Becoming a Social Analytics Leader

Case Study on Software Product Management

By

Amarpreet KalkatCo-founder & Chief Technologist @ Ciafo

This case study has been exclusively prepared for the Product Management Workshop series by

Amarpreet Kalkat.

Becoming a Social Analytics Leader “Drop by the meeting room once you are finished with your lunch, Navjot. I need to talk

to you about something important”. It was Srinivas - Navjot’s boss and the VP of Product

Management at Zoyas.

Navjot had been at Zoyas for almost 3 years now and had been a trailblazing product

manager ever since his promotion 2 years back. Srinivas had stepped into the picture a

year back and they shared a great working relationship right from the word ‘go’. Srinivas

trusted Navjot for the toughest of challenges, often bringing him at the place of product

managers senior to him. Navjot was a pretty easy-going person in general; so in spite of

such out-of-turn events, he enjoyed great camaraderie within the product management

group.

Finishing his lunch, Navjot wondered what this could be about. His first thought was

about some of the recent issues with his current product. Since those were pretty minor

and the product had been doing well over the last couple of quarters, he dismissed

that being the reason of Srinivas’s visit. His next thought was about some of the recent

organizational changes, and he wondered if it was something to do with that.

With these thoughts, Navjot opened the door of the meeting room where Srinivas was

sitting. He was surprised to see that Srinivas was not alone; he had two other VPs along

with him. One of them was Pritam, the VP of Engineering, and the person Navjot had

known well throughout his years at Zoyas. Navjot had never met the other one, but he

knew that she was Carla, the newly joined VP of Sales.

Srinivas broke the ice. “Navjot, I am sure that you know Pritam well, so let me introduce

you to Carla, who has recently joined us from Omniture. She is based out of our Bay

Area office and is responsible for worldwide sales”.

“Navjot, it is great to meet you, I have been hearing a lot about you for the last couple of

days”, Carla said, taking cue from Srinivas’s introduction. Navjot shook hands with her

and proceeded to take a seat in the corner.

“Navjot, I am sure you know about Sociatics”, Srinivas continued as Navjot nodded his

head in agreement. This might sound a little strange to you, but the reason we have

called you over is that we want you to take up product management for Sociatics. It is

one of our most ambitious products, but ever since its soft launch 6 months back, it has

been seeing more issues than what we can live with. Two out of the five lead customers

have almost decided to not continue beyond the trial phase, and Carla has made it

absolutely clear that this is not something she is going to accept. Product Management

is one of the key challenges there and all of us agree on a change in responsibilities

there. The only name that haloed my mind, when I gave it a thought, was yours. You are

not just one of the best guys we have, but also the right person to rescue Sociatics. We

hope that you are ready to take this challenge up”.

“Sociatics is our lead product and I am glad that I am being trusted to drive it forward”

Navjot responded. “Let me know when you would want me to get started. I think I would

need to do a lot of talking around to just understand the product”.

“Right away! You can hand over your current responsibilities to the Engineering team

Manager. We will see more about that later. You should spend some time talking to the

team here and then a few days in US talking to the customers. Carla is here for another

few days, so you should plan to use some of her time to understand her expectations

and see where Sociatics fits into the scheme of things for the Sales team” Srinivas said.

“Perfect”, Navjot said and walked out of the room, wondering where this was going to

lead.

About ZoyasAround 9 years ago, Zoyas was founded in Bangalore, India as a company offering

services in the Business Intelligence space. It had managed to grow to 200+ people

in the first 5 years, with annual revenues on the northern side of $ 15m. While it had

definitely grown, it was still a small and relatively unknown company.

However, it all started changing 4 years back. As the influence of social media

started growing, Zoyas found itself in a unique position where it had both the deep

competencies in analytics as well as an existing customer base. Zoyas decided to take a

plunge into social analytics space, becoming one of the first companies to offer services

in this area. A year later, Zoyas found itself expanding into social analytics products

space. Its revenues were now around $ 80m, having more than doubled annually over

the last two years.

