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Improving Customer metrics

The HBR issue (Jan-Feb 2020) spotlights “The Loyalty Economy” which makes for a great read for anyone interested in business growth. This three-article series eloquently illustrates how the myopic quarterly investor reporting has stunted long-term growth for many businesses. At the same time, true leaders like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Costco’s Jim Sinegal, and Vanguard’s Jack Brennan focused on customers and had the last laugh. In the first article, Rob Markey of Bain recommends three important auditable metrics that reflect a healthy growth of customer value viz.

The number of gross new customers acquired during the reporting period and the number of net new customers remaining at period end.
The number of existing (tenured) customers
revenue per new and existing customers

This aligns perfectly with our experience in measuring an outcome-based digital transformation deal that we did for a large multi-billion dollar division of a CPG major. We have demonstrated results of 5-7% growth in topline revenues, 60-75% call deflection, and 97% satisfied customers while simultaneously building a greenfield B2B eCommerce system and upgrading the call center technologies.

What customer measurements helped us achieve 5-7% growth in revenues and 97% satisfied customers?

As part of this transformation, we very closely monitored

the total number of customers ordering in the reporting period,
the number of customers acquired in that period
the number of customers who have NOT ordered in the last 3 reporting periods
the number of customers who have taken to ordering online
the number of clicks /calls it took to place an order
Customer feedback on the online system every quarter

with a double click into each of the above numbers by segments. We further diligently reviewed the trends of these numbers accounting for seasonality based on prior year history and adjusting for customers who declared themselves seasonal. Let us double click on the actionable metrics from this list.

Customers acquired in that period :

We compared this metric, period-over-period, and analyzed the campaigns that contributed to the growth. We further broke these numbers down by customer type and geography to learn what was going well from growth segments and campaigns to apply them broadly.

Customers who have NOT ordered in the last 3 reporting periods:

This was a lagging indicator of attrition. However, any corrective action taken 3 periods would be too late, by which time the customers had already settled in with the competitor. So we used this metric as a benchmark, but the actionable list was created by using analytics (and later ML) to come up with better predictors of who is most likely to leave, based on prior trends. For example, we noticed a pattern that customers who were leaving typically would stop ordering a certain product category and that became our early warning to reach out to them.

Customers who have taken to ordering online:

We ran campaigns to encourage the customers currently ordering over the phone to go online instead. While we debated offering incentives (such as “get $x off your nth online order”), after comparing notes with the online leader in the foodservice industry, we decided against it as the 24×7 online experience itself was the incentive to migrate. And we stopped calling the customers for orders in select markets as an experiment and the numbers proved to us that there was no drop in customers or revenues. That satisfied the critics within the leadership who did not want agents to stop calling, and we saw the adoption increase to tens of thousands of customers.

Clicks to order :

This was a B2B scenario where the majority of customers knew exactly what they want when they come back for their weekly/fortnightly orders, and hence this metric was vital to understand the friction in the process. Our effort was to make the process as quick and frictionless as possible for these customers, who, we learned from our route rides that they don’t have much time to spend on ordering, and they were also suffering from campaign /sales fatigue and hence just wanted to get their order in. Our UX design resulted in 60% of the orders being placed in 3 clicks (screens), and over 75% of the orders being placed in under 5 clicks. Our UX design to accomplish the pre-population of the cart for these customers using analytics and ML is a topic for another post.

Customer feedback loop :

We believe one of the key enablers for our success was the closed-loop feedback mechanism that we created within the system. After each major website upgrade release (typically once a quarter), we presented a short feedback-form after the order confirmation screen that asked customers to rate their ordering experience 1 (Bad)-5 (Excellent) and monitored it diligently. We kept it very simple for them to just 3 questions (how easy was it to find products, how easy was the ordering process, and how do they rate the overall experience?) where they can select 1-5 and a free format text box to add any other feedback. To address customer dissatisfaction promptly, all feedback with a 1-3 rating was automatically raised as a ticket to an agent. This resulted in a call back ASAP from an agent to inquire about their feedback and disposition it accordingly in a timely fashion. This, we believe, helped matters significantly in a) redressing the grievance of an unhappy customer before they decide to start looking elsewhere and b) letting us know in real-time the issues bothering customers so we could apply systemic fixes/ provide better educational material/ train agents accordingly. There were several other techniques that helped us accomplish these results, some of which are further described here.

