for it. Massive homework, 14 hours a day, immense networking via the Web and Naidu has a pilot complier of 250 mistakes. Anyone want to buy?"

"We put the ad on the Net and waited, not one person asked for it. Then we realised these mistakes were only made by newcomers to the system, once they moved ahead, they did not need to buy an extra de-bugging compiler. Back to the drawing board."

"In the above case," Singh explained, "we had not understood the customer need. Anyway the next experiment worked. We fulfilled a very small niche segment, our code was written over six months and cost only $260 but we found it." Did he make any money? "No. I had spend Rs 20 million on product development and definitely not made any."

But the point Singh made was "Don't be afraid to risk a decision. You may fail once, twice, thrice, four times, but the fifth, bingo, you will have realised a dream."

He firmly believes that the key issues working at Aditi are: "Treating the development team as an asset; I molly-coddle them. Understand the customer; understand your competitor; he may have already got where you are trying to go; take a high risk, then the reward is high and in a nutshell, don't let people tell you what to do, you do what you think needs to be done."

Martin Breuer, vice-president SAP, and Ravi Shankar, chief executive Citicorp Information Technology Industries Limited, spoke again of strategies they are adopting to market and develop their respective products.

Breuer believes that to have a global presence you have to have a presence in every country. SAP has a regional product development centre here in Bangalore which Breuer describes as "doing the Indian version of software required by customers here and working at the same time on the core product development as strategised by their global offices". They're transferring their global strategy in a local context and want to "develop Bangalore as a hub" in the region.

Citicorp, according to Ravishankar, works on 10 commandments:

1. Thou shall remain committed to product and strategic development.
2. Thou shall identify and stick to your market segment without getting distracted.
3. Thou shall toil without reward.
4. Thou shall put all the eggs in one basket and then aim to produce more eggs.
5. Thou shall concentrate on process and quality of the product.
6. Thou shall offer product integrity.
7. Thou shall market at the right time.
8. Thou shall augment the product by supporting the customer.
9. Thou shall build an installed base.
10. Thou shall make alliances.
    Oops, there's one more...
11. Fortune favours the brave.

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