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February 7, 2012
 

Making scrum work - getting rid of manager

For all those who think they are using Scrum as a model for software engineering, if you think your manager is being too nosey and disrupting the model, then try this.

The strategy

Scrum, as said by veterans who practice it rigorously, can be tweaked to fit your model to make it work for you. The goal of the process is to make it work for you. And definitely, not the other way around. So, here is the deal. Convince the scrum master to cancel daily stand-up and make it a weekly stand-up. In return to this concession (needs explanation for calling it concession!), offer that everyone in the team will update the tasks daily (be it excel sheet or JIRA). 

Why would this strategy work? The main reason why all managers are pumped up about Scrum is that they can keep a tab on everyone. Some managers use that forum to try and exert more pressure on the team. Some even might penalize the team for not making enough progress. While the outliers can be ignored, a vast majority falls under the category of "daily status update" collectors. Take that one thing away from them which they cherish so much and their perspective about Scrum would totally change. 

The "daily standup" paradox

The "daily standup" is simply an excuse for not doing work on manager's part. Since there is emotional pressure on employees to show progress in "daily standup", it creates an impression that everyone is working, which is exactly what the manager wants. If the manager really wants to know about progress being made, then burn-down chart is the best indicator. It is a fantastic working indicator of progress and risks. 

The "daily standup" has some benefits but then it is not as if we all fly away in our own directions after the status update or immediately put on our introvert hat. It just doesn't work that way. A team socializes in a variety of ways. May be, the American lifestyle doesn't involve simple get-together at pantries and food courts. But we Indians, meet and talk every now and then. 

I have never seen anyone paralyzed when faced with obstacles at my workplace(s). They would always call out for help either through mail/chat or in person. 

Standup every week

A week is sufficiently long time to have made some real progress. This also means that there is no pressure on anyone to necessarily come up with real progress. And no one would have to cook up some fake stuff.

Besides, spending a good chunk of time every week is better than spending 15 minutes on "daily standup". If one has to account for the context switch, I would put it at a ballpark of 15 minutes. On the whole, it makes up for something like 30 minutes everyday. For a 6 member team, this would roughly translate to (6 * 0.5 * 5 = ) 15 hours every week. In other words, nearly two full developer days. At a commit factor of 0.5 (when discounted for distractions like meetings/emails/chats/others, the net productivity per day per developer is approximately 4 hours), this would mean 4 developer days. And that is quite a serious number. 

What really works

As with anything else, weekly standup is not a golden standard (just like daily standup). It may or may not work for you in all cases. But it will certainly come as a shock to manager and they will be forced to look for other ways. Perhaps, your task board or JIRA charts will have more meaning. 

The big rush

In today's world, the behemoths are forced to fight against the startups. A startup is nimble and measures most tasks in hours. I have had occurrences in my startup days, where I have given estimates in minutes. Since most startups work with the 80/20 rule, it would work for them. Besides, most would compromise on quality to a large extent, in return to knowing what actually works with customers. It would be foolish for large companies to compete with them. While big companies do understand the risk of compromising quality, they still push their employees to go that extra mile and squeeze that extra little juice to get more done. In today's world, everyone seems to be in a big rush. 


Posted by Ram Mav 

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October 27, 2011
 

Half baked at uncrunched

Arrington in his recent post has compared Facebook with Amazon to dish out a compelling argument to rev up the hopes of Facebook investors. For all his fame and insights on technology and entrepreneurship, this one simply turns out be a rhetoric. The article that he has written is available here:

http://uncrunched.com/2011/10/24/facebook-will-probably-be-more-profitable-than-amazon-this-year/

So astounding was the fact Arrington found it convenient to compare two companies on numbers which have significantly different business models. If this comparison is justified according to Arrington, then let's embark on a comparison of Facebook with Google just with regard to numbers. Arrington says that Facebook would fetch about $1.5 billion in operating income on revenues of $3 billion. Compare this with Google's $10 billion operating income on a revenue base of $30 billion for the last year. As far as numbers are concerned, Google is at least 7 times bigger than Facebook if we take operating income as the criteria. Google is valued at $188 billion in the market. That means a fair valuation for Facebook should be 188/7 = $26 billion. To justify $70 billion valuation Facebook would have to show 3x of their operating income. This is according to Arrington's method of valuing companies in the present context. 

