Over the past couple of days, my friends and I had a rather intense discussion on the effectiveness of an Indian MBA and comparing it with a foreign MBA- an American one, mostly. Though none of us held an Indian MBA, one was doing his MBA in Canada. Rest of us are either in the pipeline or know a thing or two about the ground reality. Throughout our 22 mails that we exchanged on this topic, a few things were quite apparent. Although...

Every application, whether its a desktop app or a web app should start really small. Whenever we think of a product or an application we tend to include 100 different features in it. But that is a mistake to be avoided. We all use microsoft word and excel. But we are experienced with it and we have been using it since their first version was launched. But show that to a person who has never seen word or excel before. He will find...

Andy Clarke gave a presentation at the “Future of the Web” summit. He tries to answer the following questions in his presentation. What are the different types of designers. ? What is the job of a designer ? How to do design for developers. ? This is a must listen for every one who works on web projects. Download the audio file here Download the Presentation here

Every web application has got 2 parts. The frontend and the backend, or the design and the coding. Frontend is the artists job and the backend is the techies job. But these two parts are very much interconnected sometimes that it gets very difficult to see them as separate stuff.  Most of the time the developer ends up doing the design also. This is one great mistake to be avoided. Design and coding should be treated as two separate...

Once you launch your product, track the usage carefully. Plan for usage tracking while in development itself. Develop modules that can gather usage stats of various features you build into the product. In most cases product development teams gather the requirement from a small set of target markets. In the web domain that is not enough, as we cannot really predict what is going to happen to your product. Many of your pet features...

A very common mistake product development teams make is that, they think of a product as a set of features. But there something more to a product, that makes it a success. Every product that we use must make an emotional attachment with ourselves. This attachment is very much visible in the web world. Think how much you are attached to your gmail inbox. I remember a website that was launched for the youth, when I was in school....