In summary, the key actions we took after periodically analyzing the customer metrics and insights were to:

Establish a feedback loop to have a human agent reach out and address all reports from dissatisfied customers within the next day or two while the issue is fresh and has not caused long term impact.
Update help documentation, on-screen prompts, or videos
adjust the campaigns
change the SOP of agents as needed
adjust the requirements of our quarterly releases
create /adjust automated alerts to operators and agents, triggered by monitoring specific trends.

3. Extracting a “Yes” out of a “No!”

(This is the third part of the series on Getting stuff done. Click here to read from the beginning)

In the previous post, we discussed an example of handling a “No” by finding out a manual workaround where the integration was not critical, at least in the short term. Many times this is not an option, and it is a make-or-break situation where we need a change made to an external system (one which we have no control over) to meet our program objectives. However, that other team is not able /willing to support us. We hit a wall. Now what?

Depending upon the organizational dynamics, escalating up the chain may or may not yield results. (If it did, then that is the obviously easy way out, but many times it leads to those teams further digging in their heels and burning bridges long term- so think twice before escalation, Does your team /executives have the soft power to succeed?)

If not, what do we do now?

Start with the PM or Architect (whoever is the most reasonable /approachable / knowledgable) on that team. Take them out for lunch /drinks and try to build a relationship. Ask them how you can help them to help you. Yes, genuinely ask them how you can help. Remember, your whole program’s success depends on this, and they are overworked as well. You might be able to get a resource or two or some budget to spare for them. For example, can you give them your developer(s) to do the work required for you under their supervision? They might say, “sorry, that is a critical piece of code; we don’t want any new developers touching it.” Can you help buy the license for some software/ hardware that eases their work? Or get them something else that motivates them to help you? Is there a win-win route?

Ask if they can use the resource you provide to offload some of their monotonous but simpler work so they can use that bandwidth to help with the critical change required by you. If this also does not work, don’t give up yet. Think hard, there might be a way out.

When there is a will there is a way! You have not failed until you give up!!

Caveats:

Be careful while you loan your developer to the other team. Several complications might arise:

Your developer might break something in their system – Ensure their testing is thorough.
They might fall in love and poach your developer. Set expectations upfront!

Stay tuned….. Until my next post with another strategy…

2. Reactive handling: Going around walls

(This is the second part of the series on Getting stuff done. Read from the beginning)

“Sorry, we cannot deliver this integration before another 2 months with everything else on our plate” said the VP of the ERP systems. One of my CPG clients had a B2B eCommerce program which depended on the integration into the SAP ERP system. We were asked to get the eCommerce storefront on the Magento 2 platform ready for the launch and were told the client was working with their ERP group, but at the last minute we were informed of this blocker. It was a fixed bid and we were in a bind. We could not pull out the resources and use them elsewhere for 2 months and bring the same people back; neither would bringing new resources later be cost-effective as they would have a learning curve, not to speak of the logistic nightmare. The client had a limited budget and was in a fix to support this team for an extended period.

When you hit a wall, look left and right, there should be a door somewhere!

This is where I use the principle of “Going around walls” when we hit a wall. Yes, literally speaking this was a wall because there was no point taking an order on the storefront if it cannot be sent to the ERP system quickly for timely fulfillment. All the work my team did had to wait another two months. Or was it? We explored all the possible ways to get an order into ERP. The only two ways were a) email an order and b) manually keying it in (by the agent). At first, we explored if we could piggyback on the email order route, by emailing the order from Magento to that job which loads it into the ERP. However, that option soon fizzled out due to some environmental constraints. It seemed like we really hit the wall this time. That is when I took a step back and asked the question of how many daily orders were we expecting on this new site for the first two to three months. Given that the customers are still being onboarded, the answer was just a handful. So I turned around and asked our sponsor, why can’t we use one of our onboarding support agents to key in this handful of orders twice a day? Initially, it was seen as a ridiculous idea, but when we talked through the cost-benefit analysis it made perfect sense. The investment of an hour from this one agent each day would allow us to avoid the project delay by two months. It would allow us to get the learnings from real customers using the site two months sooner. That is how we stuck to the original date and moved forward.

Often times larger enterprises have too many stakeholders and everything is dumbed down to a black or white decision. This is the true reason why they can’t be as nimble as startups. The beauty of on-time delivery lies in working with the 50 shades of gray.

Caution: However this requires the diligence to ensure a sunset date for the work-around is committed by all parties and the workarounds do not get a life of their own, which can become unsustainable later on.

1. Proactive risk management

This is a rather simple principle of including contingency in your schedule and delivering the highest risk items early on. However many large enterprises do not seem to like the word contingency in any plan and even if that is approved by all the stakeholders as a formal block of time on the Gantt chart, everyone now knows about it and takes it easy, defeating the purpose. So there are really only two ways to do this. A simpler way was to discreetly work with the executive sponsor and draw up a date before the actual deadline to factor in the contingency and use that as the working date. The executive sponsor, in turn, commits a date including a contingency period to his board, etc.