Arrington also mentions in the passing that "big growth years" for Facebook. I simply do not understand what he means by this. But here are the possibilities:

1) Growth in terms of customers
According to Facebook, total number active users of the site is over 800 million. I would say that Facebook has pretty much reached saturation point. Given the political conditions in China, Facebook will find it absolutely difficult to penetrate that market. It would be utterly foolish to have an optimistic view point on Chinese market. As far as India is concerned, even if there were 100s of millions of users, I can bet that Facebook would not make any meaningful money out of the indian outfit. We tend to think hundred times before spending a penny. If you are hoping that we would buy some online crap from Zynga, just forget it. It is just not going to happen. Africa is yet to attain enlightenment economically. 
From where Facebook is now, to register 100% growth, Facebook have start providing accounts for may be animals or other species, or will have to convince Americans to have more babies but then they will have to wait for quite a long time. 

2) Growth in terms of revenues
Except for Facebook's flagship social networking product, rest of its efforts haven't paid off at all. If Facebook derives something like $500 million from Zynga alone, then that is really a cause of worry. Just like men spend time on pornography, women spend time on Zynga. Nothing more nothing less. Zynga is addictive, useless and stupid. Games for women was not a chartered territory and Zynga's founders were smart enough to capitalize on that. As far as I am concerned, Zynga simply has the first mover advantage. There are already signs that users are spending lesser time in Zynga. As to the ads business, it is still not very clear if Facebook's ad network is better. AdWords came out with flying colors only because it was significantly better than Omniture in terms of ROI for advertisers. For Facebook to eat into Google's lunch, it would have to provide a significantly better ROI for advertisers. Any prudent investor would think twice before betting that Facebook can beat Google in the advertising game. 

All that hype about Facebook's impressive growth of revenues is nothing but that - hype. My arguments (a year before) on why Facebook can't get any revenue from most of its efforts still holds true.  

For Facebook to really show promising growth in terms of revenues, they have to do something remarkable and also do it remarkably good. Something remarkable like getting into digital delivery business in which they can really dominate. Or perhaps, e-commerce recommendations. All these would take time and cost a lot of money. 

Amazon
Amazon is real company dealing with real people spending real money for exchange of real value. There is absolutely no comparison.

Perhaps, Arrington excused himself to be stupid this once! 

Posted by Ram Mav 

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September 8, 2011
 

Amazon gets ready to set shop in India

Reports coming from various sources like this, this and this strongly point to the fact that Amazon is entering Indian retail market early next year. Nevertheless, the market trends here shows that the space is indeed witnessing lot of actions. But flipkart is clearly taking the lead and is much ahead of everyone else in the space. In the past three months alone, Flipkart's traffic has nearly gone up by 4x (assuming that the scale used by Alexa is linear).  See below picture for details:
Traffic-comparison

While Flipkart has been maintaining the excellent standards in customer service, they started aggressively showing advertisements. Perhaps that strategy has really paid off. olx.in and quikr.com also followed similar strategy and started doing aggressive campaigns. The below traffic trends as shown by alexa indicates that ad campaigns haven't worked as well for them. 

Olx-traffic
Quikr-traffic
It would be interesting to see if Flipkart had been really successful in terms of conversion as well. This would be evident only when Flipkart shares their sales figures in public. 

Ebooks

But it is quite surprising that Flipkart hasn't yet forayed into e-books business. Amazon reported last year that ebook business sales were more than that of hardcovers. Given that there has already been a pricing war in ebook readers and Amazon is selling kindle at rock bottom prices, it seems that the future is pretty much predictable here - ebook sales will thump physical books and in a big way. Given these facts, it leaves one wondering as to why Flipkart has been quiet about coming up with their own reader. Infibeam, on the other hand, have been pushing their ebook reader - Pi. Also, their subsidizing the reader with 10k worth of gift vouchers proves their commitment to the product. But there isn't much data in the ebook market in India, as publishers are still wary of possible piracy. Perhaps, Amazon would be able to convince them to sell ebook or may be self-publishing would pick up momentum. Amazon's Kindle is priced very comfortably to convince an Indian buyer. If they would be able to convince the publishers, which other players haven't been able to do so, then there would be another disruption in the book market. It would be very interesting to see how everything unfolds! 

Posted by Ram Mav 

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