Mindful Musings

1. Design thinking is an iterative process in which we thrive to understand the user's pain, challenge assumptions, and redefine problems, in order to create new strategies and solutions. The usual Design thinking phases are the following : * Empathize with your users * Define your user's needs, their problems, and your insights * Ideate by challenging assumptions and creating ideas for innovative solutions * Prototype to start creating solutions * Test solutions 2. Lean Startup is a methodology for developing businesses and products which aims to shorten the product development cycles and rapidly discover if a proposed business model is viable; this is achieved by adopting a combination of business-hypothesis-driven experimentation, iterative product releases, and validated learning. 3. Agile is a way of working based on iterative development, incremental delivery, and ongoing reassessment of a product. Agile is all about producing tangible, working results after each iteratio...

This incident happened one or two months before when I went for a grocery run in a hypermarket. During that time I came across the spice section but I noticed something different with the veg and non-veg spice label. As a pure vegetarian myself I was sure that the green label represents veg and the red label represents non-veg and here I am standing in front of a shelf full of non-veg spices labeled green. I got confused enough to call the staff. I showed him 2 different powders, a veg stew, and the other ginger chicken, and told him that this was wrongly labeled and that they needed to inform the company. He looked at the product and said he was really sorry that it was a mistake from the company side and that he will inform them. A month later I went there and came across the same spice section and saw that those products were still labelled as green. I called in the manager and told him that I had given a warning last month and that he needed to understand that this label was mislea...

As we all know from recent news the highest governing body of football in the world which is FIFA, suspended AIFF which brought in a tumultuous few days, because of the flagrant violation of the FIFA statutes. Even though the ban might last only for a short period, its repercussions for India are huge. It has given a fair warning to take a step back and take a look at the current system. The implications of the ban were as follows : 1. No U17 Women's World Cup 2. National teams and clubs banned from international competition 3. No FIFA and/or AFC development programs, courses, or training The tension escalated when it came out that India could also lose out on massive FIFA grants which have been used for grassroots development in the country.  “It is being learned that FIFA has reportedly sanctioned grants to the tune of USD 3 million in the last three years. This money is used by AIFF for the development of grassroots football in the country. If the ban persists, annually, the AIF...

Understanding the rule of 40 is crucial because it is regarded as the general guideline for assessing a SAAS company's health or appeal. Rule of 40 is, in other words, a corporate health statistic that allows us to assess the trade-off between growth and profit. There are only two parameters that you need to consider: growth and profit margin. Growth% + Profit% = 40% And for every startup to be desirable we must increase either growth or profit to a total of 40 or greater. The revenue flow, which can be either recurring or total, determines the growth factor. If a company has more than 80% of its revenue from recurring, then we can take growth as recurring revenue or if it's a mix we can use total revenue. For profit , we will be using the EBITDA margin. EBITDA is Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization which is a common financial metric and a proxy for cash flow. Where do we find our inputs to measure this? For growth, we can take from our SAAS P&L ...

Well, I can just say that I am proud of the work that I did when I started hearing customers talking about our product. There was a time when people didn't even know who or what our product was and now whenever I meet new clients and they say yes we have heard about you and we are interested in what you have to offer, it brings me immeasurable joy. This is where I realized the key importance of the law of inertia: An object at rest tends to stay at rest; an object in motion stays in motion.  Considering the rocket metaphor: A rocket has two major systems: the payload and the delivery vehicle. The same goes for our business. The payload is the technology, products, and services that we provide to clients every day. Our delivery vehicle is the overall presentation of the business to the various stakeholders we serve. I know for a fact that rockets use more fuel during the first few minutes of the flight than the rest of the trip. The hardest part is getting off the ground. Right...