Sometimes this is not possible, especially in case the commitment is on a press release to end-users or if there is a certain product launch or external event /contractual obligation that constraints our deadline. Such was the case with our example here where we had the date fixed for the launch of a greenfield B2B eCommerce site for a large enterprise, where we were doing a project for the first time, attempting to build this site from scratch in 9 months. There were multiple risks associated with this program, one of them being that we were trying to launch this on the cloud with several integrations into their legacy systems. As per client standard practice, nothing is rolled out into production until all the signoffs are obtained which meant tested code, content, etc. Battle scars from my past warned me that this cannot happen smoothly given all the network connections in production that needed to be made, firewall ports opened, etc. So I had to package the “contingency” differently without using that word. We called it soft launch for the internal users to test it in production a month earlier on April 9th. This approach was approved by the stakeholders once we convinced them that the firewall would be set up so the external world cannot access the site except for users from within the enterprise firewall. On the actual day of the launch, all we had to do is to open up the firewall for external traffic. As feared, there were issues with setting up production routing, load balancers, etc and we missed the soft launch date. We instead soft-launched after a couple of weeks debugging. If we had not planned it this way, our real launch would have slipped by 2 weeks, with a lot of drama and high adrenalin. This soft launch also enabled us to ensure all aspects of the site (content, pricing, products, promotions, etc) were “tested” in production catching many small (and some large) issues proactively.

Happily enough, on the actual day of the launch, we had a very quick status call just to verify that the site was accessible from the outside and started watching traffic. There was no drama at all. Hopefully you find this strategy useful to have smooth – on-time -launches. Now you might ask that this works for greenfield launches, but what about a major upgrade to an existing site? How do we de-risk that? I have a post coming up on that specific topic – how we helped micro-services migration journeys for several large retail sites. Meanwhile, please like and share this if you find this is useful to others.

Delivering software on-time in spite of hurdles (Part 1)

Get Stuff Done (GSD)

Screen Shot 2019-12-13 at 5.34.58 PM A key trait, — something that I always look for while hiring my team — is the ability to Get Stuff Done. I had been brought in to several rescue efforts where key commitments got delayed in spite of having a technically brilliant team, using Agile, DevOps, etc, only because the GSD attitude was missing across the enterprise. I realized this is not something that is taught in any class or course, but this is what truly makes or breaks the on-time delivery. Hence this series of posts.

GSD is particularly critical in eCommerce programs which represent integrating many different technologies and systems. For example, integrations into catalog, inventory, product content, marketing content, product imagery, recommendations, analytics, pricing, promotions, shipping, taxes, ERP, CRM/MDM, network, security, etc, often have to come together to form one cohesive customer experience, consistent across all these subsystems, while making it available 24X7. This is the reason why eCommerce programs are of an entirely different level of complexity than other IT programs which only impact a few technologies /towers. The digital “face” of the entire organization is on the line!

This presents its own class of challenges especially in a large enterprise where different groups build and operate these systems with their own priorities, budgets, and roadmaps. So how do we navigate these and yet deliver our program on time, even though we have no control? Whether you are an external consultant or even the VP of eCommerce/ Digital Transformation, you certainly will not have complete control of all of these areas but are expected to deliver to key timeline commitments from the C Suite. There are various tricks of the trade that I have successfully been able to rely upon which I will be publishing in this series of articles. Each one states the principle along with an example where I was able to successfully solve for it. Please do let me know your experiences and hopefully, this will become a compendium of this kind of knowledge.

a ) Proactive risk management

b) Reactive handling: Going around walls

c) Persistence – Extracting a “yes” out of a “NO”

d) Less is more (coming soon)

e) 80-20 rule (coming soon)

f) Upfront Stakeholder alignment (coming soon)

g) Strangler pattern – or -Micro-services journeys of large retailers (coming soon)

Feel free to reach out to me if you have specific questions in the meantime. Also please don’t forget to Like and share if you find this useful to others.

Michael Jackson & AI Ops

What were you doing when you heard of Michael Jackson’s death?