About SociaticsWhile Zoyas had been making social analytics products for more than three years

now, those products had a big overhang of traditional analytics and were now getting

challenged by the new competitors emerging on the block. Sociatics was therefore

started a year back under a shroud of secrecy. It was said that it would become Zoyas’

flagship product, one that would take the company fully into a Web 2.0 world. It was

being built from scratch as a pure SaaS offering and the team at Zoyas believed in its

potential to take a solid leadership position in the still nascent social analytics market.

It was being developed by the Products Unit, with the VP of Product Management being

its business owner. The day-to-day direction was however led by Abhishek, who played

the role of Product Manager. Abhishek had been at Zoyas for a very long time and was

in fact one of the first few employees. He had a great relationship with most of the senior

leadership team and enjoyed a good level of trust.

Next day, Navjot decided to start off by talking to Abhishek. Given that he had replaced

Abhishek for the product management role, he knew that this was not going to be an

easy conversation. Surprisingly though, Abhishek was a lot more forthcoming than what

Navjot expected. “Navjot, I am seriously glad to be out of this product. I know this is not

going to look very great from a career perspective, but it was almost killing my personal

life for the last few months. And just to be clear, I want you to know that I have nothing

against you. I knew that this was coming, and I knew someone or the other will be given

the charge. Honestly, I was little worried about who it was going to be because I know

that this is a really important product. Your presence has relieved me and I am happy

that the responsibility is moving to the able shoulders”.

“I appreciate that Abhishek, though I would have been happier to work along with you.

I am told that there are quite a few issues with the product. I would like to listen to your

perspective of the problem, before I start planning anything. Can you give me the gist

of the situation” Navjot responded. “I know a little bit about the product from our lunch

sessions, but since yesterday, things have been moving too fast for me to make much

sense of them all”.

“Well, things have just been crazy. This product is so important for everybody that

everybody wants to make it ‘the best’ for the market. That would not be so bad a thing,

but only if they were talking about the same ‘best’. In reality, everybody’s version of

the ‘best’ is so different that I sometimes feel as if we are talking about different products

altogether”, Abhishek started.

“Take Srinivas for example. He is old school and his ideas about the product spring from

a similar point of view. He has made it clear that he sees Sociatics as an extension to

the existing product portfolio. He does not want an unknown commodity to cannibalize

existing products that are market leaders in their own right.”

“Take Pritam next. He probably sees it as a test of engineering team’s capability. All

he cares about is doing some great technical work, something that people go ‘ooh-

ah’ about. He is hardly bothered about how it matches market needs and whether it

translates into something that customers are interested in.”

“And then there is the engineering team. About them, the lesser said, the better. The

architect himself is from an ERP background, with hardly any idea about how web

products are built. The team cannot get even the basic integrations with social media

sources working; not to mention their troubles with building sophisticated algorithms on

top of that data. And Pritam expects that they would do some magic that would blow the

whole world away”, Abhishek finished, shrugging his shoulders.

With these inputs from Abhishek, Navjot started planning for the afternoon session that

he had set up with the engineering team. Navjot had always been a firm believer in

listening to the voice of the team members, and he was hoping that he would get to hear

about some of the key issues from them as well.

When Navjot entered the meeting room, most of the team members were already there.

As soon everybody got seated, Navjot started. “Folks, I know that things have not been

going great for Sociatics, and you guys probably know by now that I would be joining the

team, so I want every single person to lay it bare for me. Shoot your mind without any

hesitation. I want to go out of this room knowing exactly what our problems are!”

“Navjot, I don’t know if the others here plan to do that or not, but let me tell you at

least what I think”, said the project lead for Sociatics. “We have multiple external

dependencies at the back end on the data sources from where we pull the data. These

integrations are not very stable. The external systems have interfaces that are still

evolving, and they, anyway, have bad uptime. The system, therefore, ends up crashing

a little too often. On top of that, Abhishek keeps changing requirements every month.