2019 June marks the 10^th death anniversary of Michael Jackson. Yes, time flies! Who is not a fan of his energy, music, and moves? He was a generational icon that most people remember where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news of his death. Well, what was I doing? Our team was trying to find out why the sales suddenly spiked on store.michaeljackson.com. I was employed at Amazon.com those days managing thousands of 3^rd party businesses on webstore by Amazon. The eCommerce store of michaeljackson.com was one of those online businesses that we managed. It was a sad, almost perverse reality that within seconds of the news of his death the sales graph took off almost vertically and stayed at the top of the charts for months. We were alerted immediately on our phones about this. Our first thoughts were that there was a DOS attack on our server farm. But when we noticed it was just this one site that was spiking and after checking out the news, we knew it was real. That is how I learned of his death. Those days it was an interesting exercise to analyze and correlate bumps or dips in sales to mentions of the product or leadership appearances on popular shows like Oprah or Ellen. We could feel the marketing power of those shows acting as infomercials as we saw the sales move up or down in real-time even as the show progressed. We used to ask for advance notice of any such planned marketing events, sometimes we got those, sometimes we did not and had to sleuth it out. It was fun nevertheless.

Proactive alerts and predictive analytics

One of the key reasons for Amazon’s success is this continuous obsession with the customer and the urge to stay on top of whatever was happening on the website. There was a culture of continuously measuring and alerting any variances to what was expected at that time of the day, day of the week, time of the year. This was considered an absolute necessity because each second the web site is down or impaired, it meant not only revenue losses but also a huge hit to the brand that is the poster child of online commerce. This meant collecting analytics and trends to predict a range of where the sales volume should be at any given point. This was something that was done pretty effectively at Amazon in 2009 itself even when the industry did not hear the buzzwords analytics and proactive alerts. How should your business set this up? The raw inputs to the model are the sales trends (GMS – Gross Merchandise Sales and order volumes) by the time of the day. From these the model has to deduce the expected volume for the next 24-48 hours, adjusting for seasonality, annual growth, and catalog growth. While this forms the basis for Holiday preparedness, there are several other complexities so holiday readiness is a topic for another post.

This predicted sales volume has to be projected as a range around the actual value derived from the model described above. There are several types of models such as ARIMA (Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average) or LSTMs (Long Short-Term Memory networks). These models have to be refined for your business, based on the specific parameters and has to be periodically tweaked based on the feedback from the actual sales to limit the error rate of future predictions.

Proactive alerting needs to be in place to ensure any deviance of the actual sales graph from the projected threshold range is immediately notified. In progressive businesses, On-call support was put in place to investigate these deviances by an operations team. This operations team also puts together these metrics for a review each week to ensure the sales are on track for the weekly, monthly and annual targets as compared with the MOM YOY trends. Such a review by the leadership consisting of the Business, marketing and IT facilitates corrective action in a timely manner so business goals are exceeded or met. The latest wave, however, is AI Ops (or applying AI to technical Operations). Vendors like Dynatrace (with Davis) and Newrelic (with SignifAI) are promising to do root cause analysis by analyzing all the signals to locate the offending line of code. Cloud natives are already being offered similar services by Google, AWS, and Azure. However what truly excites me is the potential when this AI-Ops goes beyond technical ops to business ops, business leaders will have root cause analysis with the ability to drill down to the signal that is bumping or pulling down revenue in real-time. Coming back to the MJ story, if such an AI (business) Ops was in place 10 years ago, we would not have to manually do our due diligence and instead just received an alert that your business has increased by x% because of the news article on MJ’s death!

Similarities between English and Sanskritam

How close are English and Sanskritam? Let’s find out. Imagine all the basic English vocabulary you can think of, that would have been in vogue, a few thousand years ago. Juxtapose those words with their Sanskrit equivalents. You will see that they are mostly the same word if you account for slight pronunciation differences over the millennia. The below table of 70+ common words is just a small representative list.

English (or Latin root)	Sanskrit (stem)
Mother	Maathr
Father (also Peter)	Pithr
Brother	Bhraathr
Daughter	Duhita
Naval	Naav
Pod (leg) as in octapod or pedal	paada
Mind/Mental	Mann
Nose	Nas
Vocal	Vaak
Heart	Hrud
Hand	Hasta
Dental	Danta
Duo (two)	Dwi
Tri (three)	Thri
Quad /Quattro /(four)	Chatur
Penta (five) as in pentagon	Pancha
Six /hecta	Shat
Septa (seven)	Sapta
Octa (eight)	Ashta
Nona (nine)	Nava
Deci (ten)	Dasa
Cent (hundred)	Sata
Add(ition)	Adhi(ka)
Vodka (Russian “water”)	Udaka (water)
Sweet	Swaad (tasty)
Grass	Garika/Grasa
Man	Manav/Manush
She	Stree
Me	Mam
Name	Naam
Gene	Jana
Serpent	sarpa
Cow	Gau
Mouse	Mush(ika)
Divine	Divya/Deva
No	Na
Dom (icile)	Dham
Loc(ation)	Loka (place)
Door	Dwaar
Medium	Madhyam
Cal(endar)	Kaal
Create (to do)	Kri(ya)-
Mix	Misra
Mega	Maha
Mal(formed)- Stem for Bad	Mala (excreta)
Nocturnal	Nakta
Mortis (death)	Mrta
Path	Patha
Royal	Rajya/Raaya
Similar	Sama
Sugar	Sarkara
That	Tat
Vehicle/ Wagon	Vaahana
Vomit	Vamana
Vest	Vastra/ Veshti
Juvenile	Youvana
Orange (naranj in Spanish)	Naranj
Pepper	Pippali
Sandal	Chandana
New	Nava
Cough	Kafa (mucus)
Prefix ‘a’ indicating not	Prefix ‘a’
Prefix ‘an’ or ‘un’	Prefix ‘un’
Myth	Mithya
Ignite	Agni
Nerve	Nara
Per (as in Per cent)	Prati
Love	Lub(dha)- Desire
Committee	Samiti
Sweat	Swed
Condemn	Khandan

Continue reading “Similarities between English and Sanskritam”

Distributed auditing used successfully a decade before Blockchain to help solve a crime

One of the underlying principal advantages of Blockchain technology (which supports bitcoin) is the concept of distributed ledger (auditing). There is no single point of failure of the audit trail, with the multiple copies floating everywhere and hence it is tamper-proof. Long before this was introduced by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008, this concept was successfully used for auditing a financial application and also help solve a crime. When I first read about this a few years ago it reminded me of my design back in the 90s. Finally, I got the time to write about it.

The Background/Context:

It was the late 1980s/ early 90s, and life went on happily without cell phones and the internet. We were building decentralized systems for unreserved train tickets. We were constrained in that they had to be decentralized, withstand power failure, and be tamper-proof. They used to collect over 200,000 rupees in an 8-hour shift on each booking window– all in cash. Thousands of such machines were spread out across hundreds of Indian Railway stations. (5 million tickets per day- the most in the world) To put it in perspective, in those days, Rs. 200,000 was about 10 years’ salary for the booking clerks and hence there was a significant incentive to break into those systems or somehow tamper them. Given the lack of any long-distance (computer) network, we had to settle for an RS232C serial connection between the ticketing system (which was a self-sufficient system, one per booking window) and the central accounting server (one per station) to transfer the end of shift data for consolidation of reports across the station for further transmission to the divisional headquarters accounting department.

The solution:

The system was an M68000 based standalone system for which we had written the artsbbvt2 software almost from scratch, a microkernel, device drivers, application code, global data tables, all “burnt” into an EPROM (we later started using flash drives in 1993). The station-specific data was stored in a separate pluggable sealed cartridge with its own EPROM – with an internal rechargeable battery. The transaction data was stored both on the main system as well the cartridge, so in case the main system went down for any reason, (Plan B) the booking clerk can plug it into another working system and continue their shift. As a further precaution (Plan C) in case the whole station loses power or is down for any reason, I designed it such that the cumulative cash collected until that point is printed in a simple codified way on top of the next (not yet sold) ticket. In this image (randomly picked up from Google) the code JFBA on the top-left indicates the cash amount of 9510 rupees collected in that shift until and including the previous ticket sold.

unreserved-train-ticket The purpose of this was so they can at least close their shift and remit the cash as shown by the code and go home. This is also how I built in the distributed auditing aspect into the system because when each ticket is sold to a passenger (with the cumulative cash collected in that shift recorded on the top of that ticket), they traveled with it to a far off station, where (many of) those tickets were collected by the station staff at the exit gates and stored. The majority of the booking clerks enjoyed the benefits of a quick shift closing with the click of a button and did not have to manually account for the card ticket stock, cutting down their shift closure from almost 30 minutes to just 2 minutes.

The fraud:

However, there were some black sheep who decided to defraud the system. The zonal railway authorities noticed the revenue significantly dropped In Surat railway station in 1996, (pic below) and started investigating. It was obvious that there was some fraud going suratstn on, but the railway officials were missing information to prove the exact amount embezzled and other specifics. On the surface, everything seemed perfect with the end of shift reports showing the (lower) amounts collected, which were deposited accordingly. We noticed that there was a gradual reduction of the amount over a period of a few months. (Apparently, the staff started small, and when no one caught them they became greedy and bolder as months went by- which incidentally caused a bigger dent in the revenues, big enough to get attention). Earlier there seemed to be a healthy mix of high value (long-distance) tickets and low value (short distance) tickets in a shift, depending on the train schedules. But recently, all tickets were reported to be sold for shorter distances and hence the low revenues. Prima facie the reports tallied, the ticket stock was properly accounted for. So they sealed all the systems in that station which they believed were somehow tampered and had replacement systems and staff to keep the show going on while suspending the supervisor and a few suspected clerks. Now they needed proof and specifics. As the designer of the system, I was asked to be on the investigation team and visit Surat along with other railway officials. We were provided police protection even before we reached Surat station given the stakes involved.