We hardly manage to stabilize a version before the backend or the requirement end up

changing. It is just not possible to roll out a finished product this way”.

“I hear what you are saying; trust me when I say that such things do sometimes happen.

Rest assured that we are going to fix them up and get on a path where we can put

something awesome out there. Give me some days to get on top of the things first”,

Navjot added with a confidence that he had always been known for.

Having got an idea of the current circumstances from the team, the next important

task for Navjot was to understand the customer perspective. Almost all the customers

participating in the Sociatics trial were based out of the US, so next on Navjot’s agenda

now was ‘a visit to the US’. He hoped that the rest of the scattered bits would fall into

place once he had managed to spend some time with the lead customers.

Once in the US, his first customer interaction was with the social marketing team

at Market2More, a direct marketing firm. Market2More was one of the oldest Zoyas

customers and a major user of some of the existing Zoyas products. They had also been

one of the early customers to enroll for Sociatics trial, but were now on the verge of

pulling out of it.

Navjot spent a good amount of time talking to the team there, especially the Analysts,

Marketing Manager and the Director of Analytics. At the end, it seemed that there was

a clear gap between what Market2More required and what Sociatics was currently

providing. Market2More usually ran campaigns at a regional or local level, making it

very important for them to have the ability to see the impact at locally. The analytics

that Sociatics provided was however generalized at a national level, making it a poor

fit for Market2More. The Marketing Manager pointed out that while the older products

had a manual aspect and did not cover social data as well as Sociatics did, the fact that

the data could not be processed at a local level took away the advantage that it could

potentially offer.

Navjot’s second session was with the web analytics team at Surferia, a web based

company selling Surfing and other water sports products. While the Surferia team

seemed happy with the coverage that Sociatics offered, they were not so happy with the

kind of analytics it provided. They rued the fact that in spite of having good coverage and

reporting, Sociatics did not let them dive deep into the analysis of the data. With multiple

products across different value points, geographies, resellers et cetera, they needed the

ability to break down the data across those segments. Also, Surferia was a big sponsor

of water sports events, especially in Western Europe and South America, and they felt

that they were not able to view the impact of sponsoring such events on their sales as

they needed to. Overall, they felt that Sociatics was tackling the right problem, and if

executed properly, could definitely be a very useful addition to the existing analytics

products that Surferia was using.

Navjot now felt a little more aware about the core issues that Sociatics was facing. He

decided that the next thing he needed to do was to spend some time with the Sales

team based out of Cupertino. He already knew that Carla was taking keen interest

in Sociaytics, so he thought that it was important to understand her perspective a bit

further.

At the Cupertino office the day after, Navjot met Carla over lunch. The discussion soon

turned to Sociatics and Carla was off with her points before Navjot had a chance to

settle down. “Look Navjot, it is pretty simple. The usage of social media as a marketing

and even sales channel is going to explode over the next few years. Nobody can deny

that fact. Social media analytics is, therefore, going to become a strategic tool for the

marketing function. Now Zoyas is really well positioned to exploit this emerging market,

but only if we don’t mess it up. However, that is what seems to be happening right now.

I am still trying to understand our overall product portfolio and how to best target the

market with it, but one thing I am clear about is that Sociatics represents the future for

us. We just cannot afford to make mistakes there and that is the bottom line”.

On his flight back to Bangalore, Navjot tried to make sense of all the information he

had gathered over the last ten days. On the face of it, it looked like a typical product

management problem. But then, Navjot knew from his experience that things are usually

not what they seem, especially when you dig deeper into them. He had gotten an

overview of the picture, but deeper digging was what he needed to do next to get to the

core of the issue. The only thing that he knew for sure by now was the importance of

Sociatics for Zoyas. He also knew that he was looking at the biggest challenge that he

had faced in his career till the date. His confidence assured him that things would get

sorted out soon enough, but his mind was repeating only one thing. How?