How I solved it and provided the proof:

Even before reaching Surat, I talked to the superintendents of train stations in Secunderabad, Bombay Central and other stations (which receive long-distance trains from Surat) to collect as many used tickets (originating in Surat during that period) as we could from their store. (remember they collect the tickets at the end of the journey)? We got them to our team who painstakingly collated the date /time stamps of the ticket issued, the machine id, the encoded cumulative cash collected on it, piecing together solid proof of how much cash was embezzled during those days and the discrepancy between the phantom shifts they created on those systems using non-ticket stock (dummy paper). As an undocumented feature, I also had a running counter of the total cash collected on each machine which was also being transmitted to the central report server (but I did not announce or report its existence until after this fraud). That total completed the puzzle to provide an exact total. The disciplinary process then took its course to punish the guilty. The leadership appreciated my tamper-proof design and cleared our systems for further usage.

Key Lessons:

When temptation and stakes are high, fraud is a natural consequence- prepare to address it!
Distributed auditing saved the day to provide indisputable proof of the audit trail.
Always keep an additional ace up your sleeve when it comes to auditing so if the people who are supposed to check themselves resort to fraud, you have another level of checks unknown to them to fall back upon.

Focusing on Value, removing clutter!

Recently we started working with the IT division of a large client that embarked upon their digital transformation journey. Before we got engaged by the IT side, the business side of the client was working with a ‘big 5’ consulting firm for the last 2 years to help them define that journey. They were trying to define a roadmap of features and functionalities to build and order them by priority on a roadmap. A two week offsite workshop was conducted where the business leaders from around the globe were invited along with the IT team (and us) to help “collect” the requirements. The workshops were facilitated very professionally and over 500 different “epics” or “stories” were listed down. Few were well thought out stories, many were one or two liner epics, and others were somewhere in between.

At the end of the two week workshop began an exercise of prioritizing those taking into account the technical complexity, business process readiness etc. Three more weeks later, it was whittled down to about 300, but the team was nowhere near defining a crisp MVP (Minimum Viable Product). Given we were on a fixed bid discovery engagement and needed to have an MVP defined in 6-8 weeks, which was not coming (atleast in the timeline of our engagement) it was time for me to act. I worked with the IT leadership first asking a very fundamental question. Can you explain in a sentence or two of what your MVP does that is easily understood by your customers (users) and executives? It needs to be a teaser and prompt them to ask immediately, “when can I get my hands on it?” In about an hour, I helped craft a couple of sentences, which they liked and they pushed it in the next large meeting between Business and IT. It was lapped up by business as well and we had a high level definition of the MVP.

We then looked at the body of requirements from the lens of this definition and 22 stories/epics were remaining to be done which we took up for further elaboration and sized for an MVP.

The whole point of this story is that many times when we are flooded with a clutter of “things to do”, it helps to take a step back and articulate in a sentence or two of where exactly are we creating value and for whom. This is an age old principle which has been famously applied by Steve Jobs in his second innings at Apple in 1997 where he killed a plethora of product lines to stop the bleeding and create bandwidth /funding to come up with their next “big thing” , which we all now know was the ipod/ iphone product line.

Europe trip – Conclusion

(Previous days)

Day 7: Pisa and journey along the Mediterranean coast to Monte Carlo.

Checked out of the Hotel in Florence around 9:45am after breakfast. In Italy, they serve a hot drink which looks like coffee with Barley and I liked it. I loved the checkout gift as well from Hotel Roma, a box of indigenous soaps! I came to the station and bought tickets at the kiosk for the 10:28 regional train which took us to Pisa by 11:30. It left from Platform 3 which starts a bit further from the station. Barely made it to the train on time.

We had about 2 hours as our tickets were pre-booked for the 13:42 train to Genoa and onward to Nice. There were no taxi’s available at the train station even though there was a long line. The city should do something about making more taxi’s available. Neither was Uber available. We waited half an hour for a bus (or a taxi). Eventually, the bus came but was crowded, and we got to the Torre (Leaning tower) by about 12:30. There were huge crowds, people everywhere, we did not even attempt to get tickets to go up the tower, just walked around and took pictures. With great difficulty found a taxi to return. The two vegan restaurants we searched up in Pisa were closed for August. (Did I mention Italians take vacation the whole month of August?) So we had to make do with some snacks and yogurt for lunch. The backup we were carrying (Poha and pickle) finally came in handy.

Trenitalia’s first class was good with 3 +3 seat cabins with doors. Unlike other trains that had a 2+1 configuration, this had 3 seats in a cabin with the passage on the side so one could sleep across these 3 seats as they were contiguous and the hand rests can be folded up. Ours was the last car of the train so we had a good view from the back vestibule door.

The journey from Pisa to Genoa was along the Mediterranean sea with fantastic views from the train. However, it slipped into tunnels for long durations as the track runs along the Cinque Terre hills that abuts the sea in the La Spezia area of Italy. The frustrating part was that by the time we position the camera for a good shot we go into yet another tunnel. Small coastal towns like Monterosso have that old world charm, no automobiles and yet reachable (only) by train.

Changed trains in Genoa, got some snacks and boarded the Thello train to Nice. This segment also hugged along the sea with fantastic views of the hills and sea on either side. At Ventimiglia(-Italian) or Ventimille (-french), the border police combed through the train and off boarded an immigrant who was trying to sneak into France. A gentleman from Milan who frequently visits New York explained to me the problem of migrants from Northern Africa trying to get into France has been a serious one and neither France wants them nor Italy is taking strong steps to deport them because their lives are in danger as they flee war struck countries like Libya. Sad state of affairs.

Reached MonteCarlo around 7:45pm. Took a taxi to the Marriott hotel to check into a beach-view room. We headed out for dinner to Eqvita, the vegeterian restaurant of Novak Djokovic in Monte Carlo. Got ourselves seated outdoors. On our way, we saw the Casino and series of luxury cars parked around. Upon return, we walked around the marina looking at the luxury yachts. Retired to the room by around 11pm.

Day 8: Monte Carlo, Nice, and Paris along the French Rivera

Teja and I spent some time on the beach next to the hotel in the morning. Came back to the hotel and spent more time in the pool. Visited the Castle (from the outside- we missed the change of guard which happened earlier). Drove around on the middle road and reached the station to buy a ticket to Nice. The train to Nice was really crowded. Our original plan was to stay in Nice but changed it after the recent sad incident. We already bought the tickets to Paris on the TGV leaving Nice at 3:02 pm. Had an hour at the Nice station, so I found an Indian restaurant nearby and got some vegetarian dishes packed for the journey. They run two TGV trains attached to each other, the regular TGV and the IdTGV (the best source for info on European trains is seat61.com) The TGV runs at low speed continuing the journey over the French Riviera coastline onto Antibes, Cannes, Marseilles, and Avignon. From there it goes non-stop picking up its famous 320 kmph speed. Reached Paris Gare de Lyon on time at 8:40 pm, had dinner at an Indian vegetarian restaurant near Gare de Nord and checked-in to the Marriott Rive Gauche hotel.

Day 9: Paris

Booked the Louvre tickets for 9 am the previous night and printed them at the hotel. Also booked the Eiffel tower tickets earlier for a 2:30pm appointment. Headed to Louvre around 9am and got in without much wait. We had a list of top 10 things to see at the Louvre, obviously starting with the Monalisa, the Hammurabi, Venus, etc. and covered those in the next 1.5 hours. After lunch at another Vegetarian restaurant in little India (or should I say little Tamilnadu/ Sri Lanka because even the signboards are in Tamil) near the Gare de Nord station, we headed back to the Eiffel tower seeing Notredame along the way. Even with the pre-bought tickets, it took an hour to reach the summit. We debated going to Versailles but were too exhausted. Leisurely came down and spent the evening shopping at the Galerie Lafayettes on Hausmann. Had dinner at yet another vegetarian restaurant. Our plan was to take the night river cruise from the Eiffel tower. We went back to the tower again, saw the last part of the sparkling of the tower (was it fireworks?) at 10:05pm and tried looking for a cruise which was covered. (It was a bit cold and we were not dressed for that weather). It was getting too late so we dropped the idea and headed back to the hotel.

Day 10: Back home

Checked out of the Marriott after breakfast at around 9am and headed to the airport. Took a taxi to CDG, arrived more than 2 hours before the flight time and checked-in bags. However, we barely made it to the flight after a long line at the Immigration as well as security. And the flight was delayed by 15 minutes as well. The Paris CDG administrators are not realizing the revenue lost from shoppers as they keep all the (NON-EU) passengers waiting in lines. They could instead employ a few more agents during rush hours and let passengers spend their time (and money) in the airport stores. We also made the mistake of not transferring the chocolate jams (different flavors) that we bought the previous day in Maxim to a checked-in bag and the security guys trashed all 4 jars. Alas, we did not even get to taste them.

The flight was further delayed due to bad weather in Washington DC and we ran out of fuel so we were re-routed and landed first in Richmond for refueling followed by a technical snag and then arrived 4 hours late in IAD. At first, some idiot in United booked us for the flight the next day afternoon (even though seats were available for sale on the 10:15pm flight that night) and after waiting on their phones for over an hour they added us to the 10:15pm flight to Houston, which was delayed too. We eventually reached Houston IAH at 3am in the morning (instead of 7:56pm) and thanks to the booking for the next day, our bags did not arrive. The silver lining is that they sent those the next day night to our home – all intact. Thus ended our 11-day trip.

Planning and preparation

Over a few months of planning went into this trip, from making several bookings, to buying stuff. I want to emphasize that the more you plan and the earlier, the better off and inexpensive your trip will be. Do not short change or outsource this important activity. No external “travel professional” knows your needs and tastes better than you. Do take their advice but do the key planning yourself. Also, involve your family members (kids especially) as they will learn a lot about the places they are visiting. That makes them enjoy places even more. In fact, the excitement and fun of the travel begins with the planning itself. Ask them to come up with a list of places they would like to see in each destination on your itinerary. Make them prioritize as you will only have so much time.

First, decide which countries and places you absolutely have to visit. If visas are an issue for you, figure that out first. The general advice is to stay at least 2 nights in each place, but it depends on your style. If you are a ‘taster’ like us on this trip, we wanted to cover the most ground in the minimal time, just going thru the highlights. We are not always in the ‘taster’ mode, for example, a few years ago we just went to the Cayman Islands and stay put in the same condo on a beach for 5 nights. So decide your mood and mode. Then a key expense is the airfare (especially if you are family of 4) so find out which of these places can get you a cheaper fare. Especially for Europe, you don’t want to travel into and out of the same location. It will cut into your time (and believe me, you will always be short of it). I used google flights which showed the options available on a map with fares, so I could choose the inbound city which had the least fare. Originally I was eyeing a 10% sale airfare on British Airways into Vienna (at 2:30pm) but by the time I figured out all the other logistics that fare was gone. In hindsight, the itinerary we ended up on Swiss Air/United was much better as we landed into Zurich at 6:30am and we got a lot accomplished that first day. Otherwise, we would pretty much have to waste our first day arriving, so it was worth the additional $500. Don’t book the tickets right away without figuring out the rest of the trip. Use tools like https://www.routeperfect.com/trip-planner/ to help arrange the order of the cities. If you are traveling by train, seat61.com is your best friend. even if you don’t intend to travel by train just take a look at the site and you might change your mind.

I initially made all my hotel bookings with the cancel option (slightly expensive) but allowed me to change /cancel without any penalties. Ensured the office /leave situation and then came back and booked the air tickets because they were non-refundable.

To ensure we have internet and phone, we bought a SIM card from Orange for $58 on amazon.com which had 1 GB of internet and 200 minutes of phone. It worked well in spite of the bad reviews. I just inserted it in the phone in Zurich Airport when we landed and it took a few minutes but it worked like a charm.

We heeded to the advice of Rick Steves and many others and packed our lightest. In hindsight we could have gone even lighter, will definitely try on our next trip. I already mentioned how important the neck pouch was. I would never travel overseas without it. I can’t even begin to imagine what happens if I lose my passport in an unknown land. We bought a pair of cycle chain locks thinking we might have to tie them to the luggage racks, but never had to use it. I also ordered a couple of no-foreign transaction fee credit cards, one of which I lost in the wallet. “Chase Sapphire preferred” used the same card number for both me and my wife, (unlike American Express) so when I lost mine and canceled it, her card became useless. So keep that in mind when planning your backups. Decide what is your budget and after counting all the planned expenses, assume you anyway go over by at least 30%.

Advantages of going as a party of four

Most travel sites advise you to take public transportation to save money. But if you are a party of 4, the bus /metro fares are at least 1.50 euros per person, which adds up to 6 or 8 euros. Since most of these European cities (except Paris) are pretty compact, we could go by taxi within 10-15 euros. That not only saves time and energy, it also protects us from pickpockets on public transportation.